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Can input explain children's me-for-I errors?

Minna Kirjavainen1, Anna Theakston, Elena Lieven

  • 1School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. minna.kirjavainen@manchester.ac.uk

Journal of Child Language
|February 18, 2009
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Caregivers’ use of accusative pronouns like "me" in certain sentence positions may influence young children’s pronoun case errors, such as saying "me do it" instead of "I do it". This study explores input complexity and language acquisition.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Child Language Acquisition

Background:

  • Young English-speaking children often produce pronoun case errors, using accusative pronouns (e.g., 'me') in place of nominative pronouns (e.g., 'I').
  • Common examples include utterances like 'me do it', which deviate from standard English grammar.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if complex caregiver utterances, specifically those using 'me' in preverbal positions, contribute to children's 'me-for-I' pronoun case errors.
  • To explore the relationship between caregiver speech patterns and children's grammatical development in pronoun case marking.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of longitudinal, naturalistic speech data from seventeen English-speaking children aged two to four.
  • Examination of both children's pronoun case errors and their caregivers' use of first-person singular (1psg) preverbal pronouns.
  • Correlational analysis between children's error frequency and caregiver input patterns.

Main Results:

  • A significant correlation was found between the proportion of 'me-for-I' errors in children's speech and their caregivers' proportional use of 'me' in preverbal contexts.
  • Verbs used by children in 'me-error' utterances were more frequently found in complex caregiver sentences containing 'me' compared to verbs not involved in such errors.

Conclusions:

  • Caregiver input, particularly the use of 'me' in complex preverbal structures, appears to be a significant factor influencing children's acquisition of pronoun case.
  • Findings suggest that the structure and pronoun usage in adult speech play a crucial role in shaping children's grammatical development and error patterns.