The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of verb-argument structure: an alternative account

Abstract

This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian () claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive verb utterances early in development in comparison with later stages of development and to omit direct objects much more frequently with mixed verbs (where direct objects are optional) than with transitive verbs. To test these claims, data from nine children aged between  ;. and  ;. matched with Valian's subjects on MLU were examined. When analysed in terms of abstract syntactic structures Valian's findings are supported. However, a detailed lexical analysis of the data suggests that the children were not selecting argument structure on the basis of syntactic complexity.[*] We would like to thank all the families who took part in the research reported here.Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

“…Since 75% of the time these nouns occurred with determiners, determiner production was still the default option. A similar rate of determiner omission (22%) was found in a corpus analysis of all the tokens of 10 CDI mass nouns (bread, cake, cheese, coffee, food, juice, milk, pasta, toast, water;Hamilton, Plunkett & Schafer, 2001) in the CHILDES Manchester corpus (Theakston et al, 2001). Second, half the LOCATION nouns in TL sentences were treated as containers and occurred with the preposition into, while the other half were treated as surfaces and occurred with the preposition onto.…”

“…In contrast to these smaller studies, we examine the behaviour of a wide range of locative verbs in the 14 UK English corpora in the CHILDES child language database (MacWhinney, 2000). We extracted all utterances in the UK corpora in CHILDES (Cruttenden, 1978;Fletcher & Garman, 1998;Forrester, 2002;Gathercole, 1986;Henry, 1995;Howe, 1981;Johnson, 1986;Korman, 1992;Lieven, Salomo, & Tomasello, 2009;Rowland & Fletcher, 2006;Theakston, Lieven, Pine & Rowland, 2001;Tommerdahl, 2009;Wells, 1981;Wilson & Henry, 1998;Wooten, 1984) for the 140 locative verbs for which Ambridge et al (2012) collected grammaticality ratings. We created the full corpus of 38,231 utterances by searching for all possible forms of each of the 140 locative verbs (e.g., stick, sticking, stuck), and found tokens of 103 forms (see Appendix A for details).…”

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

“…These are the same corpora used in . The data for the English children are part of the Manchester corpus (Theakston, Lieven, Pine & Rowland, 2001), and consist of approximately 33,000 input utterances for Anne and 27,000 input utterances for Becky.…”

Pronoun co-referencing errors: Challenges for generativist and usage-based accounts

“…3 2. The frequencies of the pronouns in the speech directed to the twelve children in the Manchester corpus (Theakston et al 2001) available on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000) are as follows: him (2805), her (4129), them (5176). The high frequency of them as opposed to him and her is probably due to the fact that them can refer to animate and inanimate objects.…”