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Early syntactic productivity: evidence from dative shift.

Erin Conwell1, Katherine Demuth

  • 1Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, 190 Thayer Street Providence, RI 02912, USA. Erin_Conwell@brown.edu

Cognition
|May 9, 2006
PubMed
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Children demonstrate abstract syntactic knowledge of the English dative alternation by age three. Their production abilities are sensitive to task demands, with a preference for the prepositional dative form.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Child Language Acquisition
  • Syntactic Development

Background:

  • Debate exists on whether children's early syntactic knowledge is abstract or lexically specific.
  • Some studies suggest robust, abstract knowledge in young children, while others propose item-specific constructions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the abstractness of children's early syntactic representations.
  • To examine children's productive knowledge of the English dative alternation.

Main Methods:

  • A production study was conducted with three-year-old children.
  • Children were exposed to sentences involving the dative construction to test generalization.

Main Results:

  • Three-year-old children showed productive knowledge of the English dative alternation.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Task variations influenced children's performance.
  • A preference for the prepositional dative form was observed.

    • Conclusions:

    • Young children possess abstract syntactic knowledge, specifically for the dative alternation.
    • Task design is a crucial factor in eliciting abstract syntactic abilities.
    • Further research is needed to understand the reasons behind the prepositional dative preference.