Children know how to use their verbs, nouns, and adjectives

1
Children know how to use their verbs, nouns, and
adjectives

• Marian Erkelens, University of Amsterdam
• June 9, 2006 PoS Conference

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Acquisition of Parts of Speech

• Child language research primarily focused on
  semantics (universal noun bias)
• Focus on more structural properties is necessary
  for a more principled account of PoS acquisition

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Hengevelds (1992) syntactic account

• Content words / syntactic possibilities
• Syntactic possibilities relevant for content
  words
• Head of a predicate phrase (HP)
• Head of a referential phrase (HR)
• Modifier in a referential phrase (MR)
• Modifier in a predicate phrase (MP)

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Major Parts of Speech in Dutch

• Three classes of content words with distinct
  syntactic possibilities
• Verbs can only be used in HP
• Nouns can be used in HR ( HP)
• Adjectives can be used in MR and MP ( HP)
• Een mooiMR meisjeHRRef zing-tHP
  mooiMPPref.
• A beautiful girl sing-3SG
  beautifully

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Questions

• How do Dutch children learn the syntactic
  possibilities of content words?
• Do they make errors by over-using words in
  syntactic positions that adult Dutch does not
  allow?
• Do they under-use words in only one syntactic
  position while adult Dutch allows more
  possibilities?

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Prediction from typology I

• Subset Principle (Berwick, 1985)
• Parts-of-Speech Hierarchy HP lt HR lt MR lt MP

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Prediction from typology II

• Following the Subset Principle, children use
  their content words in HP first, gradually
  expanding their content word classes to HR, MR,
  and MP.
• Children will make errors by using content words
  in syntactic positions that adult Dutch does not
  allow (prediction for over-use question).

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Method corpus research

• 4 monolingual Dutch children, 1,8 lt MLU lt 3,6
• 4 Dutch adults
• Every content word coded for syntactic position,
  and the word class
• e.g. de tafel is vies (the table is dirty)
• tafel HR, N
• vies HP, A

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Syntactic positions in which content words are
used
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Word classes used in HP
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Nouns in HP

• DatHR, Ref is trekkerHPPred
• That is tractor
• Alternative analysis
• Dat is Ø trekkerHR Ref, HPPred

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Word classes used in HP
13
Word classes used in HR
14
Word classes used in MR
15
Word classes used in MP
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Results Question A

• Children fill HP, HR, and MR with content words
  from the start.
• Children are almost adult-like in their use of
  words over the four different syntactic
  positions. Most differences can be explained by
  other developmental processes.
• Do children make errors by over-using words in
  syntactic positions that adult Dutch does not
  allow?
• NO, THEY DONT

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Word-based analysis

• Do children indeed group content words in a class
  with adult-like syntactic possibilities?
• Do they use the same nominal word both in HP and
  HR?
• Do they use the same adjectival word in HP, MR,
  and MP?
• Analysis performed for one child

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Daans word class N

• The same nominal words are used both in HP and
  HR
• dat zijn koffers (HP)
• those are suitcases
• xxx zijn de koffers (HR)
• UNINT are the suitcases
• (Daan, 204,14 - total 17 doublets)

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Daans word class A

• The same adjectival words are used in HP, MR, and
  MP
• deze is heel mooi
• this is very beautiful
• deze mooi-e maan
• this beautiful-ATTR moon
• mooi op de bank zitten
• beautiful on the couch sit
• (Daan, 204,00 209,10 - total 9)

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Results Question B

• Corpus data only give a small amount of the
  possible uses of words.
• Even in these small amounts, verbs, nouns, and
  adjectives have the syntactic possibilities they
  have in adult Dutch.
• Do they under-use words in only one syntactic
  position while adult Dutch allows more
  possibilities?
• NO, THEY DONT

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Conclusion

• Dutch children know how to use their verbs,
  nouns, and adjectives at the moment they start to
  produce sentences

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Discussion

• How do children learn the syntactic possibilities
  of their content words?
• Adult-like production pattern as a result of
  input pattern item-based learning (Tomasello,
  2003).
• Adult-like production pattern as a result of very
  early mapping of content words to abstract,
  innate categories (such as in Baker, 2003).

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Further research

• Do these young children have abstract syntactic
  categories?
• Perception experiments
• (do even younger children categorize?)
• Language comparison
• (do children learning a language in which
  content words have syntactic possibilities
  different from Dutch show the same
  adult-likeness?)

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References

• Baker, M. C. (2003). Lexical categories verbs,
  nouns and adjectives. Cambridge Cambridge
  University Press.
• Berwick, R. C. (1985). The acquisition of
  syntactic knowledge. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.
• Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before
  verbs linguistic relativity versus natural
  partitioning. In S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language
  development (pp. 301-334). Hillsdale, N.J.
  Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Hengeveld, K. (1992). Parts of Speech. In M.
  Fortescue P. Harder L. Kristoffersen (Eds.),
  Layered structure and reference in a functional
  perspective papers from the Functional Grammar
  Conference in Copenhagen, 1990 (pp. 29-55).
  Amsterdam Benjamins.
• Tardif, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned
  before verbs evidence from Mandarin speakers'
  early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology,
  32(3), 492-504.
• Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language a
  usage-based theory of language acquisition.
  Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press