journal of child language …... additional services for journal of child language ... (1992) case...

Journal of Child Languagehttp://journals.cambridge.org/JCL

Additional services for Journal of ChildLanguage:

Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click here

Investigating the abstractness of children's earlyknowledge of argument structure

KATHLEEN MCCLURE, JULIAN M. PINE and ELENA V. M. LIEVEN

Journal of Child Language / Volume 33 / Issue 04 / November 2006, pp 693 - 720DOI: 10.1017/S0305000906007525, Published online: 08 November 2006

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305000906007525

How to cite this article:KATHLEEN MCCLURE, JULIAN M. PINE and ELENA V. M. LIEVEN (2006).Investigating the abstractness of children's early knowledge of argument structure.Journal of Child Language, 33, pp 693-720 doi:10.1017/S0305000906007525

Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/JCL, IP address: 194.94.96.194 on 25 Nov 2015

Investigating the abstractness of children’s earlyknowledge of argument structure*

KATHLEEN MCCLURE

Lehman College, City University of New York

JULIAN M. PINE

University of Liverpool

AND

ELENA V. M. LIEVEN

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig

(Received 15 March 2004. Revised 23 August 2005)

ABSTRACT

In the current debate about the abstractness of children’s early

grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have

suggested that children might first develop ‘weak’ or ‘partial ’

representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts

to characterize these structures by comparing the development of

constructions around verbs in Tomasello’s (1992) case study of Travis,

with those of 10 children (Stage I–II) in a year-length, longitudinal

study. The results show some evidence that children’s early knowledge

of argument structure is verb-specific, but also some evidence that

children can generalize knowledge about argument structure across

verbs. One way to explain these findings is to argue that children are

learning limited scope formulae around high frequency subjects and

objects, which serve as building blocks for more abstract structures

such as S+V and V+O. The implication is that children may have

some verb-general knowledge of the transitive construction as early as

Stage I, but that this knowledge is still far from being fully abstract

knowledge.

[*] Address for correspondence : Kathleen McClure, Lehman College, CUNY, Departmentof Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, Bronx, NY10468, USA. tel : 1-718-960-8460; e-mail : [email protected]

J. Child Lang. 33 (2006), 693–720. f 2006 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0305000906007525 Printed in the United Kingdom

693

INTRODUCTION

In recent years there has been a debate about how abstract children’s

knowledge is at the beginning of multi-word speech. On one side is

Tomasello (2000) and his constructivist account of early grammatical

development; on the other side, is Fisher (2002a, b) and a syntactic boot-

strapping proposal. For Tomasello, children do not start out with abstract

syntactic categories; rather, grammatical structure builds around individual

lexical items and these item-specific constructions only gradually become

more general. Tomasello outlines a position in stark contrast to that

proposed in generative accounts of grammatical development, which

ascribe adultlike syntactic categories to the child at the beginning of word

combination. Although Fisher does not specify just how much syntactic

competence children start out with, she cites results from comprehension

studies that point to children having more abstract knowledge and earlier

than Tomasello proposes. In response, Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002)

have suggested that in the process of moving towards the adult system

from low-scope representations, children might develop ‘weak’ or ‘partial ’

representations of more abstract linguistic structures. However, they do

not specify in detail what these representations might consist of. This

paper attempts to give them a preliminary characterization by looking at the

development of constructions around verbs at the earliest stages of syntactic

development.

The recent Tomasello–Fisher debate concerns two main questions: (1)

how lexically specific is children’s early grammatical knowledge and (2)

at what point do children possess abstract syntactic categories. According

to Tomasello (2000) young children do not come to the task of combining

words with ‘abstract categories and schemas’. Instead their earliest

combinations ‘revolve around concrete items and structures’ (Tomasello,

2000: 215). These specific words and phrases develop in their own way

depending upon the individual child’s experience. For example, children do

not start out with an abstract ‘verb’ category or an abstract ‘transitive’ or

‘ intransitive’ construction with which to assimilate new verbs. Rather they

learn the argument structure of individual verbs on a case-by-case basis.

They learn, for example, that the verb hit can have a hitter, a thing hit, and

a thing hit with argument.

This lexically specific view of early syntactic development derived from

observational as well as experimental data. Tomasello (1992) conducted a

detailed diary study of all the different uses of his daughter Travis’s

early verbs and word combinations from age 1;0 to 2;0. He found that

Travis was conservative in how she used her verbs. Almost half of the

162 verbs and relational words she produced were used in only one verb–

argument construction type (e.g. ‘Mommy break’ is one type, ‘break cup’

is another). Furthermore, he found that the verbs developed grammatical

MCCLURE ET AL.

694

structure in quite individual ways. For semantically similar verbs like cut

and draw, where one would expect to find the child using them in the same

construction type (cut with, draw with), he found that cut was used in only

one, whereas draw was used in many. He also found unevenness in how

certain arguments were used across verbs. For example, at the same stage

of development one verb might be marked with an instrument whereas

another would not. These findings led Tomasello to conclude that, with

the exception of some kind of ‘noun’ category, early language learners

did not possess syntactic categories. Instead their earliest categories were

‘ lexically specific categories such as ‘kisser’, ‘kissee’, ‘seer’, ‘ thing seen’, ’

etc. (Tomasello, 2000: 215). This lexically specific view has been supported

by other observational studies (Pizzuto & Caselli, 1992; Pine & Lieven,

1993; Pine & Martindale, 1996; Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997; Pine,

Lieven & Rowland, 1998; Rubino & Pine, 1998).

Although Tomasello’s case study was highly informative about what

one particular child did and did not produce, it could not control for what

the child heard and thus address the issue of how productive her language

was. To do this, experimental studies were needed. Tomasello and his

colleagues conducted a series of experiments (see Tomasello, 2000, for a

review) in which they taught children new verbs in one construction frame

and investigated whether they could use them productively in another.

