Abstract
Recent proposals about children’s first language acquisition have stressed usage-based acquisition and suggest that children have no language specific innate knowledge but instead use general cognitive abilities, such as perception, memory, and analogical processing, to acquire their mother tongue. These proposals do not, however, account for one argument raised by proponents of innate grammar approaches, which is the speed and correctness of children’s language acquisition, which could be described as a syntactic burst usually occurring around age two to three. In this chapter, a testing procedure is proposed to demonstrate that the acquisition of usage-based and fixed-form patterns can account for this syntactic burst. The analysis is conducted with the large Manchester corpus from the CHILDES database. It is demonstrated that fixed-form patterns extracted from child input and used in their raw and unprocessed form can, if combined freely, account for the children’s subsequent language production. Results show that young children’s grammatical abilities (before age three) could result from simple mechanisms and that complex linguistic mastery does not need to be available early in the course of language development.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bloom, P. (1999). Theories of word learning: Rationalist alternatives to associationism. In W. C. Ritchie, & T. K. Bhatia, (Eds.), Handbook of language acquisition. San Diego: Academic.
Brown, R. W. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of verbal behavior, by B. F. Skinner. Language, 35, 26–58.
Clark, E. V. (1993). The lexicon in acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Elman, J. L., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ingram, D. (1989). First language acquisition : Method, description, and explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The discovery of spoken language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond modularity: A developmental perspective on cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Konopczynski, G. (1998). De l’énoncé présyntaxique à la phrase canonique: Aspects syntactico-prosodiques. Revue PArole, 7–8, 263–287.
Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M., & Baldwin, G. (1997). Lexically-based learning and early grammatical development. Journal of Child Language, 24, 187–219.
MacWhinney, B. (1975). Rules, rote, and analogy in morphological formations by hungarian children. Journal of Child Language, 2, 65–77.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Maratsos, M. P., & Chalkley, M. A. (1980). The internal language of children’s syntax: The ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories. In K. E. Nelson (Ed.), Children’s language (Vol. 2). New York: Gardner Press.
Peters, A. M. (1983). The units of language acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, A. M. (1995). Strategies in the acquisition of syntax. In P. Fletcher, & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The handbook of child language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pine, J. M. & Lieven, E. V. M. (1997). Slot and frame patterns and the development of the determiner category. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18, 123–138.
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York/London: William Morrow & Co (New York)/Penguin (London).
Ritchie, W. C., & Bhatia, T. K. (1999). Child language acquisition: Introduction, foundations, and overview. In W. C. Ritchie, & T. K. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of language acquisition. San Diego: Academic.
Sinclair, H., & Bronckart, J. P. (1972). S.V.O. a linguistic universal? A study in developmental psycholinguistics. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 14(3), 329–348.
Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M., & Rowland, C. F. (1999). The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of ‘mixed’ verb-argument structure at stage 1. In M. Perkins & S. Howard (Eds.), New directions in language development and disorders (pp. 119–129). New York: Plenum Press. P. 247.
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74, 209–253. P. 8.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisitiond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tomasello, M., & Stahl, D. (2004). Sampling children’s spontaneous speech: How much is enough? Journal Of Child Language, 31(1), 101–121.
Wexler, K. (1982). A principle theory for language acquisition. In E. Wanner & L. R. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition – the state of the art (pp. 288–315). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Parisse, C. (2013). Rethinking the Syntactic Burst in Young Children. In: Villavicencio, A., Poibeau, T., Korhonen, A., Alishahi, A. (eds) Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31863-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31863-4_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31862-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31863-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)