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Acquiring basic word order: evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure
1Psychology Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. nakhtar@cats.ucsc.edu
Journal of Child Language
|November 15, 2001
Summary
Young children learning English may not grasp Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentence structure initially. They gradually learn SVO order through exposure and examples, rather than an innate understanding.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Child Language Acquisition
Background:
- Young English-speaking children often rely on verb-specific formulas rather than general Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order for sentence interpretation.
- This reliance suggests potential openness to learning non-standard sentence structures with novel verbs.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether young English-speaking children can learn novel transitive verbs in non-SVO sentence orders (SOV, VSO).
- To determine the role of age in the acquisition of a general understanding of SVO word order.
Main Methods:
- Three age groups of children (2, 3, and 4-year-olds) were taught novel verbs in medial (SVO), final (SOV), and initial (VSO) positions.
- Children's spontaneous use and correction of these novel word orders were recorded.
Main Results:
- Younger children (2 and 3-year-olds) were equally likely to use novel orders or correct them to SVO.
- Older children (4-year-olds) consistently corrected non-SVO orders to the standard English SVO structure.
Conclusions:
- The acquisition of a general understanding of SVO order in English-speaking children is a gradual process.
- Findings support data-driven learning accounts of grammar acquisition, emphasizing learning from linguistic examples.
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