If they could, then this would imply the presence of syntactic categories.

If, on the other hand, the children used the new verbs conservatively,

that is, only in the ways they had heard them, then this would imply the

lack of an abstract syntactic system, and that children were learning the

verbs individually. The experiments involved presenting children with

new verbs in different constructions (e.g. intransitive, passive, and non-

SVO word order) and then seeing whether they could produce them in

correct transitive constructions. For example, Tomasello & Brooks (1998)

presented 16 children at 2;0 and 16 children at 2;6 with a new verb

modelled as an intransitive (e.g. The ball is dacking) and another as a

transitive (Jim is tamming the car). The experimenter then tried to elicit

transitive uses by asking, ‘What’s X doing?’ with X being the agent. If

the child was able to say, ‘He’s dacking the ball ’, this would mean he was

using the verb productively because he had switched from intransitive to

transitive, and if he said, ‘He’s tamming the car’, this would mean he

was using the verb in the way it had been modelled. Results showed that

although 11 out of 16 of the two-year-olds and all of the older children

could produce a new transitive sentence, only one two-year-old and three of

the older children could switch from the intransitive model to the transitive.

This developmental pattern was found in numerous experiments using

different constructions, though most involved the transitive (see Tomasello,

2000, Figure 1). The youngest children (under age 3;0) were found least

INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS

695

able to produce a transitive utterance when they had heard a new verb

modelled in another construction, but older children (above 3;0) were

able to do so. Tomasello (2000) interpreted this reluctance of children to

innovate early on as an indication that they lacked verb-general knowledge

and an abstract transitive construction.

Fisher (2002a), however, challenges this interpretation. She argues that

Tomasello’s experiments rest on faulty assumptions. First, she claims that

Tomasello’s experiments rest on the assumption that children will infer

‘that any new verb could be used transitively’, which is why when children

fail to produce transitives in elicitation tasks, this is taken as evidence

that they do not have an abstract transitive construction. However, she

argues, children’s failure may reflect the fact that they have not yet learned

that a verb used in one particular context could be used in another. This

takes time and experience and ‘only after learning a great deal about how a

particular language organizes its verbs could a child guess that a new verb

can be extended into a new syntactic structure’ (Fisher, 2002a : 264). This

is what one would expect, she says, and is a better explanation of the

gradual trajectory found in Tomasello’s (2000) Figure 1 summary of his

results. Here Fisher seems to agree with Tomasello’s characterization of

children’s early verb knowledge as lexically specific, but disagree with

him that the interpretation of his results show that children lack abstract

syntactic knowledge at the very beginning of word combination. Tomasello

& Abbot-Smith (2002) reply that the verbs used in the relevant experiments

(except for those in the earliest studies) were all carefully chosen so that

they would ‘fall into the appropriate semantic classes, as outlined, for

example in Levin (1993), thus ensuring that they were of a type that

adults use both as transitives and in other constructions depending upon the

study (e.g. active–passive or transitive–intransitive alternation)’ (Tomasello

& Abbot-Smith, 2002: 208).

Second, Fisher claims that Tomasello does not consider any other reasons

besides the lack of syntactic categories to explain children’s reluctance to

innovate with new verbs. Performance factors such as syntactic priming

may explain the conservative findings. Again Tomasello & Abbot-Smith

(2002) respond that Fisher has not accurately represented Tomasello (2000)

and that three alternative explanations and possible controls that seemed to

rule them out were discussed.

Third, Fisher claims that children may not interpret new verbs in the

ways the experimenters expect. For example, if children do not interpret

the new verbs as causative, they would not then switch to the transitive.

Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002) acknowledge that some children in

the intransitive–transitive studies might have done this. However, they

argue that this criticism does not apply to all the studies (e.g. studies of

the active–passive constructions), because it focuses on differences in the

MCCLURE ET AL.

696

number of arguments around verbs in the transitive and intransitive studies,

which is not the case in the active–passive studies.

Tomasello is quite clear in his claim that children’s early grammatical

knowledge is lexically specific; whereas Fisher’s (2002a) position seems to

be that children’s early grammatical knowledge is a mixture of abstract

and item-based knowledge. Thus, she argues that children must have

some kind of relatively abstract ‘noun’ category, but also ‘abstract

representations of sentence structure’ (Fisher, 2002b : 56) that allow them

to interpret sentences and ‘structure-matching biases’ (Fisher, 2002a : 274)

that allow them to map structures found in the sentence to referents in the

scene being observed. For example, children use the number of nouns in

an utterance in order to interpret the meanings of sentences ‘by mapping an

utterance containing two known nouns onto a salient conceptual relation

between their referents, and an utterance containing one noun phrase onto

the most salient conceptual predicate involving the referent of that noun’.

The number of nouns gives a ‘probabilistic estimate of the number of

syntactic arguments of the sentence’s verb’ (Fisher, 2002a : 273). Thus, the

structure of a sentence helps the child interpret it. If there are two nouns,

the child matches this structure to a conceptual representation of a

particular event with two participants. If there is only one, it is matched to

an event with only one participant (Fisher, 1996).

