Pathbreaking verbs in syntactic development and the question of prototypical transitivity

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).

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.