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Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity.

A Ninio1

  • 1Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. msninio@mscc.huji.ac.il

Journal of Child Language
|December 22, 1999
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Children learn new verb combinations faster when they already know similar patterns. Early verbs focus on basic object relations, suggesting a foundation for syntactic abstraction in language acquisition.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Investigating the emergence of verb-object (VO) and subject-verb-object (SVO) constructions in early child language.
  • Understanding the temporal dynamics of how these combinatorial patterns spread across a child's lexicon.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To examine the initial verbs involved in VO and SVO combinations.
  • To determine the temporal parameters of the acquisition of these patterns.
  • To explore the role of existing verb knowledge in learning new syntactic patterns.

Main Methods:

  • Longitudinal language observations of 16 children (English and Hebrew speakers).
  • Weekly observations over 3-12 months, from single-word to multiword stages (ages 1.1-2.7).

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Main Results:

  • Children learn new verb combination patterns faster if they already know similar patterns.
  • 'Pathbreaking verbs' initiating novel syntactic rules are often generic, expressing core object relations (incorporation/ejection).
  • These initial verbs do not necessarily exhibit high transitivity but fundamental 'object relations'.

Conclusions:

  • Prior knowledge of verb combinations accelerates the learning of new ones, indicating generalization.
  • Early verb acquisition may rely on fundamental 'object relations' rather than high transitivity.
  • Lexical-specific learning of positional patterns could be sufficient for forming syntactic abstractions.