The second major issue concerns when children begin to have abstract

grammatical knowledge. Tomasello’s (2000) position is that children do

not have innate abstract grammatical categories. Instead these grammatical

categories grow gradually as the child has more and more experience with

individual lexical items. For example, an abstract ‘verb’ category develops

as children become more familiar with different verbs and their argument

structure. Although Fisher (2002a) agrees with Tomasello that children do

not start out with ‘adult syntactic competence’ (Fisher, 2002a : 272), she

argues that children have abstract knowledge earlier than Tomasello claims

(i.e. earlier than 3;0). As evidence she cites Brooks & Tomasello’s (1999),

study 2, in which children aged 2;10 were presented with new verbs in

both an active and a passive sentence and then encouraged to produce

a sentence in a new frame. Brooks & Tomasello found that 40% of the

children who were presented with the active sentence were able to switch

to the passive and 35% of those presented with the passive could produce

the active. These were higher rates than those found in study 1, and Brooks

& Tomasello attribute the difference to priming effects. The children in

study 2 were trained on a nonce verb in both active and passive utterances.

Fisher notes the high percentages and concludes that these children (who

were younger than 3;0) also had some ‘notion of both active transitive

and passive sentence constructions that was already abstract enough to be

primed across different newly-learned verbs’ (Fisher, 2002a : 270).


697

Furthermore, Fisher (2002a) cites a study by Akhtar (1999) in which

children at 2;8, 3;6, and 4;4 were trained with new verbs in three different

word orders: SVO, SOV and VSO. Akhtar found that the younger children

(2;8, 3;6) used the non-SVO word orders as often as they corrected them

to SVO word orders; whereas the older children (4;4) corrected their

utterances to SVO almost all of the time. These findings support

Tomasello’s claim that the process of acquiring an abstract grammatical

structure is a gradual one. However, they also show more verb-general

knowledge in younger children than had previously been thought.

When presented with a new verb in an odd word order and encouraged

to respond, about half of the two-year-olds switched to the SVO word

order, and when presented with a new verb in the SVO order, all of them

responded with an SVO order. This demonstrates some knowledge of

the transitive construction. Akhtar concludes that between the ages of 2;0

and 4;0 children are developing an understanding of what word order is

in English: ‘Whereas the younger children seem to be in the process of

constructing a truly general understanding of the syntactic significance

of word order (that all English sentences must employ SVO order), the

four-year-olds were simply not willing to use the non-SVO structures’

(Akhtar, 1999: 354).

Finally, Fisher (2002a) presents evidence from comprehension studies

(Naigles, 1990; Naigles & Kako, 1993) that children have more abstract

knowledge of the transitive construction than Tomasello’s (2000) pro-

duction data demonstrate. She cites a preferential looking study by Naigles

(1990) in which children with a mean age of 2;1 looked longer at a video-

recorded scene showing a transitive action (a duck bending a rabbit over)

when they heard a novel verb used in a transitive frame and longer at a

scene showing an intransitive action (a duck and a rabbit making circles

with one of their arms) when they heard a novel verb used in an intransitive

frame. This is taken to mean that the children used sentence structure

(either transitive or intransitive) to help them learn the meanings of new

verbs, and hence that they did have some abstract knowledge of these

structures.

In response to Fisher, Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002) concede that

children under 3;0 may have more abstract syntactic knowledge than had

previously been demonstrated, acknowledging Akhtar’s (1999) results and

citing similar results in Abbot-Smith, Lieven & Tomasello (2001). The

new finding in Abbot-Smith et al.’s study is that the youngest children

(2;4) corrected the non-canonical word orders 21% of the time, which is

less than half that of the children aged 2;8 in Akhtar’s study. However, this

is what one would expect if the children were acquiring a transitive

schema gradually. The children also demonstrated some familiarity with

the transitive construction – they used the new verb they heard in the

MCCLURE ET AL.

698

SV order more often than the new verb in the VS order. To explain these

findings Tomasello & Abbot-Smith suggest that perhaps these very young

children have a ‘weak transitive schema – one that enables certain kinds

of linguistic operations but not others – whereas older children have a

stronger and more robust schema based on a wider range of stored linguistic

experience’ (Tomasello & Abbot-Smith, 2002: 210).

Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002) also use this notion of a ‘weak

verb-general representation of the transitive construction’ (Tomasello

& Abbot-Smith, 2002: 212) to explain the results from the preferential

looking studies that Fisher (2002a) cites. A weak verb-general represen-

tation would mean that the children have partial knowledge of what

is involved in the transitive construction. It might explain why

two-year-olds in comprehension tasks were found to be sensitive to a

difference between transitive and intransitive but similar aged children in

production tasks (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997) did not do well in acting out

transitive sentences with novel words. The performance tasks of the

older children may have required a stronger cognitive representation of

the category.

In summary, there is evidence from numerous observational (Tomasello,

1992; Pine & Lieven, 1993; Pine & Martindale, 1996; Lieven, Pine &

Baldwin, 1997; Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998) as well as experimental

studies (cited above) that children’s early grammatical knowledge is

lexically specific or limited in scope. For example, Tomasello’s (1992)

findings from the case study of his daughter indicated that syntactic

structure developed around individual verbs in a lexically specific way. In

what became known as the VERB ISLAND HYPOTHESIS, verbs had a special role

to play. They acted like ‘ islands’ around which children attached arguments

and syntactic markings ‘ in an otherwise unorganized grammatical system’

(Tomasello, 1992: 23). However, despite this evidence of verb-specific

knowledge, there is also evidence of some more verb-general knowledge

building up in children between 2;0 and 3;0 (Akhtar, 1999; Brooks &

Tomasello, 1999; Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Tomasello & Abbot-Smith,

2002). To investigate just how verb-specific early grammatical knowledge

is, this study seeks to compare Tomasello’s (1992) findings of one child’s

development with those of a larger group of children. The aim was to

investigate :

’ To what extent Tomasello’s description of Travis generalizes to a

larger group of children’ To what extent children’s knowledge seems to be growing gradually

around specific lexical items’ To what extent children show evidence of verb-general knowledge in

the early stages.


699

It was also hoped that, by identifying instances of verb-general knowledge

at the early stages, it would be possible to develop a more precise description

of what ‘partial ’ knowledge of syntactic constructions might actually

consist of.

