Lexically-based learning and early grammatical development

TLDR

A lexically‑based positional analysis can explain a substantial portion of children’s early multiword utterances. The study tests this claim on a larger sample of eleven children aged 1–3 years and extends the analysis to later developmental stages. The authors examined this cohort, extending the positional analysis to later stages, and investigated alternative syntactic or semantic explanations by analyzing pronoun case marking and agent–patient verbs. The positional analysis accounted for an average of 60 % of the children’s utterances, with most remaining utterances classified as frozen, and the study found no evidence supporting rule‑based production, underscoring the importance of distributional learning in early language development.

Abstract

Pine & Lieven (1993) suggest that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. The present study tests this claim on a second, larger sample of eleven children aged between 1;0 and 3;0 from a different social background, and extends the analysis to later in development. Results indicate that the positional analysis can account for a mean of 60% of all the children's multiword utterances and that the great majority of all other utterances are defined as frozen by the analysis. Alternative explanations of the data based on hypothesizing underlying syntactic or semantic relations are investigated through analyses of pronoun case marking and of verbs with prototypical agent–patient roles. Neither supports the view that the children's utterances are being produced on the basis of general underlying rules and categories. The implications of widespread distributional learning in early language development are discussed.