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Early syntactic creativity: a usage-based approach
Elena Lieven1, Heike Behrens, Jennifer Speares
1Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. lieven@eva.mpg.de
Journal of Child Language
|July 9, 2003
Summary
Early language development shows creativity through modifying existing sentence structures. Children often substitute words or add to previous utterances to form novel expressions.
Area of Science:
- Developmental psycholinguistics
- Child language acquisition
Background:
- Understanding the mechanisms of creative language production in early childhood is crucial for developmental psycholinguistics.
- Previous research has explored child language development, but the specific processes behind novel utterance formation require further investigation.
Observation:
- Analysis of a child's multi-word utterances (age 2;1.11) revealed 37% were novel, not previously produced in their entirety.
- A morpheme-matching method was used to compare novel utterances to a preceding corpus of the child's speech.
- Data included high-density recordings and a maternal diary spanning six weeks.
Findings:
- 74% of novel utterances required only one modification (e.g., word substitution or addition) from a previous utterance or schema.
- Most single-operation changes involved substituting a word, typically a noun, into an existing structure.
- 26% of novel utterances required multiple operations, often combining simple modifications.
Implications:
- Early English child language creativity may stem from established linguistic schemas and simple modification operations.
- Findings suggest a balance between stored linguistic strings and flexible categorial knowledge in language production.
- This research informs theories on the interplay of memory and grammatical knowledge in early language development.