METHOD

Participants

Ten children participated in the study (6 girls, 4 boys). They were part

of a year-length longitudinal study of early language development of 12

first-born children. Two children were excluded from the present study

because they did not have Stage I data. The children were recruited from

newspaper advertisements, local nurseries, and doctors’ surgeries. They

were all from monolingual English-speaking families and were, for the most

part, from middle-class homes. Their ages ranged between 1;10.7 and 2;0.7

at the beginning of the study (M=23.12 months) and 2;03 and 3;0.10 at

the end (M=27.2 months). The children’s MLUs were between 1.06

and 2.01 at the beginning (M=1.46) and between 2.03 and 3.261 at

the end (M=2.43). Table 1 presents the age, MLU, and number of

audio-recorded sessions at Stage I and Stage II for all the children in

the study. Note that the MLU and age ranges refer to the first and last

recording for each stage.

Design of study

In his case study, Tomasello (1992) observed his daughter Travis from

age 1;0 to 2;0 and kept a detailed diary record of all the verbs and verb

combinations she produced by age of acquisition. Beginning when she

was 1;5, Travis was video-recorded at the start of each month for an hour

until the end of the study. Her MLU at the first recording was 1.56 and her

MLU at the final recording was 2.58. MLUs for the recordings in between

are not provided. However, since it is clear that Tomasello’s study focuses

primarily on data from Stage I and Stage II, only data from Stage I (MLU,

1.0–1.99 [Brown, 1973]) and Stage II (MLU, 2.0–2.49) were used in the

present study, and all of the developmental analyses involved comparisons

between Stage I and Stage II data. This design obviously prevents us

from looking for developmental changes in children’s language within

[1] To make a transition from one stage to another, a child had to have three consecutivesessions (hours of data) in which the MLUs were above the relevant borderline. TheMLU of 3.26 reflects a particularly high MLU in one session for a child who failed tomeet the criterion for transition to Stage III (because her MLU subsequently droppedbelow 2.5).

MCCLURE ET AL.

700

stages (Ingram, 1989). However, it does increase the reliability of those

comparisons that are made by ensuring that they are based on relatively

large amounts of data for each child for each developmental stage.

Three predictions that derive from the Verb Island hypothesis were

tested. The first concerns argument structure and the way that it builds

around individual verbs. Tomasello (1992) hypothesized that syntactic

TABLE 1. Age, MLU, and number of audio-recorded sessions for the

Manchester children at Stage I and Stage II

Children Stage I Stage II

AranAge 1;11.12–2;0.2 2;0.9–2;1.28MLU 1.41–1.83 2.22–2.27Tape Session (No.) 1–3 4–8

BeckyAge 2;0.7–2;2.22 2;2.30–2; 3.20MLU 1.46–1.97 2.06–2.41Tape Session (No.) 1–8 9–11

DominicAge 1;10.24–2;1.26 2;2.9–2;5.22MLU 1.20–1.78 2.12–2.48Tape Session (No.) 1–10 11–21

AnneAge 1;10.7–1;11.20 2;0.15–2;1.18MLU 1.61–1.92 2.27–2.21Tape Session (No.) 1–6 7–10

RuthAge 1;11.15–2;3.6 2;3.25–2;7.24MLU 1.41–1.97 2.04–2.03Tape Session (No.) 1–12 13–25

GailAge 1;11.27–2;0.19 2;0.25–2;2.12MLU 1.76–1.88 2.04–2.42Tape Session (No.) 1–3 4–8

JoelAge 1;11.1–2;1.10 2;1.23–2;4.2MLU 1.33–1.87 2.00–2.48Tape Session (No.) 1–8 9–16

LizAge 1;11.9–2;1.21 2;0.28–2;2.30MLU 1.35–1.88 2.02–2.42Tape Session (No.) 1–5 6–12

NicoleAge 2;0.25–2;6.16 2;6.23–3;0.10MLU 1.06–1.71 2.04–3.26Tape Session (No.) 1–17 18–34

WarrenAge 1;10.6–1;10.15 1;10.29–2;0.3MLU 2.01–1.95 2.36–2.33Tape Session (No.) 1–2 3–6


701

structure builds gradually from simple to complex; therefore, one can

predict that :

1. Few verbs will first appear in multi-argument structures.

This was true for Travis, but would it generalize to other children as well?

The second prediction concerns how lexically specific children’s early

multi-word speech is. If verbs show individual developmental trajectories,

as Tomasello proposes, then structure should be more complex around

verbs that the child has known for a longer period of time. Using Stage II

data one can test this by comparing verbs that had been acquired at Stage I

and then reappeared at Stage II (called Old Verbs), with verbs that had just

been acquired at Stage II (called New Verbs). One can therefore predict

that :

2. Utterances with Old Verbs at Stage II will have more complex

structures than utterances with New Verbs at Stage II.

Complexity was measured by calculating the MLUs and the number of

arguments per utterance. MLUs for both tokens and first uses of verb types

were calculated. One would expect that the MLUs for utterances with

Old Verbs would be greater than the MLUs of utterances with New Verbs.

However, as MLU measures more than just argument structure, a more

precise test of the hypothesis is to measure the number of arguments per

utterance for Old and New Verbs. One would predict that utterances with

Old Verbs would have more arguments than utterances with New Verbs.

A third prediction concerns whether children are acquiring any verb-

general knowledge. According to Tomasello, knowledge about structure

from verbs already learned should not generalize to new verbs. To test this

prediction New Verbs at Stage I were compared to New Verbs at Stage II.

The specific prediction was that :

3. Utterances with New Verbs at Stage II should be no more complex

than utterances with New Verbs at Stage I.

