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Lexically-based learning and early grammatical development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1997

ELENA V. M. LIEVEN ,
JULIAN M. PINE  and
GILLIAN BALDWIN
ELENA V. M. LIEVEN
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
JULIAN M. PINE
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
GILLIAN BALDWIN
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Abstract

Pine & Lieven (1993) suggest that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. The present study tests this claim on a second, larger sample of eleven children aged between 1;0 and 3;0 from a different social background, and extends the analysis to later in development. Results indicate that the positional analysis can account for a mean of 60% of all the children's multiword utterances and that the great majority of all other utterances are defined as frozen by the analysis. Alternative explanations of the data based on hypothesizing underlying syntactic or semantic relations are investigated through analyses of pronoun case marking and of verbs with prototypical agent–patient roles. Neither supports the view that the children's utterances are being produced on the basis of general underlying rules and categories. The implications of widespread distributional learning in early language development are discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , February 1997 , pp. 187 - 219
Copyright
© 1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

An earlier version of parts of this paper was given at the Stanford Child Language Research Forum, 1995, and is published in the Proceedings. We would like to thank all the families who took part in this study and to acknowledge gratefully the assistance of Tameside Regional Health Authority in collecting the sample. Thanks are also due to Helen Dresner Barnes who was centrally involved in the original data collection. The research reported here was partly funded by The University of Manchester Research Support Fund and partly by the ESRC, grant number: R000221285.