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Syntactic distinctions in child language.

P Bloom1

  • 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139.

Journal of Child Language
|June 1, 1990
PubMed
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Young children understand English word order rules early, avoiding adjective-noun phrase combinations with proper names or pronouns. This suggests innate linguistic knowledge rather than just learned patterns.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Child Language Acquisition

Background:

  • Adult English grammar restricts prenominal adjectives before proper names and pronouns.
  • This constraint is understood as a syntactic rule differentiating lexical Noun Phrases (NPs) from nouns.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether young children comprehend the constraint on prenominal adjective modification of proper names and pronouns.
  • To analyze early word combinations for evidence of this syntactic understanding.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of spontaneous speech data from 14 children aged one and two years old.
  • Examination of early multi-word utterances for patterns of adjective placement.

Main Results:

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  • Children rarely produced utterances like 'big Fred' or 'big he' even in their earliest word combinations.
  • This pattern suggests an early understanding of syntactic categories and word order restrictions.

Conclusions:

  • Children's early language acquisition demonstrates knowledge of abstract linguistic rules, not just non-syntactic patterns.
  • A proposed theory suggests children use semantic cues to distinguish nouns from Noun Phrases (NPs) and learn this word order restriction.