If children were generalizing some of their knowledge about the verbs

they learned at Stage I to the verbs they were learning at Stage II, then

utterances with New Verbs at Stage II would have more complex structures

than utterances with New Verbs at Stage I.

Procedure

The children were audio-recorded in their homes for one hour twice every

three weeks for a year. They were recorded interacting with their mothers,

half the time playing with their own toys in a free play session, and half

the time with toys brought by the investigator in a structured play session.

MCCLURE ET AL.

702

In the structured session the investigator introduced a number of additional

toys to stimulate the child’s interest in play; however, the child was not

restricted to playing with these toys in any way. The investigator did not

play with the child, but did respond to talk. The recordings were

transcribed orthographically using the CHAT system from the CHILDES

project (MacWhinney, 2000) and can be accessed from the CHILDES

archive as the Manchester Corpus (Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland,

2001).

Children’s speech corpora. The corpus for each child was searched for

utterances that included verbs at Stage I and II, and these were extracted

from the transcripts and collected into separate files. Excluded were

incomplete or unclear utterances, imitations, self-repetitions, and routines

(songs, counting sequences). A verb was defined in the adult sense of the

word. This definition departs slightly from Tomasello’s (1992) definition,

which also included predicates such as off, on, over, up, and down.

Once these files had been organized, they were further divided into three

categories of verbs per child:

(1) Stage I New Verbs: all verbs acquired at Stage I;

(2) Stage II Old Verbs: verbs that had first appeared at Stage I and then

reappeared at Stage II; and

(3) Stage II New Verbs: verbs that had only first appeared at Stage II.

Excluded from these categories were copula constructions, double-verb

constructions (e.g. want to go) and formulaic expressions (e.g. thanks, thank

you, excuse me, bless you, pardon me).

Three additional categories were then organized per child, but this time

they only included first uses of Old and New Verbs at Stage I and II. Note

that since the Manchester corpus does not include any maternal diary data,

first use simply refers to the first utterance including a given verb in the

child’s spontaneous speech data from a particular MLU stage.

Coding. In order to evaluate the predictions concerning the number of

arguments per verb, all first uses of Old and New Verb types were coded for

the number of arguments they appeared with. Argument was defined, as per

Tomasello (1992) to mean constructions developing around the verb.

Because the Verb Island hypothesis proposes that the child does not

start out with abstract argument structure but has to construct it, each

verb has its own argument types and by rights should have its own

terminology. However, developing verb-specific terminology that is not

overly cumbersome (e.g. ‘the one who hits’ and ‘thing hit ’) is not easy, and

Tomasello compromises and uses terms such as Actor (to include agent

and experiencer), Object (to include patient and theme), Instrumental,

Locative, and Recipient. As the purpose of this study was to compare Travis

to a larger group of children, these categories were also used and refer to


703

NPs required by the verb, NPs in prepositional phrases not necessarily

required by the verb, and the locative adjuncts there and here. Each

argument was also categorized as to whether it contained one or more

words.

The verbs were then organized into three tables for each child

(New Verbs at Stage I, New Verbs at Stage II, and Old Verbs at Stage II)

according to the number of arguments they first appeared with: zero, one,

two, or three and their argument frames. Table 2 shows all the argument

frames that were found along with an example utterance from the data. The

reliability of the argument frame coding was assessed by having a second

independent coder re-code 400 of the 725 utterances to which argument

frames were assigned. Agreement was a satisfactory 94.8% (Kappa=0.93).

Analyses. Once files for Old and New Verbs for each child were set up,

the MLUs for tokens and the MLUs for first uses of Old and New Verb

types were calculated. The average number of arguments per utterance

was then calculated for each child. A larger figure for Old Verbs meant

TABLE 2. Argument frames

1-Argument frames

___OBJ ‘Climb it’. (Aran)___LOC ‘Crawl in dark ditch’. (Aran)___REC ‘Give Caroline’. (Gail)__ACT ‘Read rabbit’. (Warren)ACT___ ‘Lady repair’. (Aran)INST___ ‘The key start’. (Aran)OBJ___ ‘Cake drop’. (Aran)

2-Argument frames

ACT___OBJ ‘I shot a dog’. (Aran)ACT___REC ‘I show lady’. (Aran)ACT___LOC ‘I sit there’. (Warren)OBJ___LOC ‘Tractor lives here’. (Aran)REC___OBJ ‘That called Diesel’. (Dominic)OBJ__REC ‘They fit me, no’. (Ruth)___OBJ LOC ‘Put him in train’. (Gail)___OBJ ACT ‘See it Anne’. (Anne)___REC OBJ ‘Feed duck bread’. (Dominic)___OBJ REC ‘Make tea a baby please’. (Ruth)

ACT OBJ___ ‘Mama me stop’. (Ruth)ACT LOC___ ‘Me on there knock’. (Ruth)OBJ LOC___ ‘Me there roll too’. (Ruth)OBJ ACT__ ‘What do you think?’ (Gail)LOC OBJ___ ‘There it goes’. (Anne)

3-Argument frames

ACT___OBJ LOC ‘I load one there’. (Aran)ACT___OBJ REC ‘Nicola give that me’. (Aran)ACT___REC OBJ ‘I’ll tell you what’. (Anne)

MCCLURE ET AL.

704

that these verbs had more surrounding argument structure. Because an

argument can be more than one word long, the differences in MLU

and in the number of arguments were examined to see to what extent

any differences were due to differences in the number of arguments and

differences in the complexity of the arguments. Finally, the percentage of

multi-argument utterances was calculated. According to the hypothesis, few

verbs should first appear with two or more arguments.

