Experimental investigations of the formation and restriction of abstract grammatical constructions in young children

TY - BOOK

T1 - Experimental investigations of the formation and restriction of abstract grammatical constructions in young children

AU - Ambridge, Ben

AU - The University of Manchester . Department of, Psychology

N1 - [Main author] (United Kingdom) 338 p. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-04C. Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Manchester (United Kingdom), 2004. Summary: Under traditional generativist accounts, children acquire language (a system of formal rules acting on variables such as NOUN, VERB and TENSE) with the help of some innate knowledge of syntax. Recently, these generativist accounts (e.g.. Pinker, 1989; Radford, 1990; Wexler, 1998) have been challenged by functionalist accounts (e.g., Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998; Bybee, 1995, Bates & Goodman, 2001) under which children acquire an inventory of meaningful chunks of linguistic material of various sizes, that become increasingly abstract as development proceeds (e.g., / wantX [SUBJECT] [VERB][OBJECT]). Tomasello (2003) draws together many different strands of research to present a relatively complete constructivist account of language acquisition. The goals of this thesis are (1) to test the predictions of this account, and competing generativist accounts; and (2) to investigate aspects of this account that currently remain somewhat underspecified. Chapters 1 and 2 outline generativist and constructivist accounts of language acquisition respectively, and present evidence in support of the claim that only constructivist approaches can potentially explain the pattern of child language acquisition observed. Experiment 1 (Chapter 3) tested the predictions of these two approaches with respect to children's acquisition of non-subject wh- questions (e.g.. Who is Mickey hitting?). Questions using each of 4 wh- operators (what, who, how and why), and 4 auxiliaries (copula BE, auxiliary BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6-4;6. Generativist theories claim that uninversion errors (e.g.. Who Mickey is hitting?) will pattern by wh- operator (De Villiers, 1991; Valian et al., 1992) or auxiliary (Stromswold, 1990; Santelmann et al., 2002). Although errors did show some tendency to pattern by auxiliary, interactions between the variables of wh- operator, auxiliary and number suggest that Rowland and Pine's (2000) constructivist model, under which children acquire frequent wh- operator-lexical auxiliary combinations from the input, can potentially provide the best fit for the data. Experiments 2 and 3 (Chapter 4) investigated two factors thought to influence the process by which children form abstract grammatical constructions: (1) temporal distribution of instantiations of the construction and (2) type frequency of the variable element in the construction. 48 children aged 3;6-5;10 and 72 children aged 4;0-5;0 were given 10 exposures to the construction it ivas the [OBJECT] that the [SUBJECT] [VERB]ed all in one session (massed), or on a schedule of 2 trials per day for 5 days (distributed pairs), or 1 trial per day for 10 days (distributed). Children in both the distributed conditions learned the construction better than children in the massed condition, as evidenced by productive use of this construction with a verb that had not been presented during training, though a VERB type frequency manipulation was found to have no effect. Experiments 4-6 investigated a specific aspect of Tomsello's account: the hypothesis that repeated presentation of a particular verb (e.g., kick) in a particular argument structure construction (e.g., John kicked the ball) leads to the inference that the use of that verb in non-attested constructions (e.g., the ball kicked) is not permitted (the entrenchment hypothesis). These studies did not demonstrate an entrenchment effect, but remain a work in progress. In Chapter 6, I conclude that the findings of Experiments 1-6 are broadly consistent with Tomasello's (2003) account, but argue that specific aspects of the constructivist account require much more detailed investigation, and present several suggestions as to how this might be accomplished.

PY - 2004

Y1 - 2004

KW - Linguistics. Developmental psychology.

M3 - Book

SN - 9780355477337

BT - Experimental investigations of the formation and restriction of abstract grammatical constructions in young children

PB - ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

CY - Ann Arbor

ER -