Abstract
Recent studies indicate that young English-speaking children do not
have a general understanding of the significance of SVO order in
reversible sentences; that is, they seem to rely on verb-specific formulas
(e.g. NPpusher – form of the verb PUSH – NPpushee)
to interpret such sentences (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997). This finding raises the possibility
that young children may be open to learning non-SVO structures with
novel transitive verbs. To test this hypothesis, 12 children in each of
three age groups (two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and four-year-olds)
were taught novel verbs, one in each of three sentence positions: medial
(SVO), final (SOV), and initial (VSO). The younger age groups were
equally likely to use the novel (non-English) orders spontaneously as to
correct them to SVO order, whereas the oldest children consistently
corrected these structures to SVO order. These results suggest that
English-speaking children's acquisition of a truly general understanding
of SVO order may be a gradual process involving generalization
(learning) from examples. The findings are discussed in terms of recent
data-driven learning accounts of grammar acquisition.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
General Psychology,Linguistics and Language,Developmental and Educational Psychology,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
200 articles.
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