Two additional types of analysis were conducted to investigate the extent

to which the results generalized across different types of verbs. The first of

these involved calculating the number of transitive, mixed and intransitive

verb types that first appeared with more than one argument in order to see

whether transitive verbs were more likely to appear in multi-argument

structures than mixed and intransitive verbs. All verbs both for Travis and

for the children in the present study were divided into fixed transitive,

mixed, or fixed intransitive verbs. ‘Fixed transitive’ or ‘fixed intransitive’

verbs were verbs that were categorized as only transitive or only intransitive

in Levin (1993). ‘Mixed’ verbs were those listed as both transitive and

intransitive in Levin. If the verbs were not included in Levin, then the

same procedure was followed using the Oxford English Dictionary, but

ignoring rare, idiomatic and literary uses. The reliability of this procedure

was assessed by recoding the verbs found in Levin (1993) using the Oxford

English Dictionary. Agreement was a satisfactory 93.9% (Kappa=0.85).

The second type of analysis involved repeating the Old versus New Verbs

at Stage II and New Verbs at Stage I and Stage II analyses on transitive

verbs only. Since, in practice, the category of mixed verbs includes many

verbs that are unlikely to be mixed from the child’s point of view, for the

purposes of this analysis, transitive verbs were defined as verbs for which

the utterance being examined either included a direct object argument or

lacked an obligatory direct object argument. This allowed us to include in

the analysis mixed verbs that were clearly being used transitively by the

child rather than restricting the analysis to an artificially small group of

transitive verbs that could never be used intransitively even in the adult

language. Note that if we had not used this more realistic child-centred

definition of transitivity, there would have been so few fixed transitive verbs

in the relevant subsections of some of the children’s data that meaningful

comparison of the number of arguments with which children used Old

and New transitive verbs during Stage II and transitive verbs at Stage I and

Stage II would not have been possible.

RESULTS

Table 3 presents the number of New Verbs (types) at Stage I and New and

Old Verbs (types) at Stage II for the children in this study. If one adds


705

the number of Stage I New Verbs and Stage II New Verbs, one gets the

total number of verb types per child. The table shows that, contrary to what

one might expect, the number of Old Verbs in Stage II is always lower

than New Verbs in Stage I. This is because not all the verbs that first

appeared in Stage I reappear in the Stage II data.

Multi-argument analysis

The central claim of the Verb Island hypothesis is that verbs first appear

in simple structures and show individual developmental trajectories. The

Verb Island hypothesis therefore predicts that few verbs should first

appear with two or more arguments. The results for the multi-argument

analysis are presented in Table 4. The children in this study are compared

with Travis in terms of how many verbs first appear in the data with

two or more arguments and the results show that the first prediction was

confirmed. The table shows that in Tomasello’s (1992) study, only 16 of

Travis’s 115 verbs, or 13.9%, first appeared with two or more arguments.

The total number of Travis’s verb types was 162. This number, however,

included 22 relational words, 12 holophrases, and several instances of

different forms of the same verb. Since the present study did not include

relational words, holophrases, or duplicate forms and the purpose was to

compare the children in this study as closely as possible with Travis, these

words were excluded from Tomasello’s total. The table also shows that the

children have a mean of 19.8% (range, 8.8%–37.3%) of their verbs first

appearing with more than one argument. From the table, which combines

Stage I New Verbs and Stage II New Verbs to make it easier to compare

with Travis, it is clear that most of the children do in fact look like Travis.

For example, Becky has 9% of her verbs first appearing with two or more

TABLE 3. Number of verb types for Stage I New Verbs and Stage II

New and Old Verbs for each child

ChildrenStage I

New VerbsStage II

New VerbsStage IIOld Verbs

Aran 56 52 40Becky 89 24 48Dominic 49 50 41Anne 87 26 58Ruth 15 61 12Gail 65 60 43Joel 65 65 46Liz 48 63 38Nicole 99 70 83Warren 35 35 28

MCCLURE ET AL.

706

arguments; Gail, 14%; Liz, 15%; Aran 17%; and Anne, Joel, and Warren

all have 19%. There are only two exceptions: Dominic and Ruth, and only

Ruth, with 37% of her verbs first appearing with more than one argument,

looks radically different from Travis.

These results suggest that, like Travis, the children in this study do

initially tend to use their verbs in single argument structures. This finding

is consistent with the Verb Island hypothesis and a lexically specific view

of early grammatical development, and suggests that Travis is not an

isolated case. However, the results presented in Table 4 do not address

the issue of whether certain verb types (e.g. transitive verbs) may be

more likely to first appear in multi-argument structures than others. To

investigate this possibility, all verb types for Travis and the Manchester

children were categorized as either fixed transitive, mixed, or fixed intran-

sitive verbs (following Levin’s, 1993, categorization scheme or the OED).

The results are presented in Table 5.

It is clear from Table 5 that the data for Travis and the Manchester

children are still broadly comparable (33.3% versus a mean of 37.1% for

fixed transitive verbs; 10.5% versus a mean of 17.0% for mixed verbs and

0% versus a mean of 8.4% for fixed intransitive verbs). However, it is

also clear that a higher percentage of fixed transitive verbs first occurred in

multi-argument structures than mixed verbs or fixed intransitive verbs.

These differences were analysed by conducting a one way repeated

measures analysis of variance on the data from the Manchester children.

This analysis revealed a significant effect of verb-type (F(2, 9)=14.87,

p<0.001). Additional post hoc analyses using Scheffe tests revealed a

significant difference between fixed transitive verbs and mixed verbs

TABLE 4. Comparison of Travis with Manchester children for number and

percentage of first uses of verb types with more than one argument in Stage I

& II combined

Children No. (%)

Travis 16/115 (13.9)

Aran 18/108 (16.7)Becky 10/113 (8.8)Dominic 27/99 (27.3)Anne 21/112 (18.8)Ruth 28/75 (37.3)Gail 17/125 (13.6)Joel 25/130 (19.2)Liz 16/108 (14.8)Nicole 38/169 (22.5)Warren 13/69 (18.8)Mean (19.8)


707

(F=13.79, p<0.01), a significant difference between fixed transitive

verbs and fixed intransitive verbs (F=28.24, p<0.001, but no significant

difference between mixed verbs and fixed intransitive verbs (F=2.56, NS).

