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Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization
Published on: April 19, 2017
Lexically-based learning and early grammatical development
E V Lieven1, J M Pine, G Baldwin
1Department of Psychology, University of Manchester, UK.
Journal of Child Language
|February 1, 1997
Summary
Early language development shows children primarily use learned word positions, not abstract rules. This positional analysis explains most early multiword utterances, suggesting distributional learning is key.
Area of Science:
- Developmental linguistics
- Child language acquisition
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Early multiword utterances in children present a complex structure.
- Pine & Lieven (1993) proposed a lexically-based positional analysis for early child language.
- The current study validates and extends this analysis to a broader developmental scope.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test the efficacy of a lexically-based positional analysis on a new, larger dataset of child language.
- To examine the applicability of this analysis across a wider age range (1;0 to 3;0).
- To investigate alternative explanations for early utterance structures, focusing on syntax and semantics.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of multiword utterances from eleven children aged 1;0 to 3;0.
- Application of a lexically-based positional analysis to the collected language sample.
- Examination of pronoun case marking and verb roles to test underlying rule-based hypotheses.
Main Results:
- The positional analysis successfully accounted for a mean of 60% of children's multiword utterances.
- The majority of remaining utterances were identified as 'frozen' or idiomatic expressions.
- Analyses of pronoun case and verb roles did not support the existence of general underlying syntactic or semantic rules.
Conclusions:
- Early multiword language acquisition is significantly driven by distributional learning and positional patterns.
- Lexically-based positional analysis provides a robust framework for understanding early child language structure.
- The findings challenge theories positing early reliance on abstract syntactic or semantic rules in language development.
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