Opinion
The item-based nature of children’s early syntactic development

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Abstract

Recent research using both naturalistic and experimental methods has found that the vast majority of young children’s early language is organized around concrete, item-based linguistic schemas. From this beginning, children then construct more abstract and adult-like linguistic constructions, but only gradually and in piecemeal fashion. These new data present significant problems for nativist accounts of children’s language development that use adult-like linguistic categories, structures and formal grammars as analytical tools. Instead, the best account of these data is provided by a usage-based model in which children imitatively learn concrete linguistic expressions from the language they hear around them, and then – using their general cognitive and social-cognitive skills – categorize, schematize and creatively combine these individually learned expressions and structures.

Section snippets

Some recent findings in language acquisition

Most of children’s early language is grammatical from the adult point of view, and this fact has been taken by some theorists as support for the hypothesis of an innate universal grammar. But children can also produce ‘grammatical’ language by simply reproducing the specific linguistic items and expressions (e.g. specific words and phrases) of adult speech, which are, by definition, grammatical. To differentiate between these two hypotheses, deeper analyses of children’s linguistic competence

Implications for theories of language acquisition

Combining the results from naturalistic and experimental studies, it is clear that young children are productive with their early language in only limited ways. They begin by learning to use specific pieces of language and only gradually create more abstract linguistic categories and schemas. These findings have important implications for current theories of child language acquisition.

Conclusion

If grammatical structures do not come directly from the human genome, as the above-reported data suggest they do not, and if children do not invent them de novo, as they clearly can not, then it is legitimate to ask, Where do grammatical structures come from? The answer is that, in the first instance, they come from processes of grammaticalization in language history. That is to say, at some point in human evolution, Homo sapiens evolved the ability to communicate with one another symbolically34

Outstanding questions

  • When children imitatively learn some complex linguistic expression, how do they come to understand the communicative functions of the different constituents involved?

  • On what basis do children make analogies or form schemas as they abstract across their verb island and other relational linguistic schemas?

  • What principles govern the ways in which children combine established linguistic constructions with one another creatively?

  • How do children select what they need from all the language they hear

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Elena Lieven, Heike Behrens, Holger Diessel, Nameera Akhtar, and Patty Brooks for helping to develop the ideas and the studies reported in this paper.

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