When taken as a whole, these results suggest that Travis’s data are fairly

typical of children learning English. However, they also suggest that the low

percentage of children’s early verbs that first occur in complex structures

is at least partly a reflection of the kind of verbs that children are learning

during the early stages. The implication is that the percentage of verbs

that first occur in multi-argument frames may not be a particularly

informative measure, and hence that a better way to evaluate the Verb

Island hypothesis may be to focus on differences in the complexity of the

structures in which children use new and old verbs at the same stage of

development.

Stage II Old Verb vs. Stage II New Verb analysis

Results for Old versus New Verbs at Stage II are presented in Table 6.

They show that the second prediction was confirmed: Old Verbs at Stage II

do tend to occur in more complex structures than New Verbs at Stage II.

MLU analyses. The table indicates that the MLUs for tokens of Old

Verbs are greater than the MLUs for tokens of New Verbs at Stage II.

The mean MLU for Old Verbs is 3.26, whereas that for New Verbs is 3.02.

A t-test indicated a significant difference between Old and New Verbs for

tokens: t(9)=4.88, p<0.001, one-tailed. A similar result was found

for first uses of verb types. The mean MLU for Old Verbs is 3.10 and for

TABLE 5. Comparison of Travis with Manchester children for percentage of

fixed transitive, mixed and fixed intransitive verb types with more than one

argument

ChildrenFixed

transitive MixedFixed

intransitive

Travis 7/21 33.3% 9/86 10.5% 0/8 0%

Aran 9/22 40.9% 9/81 11.1% 0/5 0%Becky 3/20 15.0% 7/87 8.0% 0/6 0%Dominic 9/20 45.0% 18/73 24.7% 0/6 0%Anne 4/21 19.0% 15/84 17.9% 2/7 28.6%Ruth 8/16 50.0% 19/51 37.3% 1/8 12.5%Gail 6/19 31.6% 10/97 10.3% 1/8 12.5%Joel 4/16 25.0% 20/104 19.2% 1/10 10.0%Liz 7/17 41.2% 8/82 9.8% 1/9 11.1%Nicole 10/30 33.3% 27/128 21.1% 1/11 9.1%Warren 7/10 70.0% 6/55 10.9% 0/4 0%Mean 37.1% 17.0% 8.4%

MCCLURE ET AL.

708

New Verbs, 2.81. A t-test indicated a significant difference between the

two: t(9)=3.47, p<0.01, one-tailed. This result indicates that there is

more complexity surrounding Old Verbs than New Verbs at Stage II.

However, as it is unclear whether this difference in complexity reflects

differences in the average number of arguments per utterance, a separate

analysis was performed.

Argument analyses. When one looks at the analysis for the number

of arguments per utterance, Table 6 shows that utterances with Old Verbs

have more arguments than utterances with New Verbs at Stage II, which

is what the Verb Island hypothesis predicts. Old Verbs have a mean of

1.14 arguments per utterance, whereas New Verbs have a mean of 1.0. A

significant difference was found between Old and New Verbs (t (9)=2.26,

p<0.05, one-tailed), thereby giving further support to the Verb Island

hypothesis. When one looks at the difference in the size of the mean

differences in the MLU for types and the number of arguments, it appears

that the children are both using more arguments and extending the length

of their utterances in other ways. The mean difference for MLU types is

0.29 and the mean difference for number of arguments is 0.14, indicating

that half of the effect for MLU is due to the difference in number of

arguments and the rest to other differences in complexity, including

differences in the complexity of the verb forms produced (e.g. the inclusion

of modals or auxiliaries) and differences in the complexity of the arguments

produced (e.g. the inclusion of determiners or adjectives).

Transitive analyses. The difference in the number of arguments for

Old and New Verbs suggests that children’s knowledge about argument

structure is not fully verb-general. However, this result could also reflect

differences in the type of verbs that first appear at Stage I and II. For

example, it could be that a higher proportion of the children’s Old Verbs at

Stage II is transitive, which would explain why Old Verbs at Stage II tend

TABLE 6. Means (and S.D.s) for MLU and number of arguments/utterance

for Old vs. New Verbs at Stage II

AnalysesStage II

New VerbsStage IIOld Verbs t-test

MLU tokens 3.02 (0.31) 3.26 (0.22) ***MLU types(first uses at St. II)

2.81 (0.41) 3.10 (0.32) **

Arguments/Utterance(first uses at St. II)

1.0 (0.21) 1.14 (0.21) *

Arguments/Transitiveutterance (first uses at St. II)

1.25 (0.15) 1.41 (0.17) *

* p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001.


709

to have more arguments. To evaluate this possibility, an analysis of the

percentages of Old and New Verbs that were transitive was conducted.

Table 7 shows that Old Verbs at Stage II do not have a higher percentage

of transitive verbs than New Verbs at Stage II. For 7 out of 10 children,

New Verbs have a higher percentage of transitive verbs. Furthermore,

when the analysis for arguments was restricted to just transitive verbs

(Table 6), a significant effect for arguments between Old and New

Transitive Verbs at Stage II was still found (t (9)=2.41, p<0.05, one-

tailed). This result indicates that the difference found between all Old and

New Verbs at Stage II (Table 6) was not simply due to the category of Old

Verbs including more transitive verbs, and suggests that the children’s

ability to use verbs in more complex structures is related to the length of

time that they have known the relevant verb, which is consistent with a

lexically specific view of early grammatical knowledge.

