The acquisition of word connotations: asking 'what happened?'

Although words have both denotative and connotative meanings, there has been little research on the child's acquisition of connotations. In large segments of written texts, connotations can be studied by examining word co-occurrences (collocations). Using this technique, corpus linguists have found, for example, that 'happen' has a negative connotation; it most often collocates with negative words (e.g. 'accidents', 'something dreadful'). The current research is a case study of the use of the lemma 'happen'. Adult production of 'happen/happens/happening/happened' was examined in 151 American English-speaking, adult-child dyads from the CHILDES database. Within these dyads, 35 children used 'happen' and its variants. Both adults and children were increasingly likely to use 'happen' to describe negative contexts as children's language progressed from MLUs around 1.00 to MLUs greater than 4.00. Results are consistent with usage-based theories of language that claim that the relative frequency of information in the input is critical to language learning.