Stage I New Verb vs. Stage II New Verb analysis

The Verb Island hypothesis states that children’s knowledge about verb-

argument structure is entirely verb-specific. Therefore, it not only predicts

that Old Verbs at Stage II will occur in more complex structures than

New Verbs at Stage II as seen above; it also predicts that there will be

no difference in children’s ability to manipulate New Verbs at Stage I and

New Verbs at Stage II. The results indicate, however, that this is not the

case. Table 8 shows that MLUs and the number of arguments per utterance

for New Verbs at Stage II are greater than those for New Verbs at Stage I.

This suggests that children’s knowledge about argument structure is not

entirely verb-specific.

TABLE 7. Number and percentage of transitive Old vs. New

Verbs at Stage II

Children

Stage IIOld Verbsno. (%)

Stage IINew Verbsno. (%)

Aran 17/40 (43) 38/52 (73)Becky 17/48 (35) 17/24 (71)Dominic 20/41 (49) 36/50 (72)Anne 35/58 (60) 13/26 (50)Ruth 3/12 (25) 43/61 (70)Gail 22/43 (51) 36/60 (60)Joel 28/46 (61) 34/65 (52)Liz 15/38 (39) 39/63 (62)Nicole 51/83 (61) 47/70 (67)Warren 16/28 (57) 16/35 (46)

MCCLURE ET AL.

710

MLU analyses. Table 8 shows the mean MLU for New Verb tokens at

Stage II was 3.02, and that of New Verb tokens at Stage I, 2.53. A signifi-

cant difference between Stage I and II was found for tokens: t (9)=6.19,

p<0.001, one-tailed. The mean MLU for New Verb first uses of verb

types was 2.81 at Stage II and 2.27 at Stage I. This difference was also

significant: t (9)=4.59, p<0.01, one-tailed.

Argument analyses. The analysis of the number of arguments per

utterance shows that utterances with New Verbs at Stage II have more

arguments than New Verbs at Stage I. New Verbs at Stage II have one

argument per utterance; those at Stage I have 0.77. Again, the results for

first uses are significant : t (9)=2.72, p<0.05, one-tailed. The difference

in size of the means of the MLU types (0.54) and the number of arguments

(0.23), indicates that there are more, and more complex, arguments around

New Verbs at Stage II.

Transitive analyses. As with the analysis between Old and New Verbs at

Stage II, this effect for arguments could be an artifact of difference in the

type of verbs learned during Stage I and Stage II. For example, if a higher

proportion of the children’s Stage II verbs was transitive than their Stage I

verbs, this might have the effect of increasing the number of arguments

per verb in Stage II. Table 9 shows the proportions of New Verbs at

Stage I and II that were transitive. It can be seen that a greater proportion

of each child’s verbs at Stage II was transitive. However, when the analysis

for arguments was restricted to transitive verbs (Table 8), a significant

difference was still found (t (9)=1.84, p<0.05, one-tailed). This suggests

that the increase in the number of arguments for New Verbs at Stage II was

not just an artifact of changes in the proportion of the children’s verbs

that was transitive.

The implication is that although there is some evidence from the analysis

of Old versus New Verbs at Stage II that the children’s knowledge about

TABLE 8. Means (and S.D.s) for MLU and number of arguments/utterance

for New Verbs at Stage I and Stage II

AnalysesStage I

New VerbsStage II

New Verbs t -test

MLU tokens 2.53 (0.19) 3.02 (0.31) ***MLU types

(first uses)2.27 (0.22) 2.81 (0.41) **

Arguments/Utterance(first uses)

0.77 (0.15) 1.0 (0.2) *

Arguments/Transitiveutterance (first uses)

1.13 (0.16) 1.25 (0.15) *

* p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001, one-tailed.


711

argument structure is not fully verb-general, there is also evidence from

the analysis of New Verbs at Stage I versus Stage II that it is not fully

verb-specific either.

Productive positional patterns

One way of reconciling these findings is to propose that children are not

restricted to learning lexically specific patterns around verbs, as Tomasello

(1992) suggests, but can also learn lexically specific patterns around

other high frequency items (Braine, 1976; Pine et al., 1998). In order to

investigate this issue each of the children’s corpora was searched for

evidence of lexical patterns of the form: ‘high frequency subject+X’ or

‘X+high frequency object’, where X is a verb. The following procedure

was used. First, each child’s corpus was searched for verb types (at Stage I

and Stage II) that occurred with subjects and then these were examined

to see whether any of the subjects occurred with 6 or more different

verb types. Thus, ‘high frequency subject ’ was defined as any subject

that occurred with 6 or more different verb types. The same procedure

was followed for verb types with objects.

The consistency of the patterns was evaluated using Braine’s (1976)

statistical criterion for the attribution of a productive positional pattern

based on the binomial theorem (i.e. six different instances in the same

order and no instances in a different order, or eight instances in the

same order and one instance in a different order, etc.). For example, ‘X+it ’

was considered a productive pattern if there were 6 correct examples of

it used as an object and no examples of it used as an object in the opposite

pattern, ‘It+X’.

TABLE 9. Number and percentage of transitive New Verbs at Stage I vs.

transitive New Verbs at Stage II

Children

Stage INew Verbsno. (%)

Stage IINew Verbsno. (%)

Aran 17/56 (30) 38/52 (73)Becky 17/89 (19) 17/24 (71)Dominic 20/49 (41) 36/50 (72)Anne 35/87 (40) 13/26 (50)Ruth 3/15 (20) 43/61 (70)Gail 22/65 (34) 36/60 (60)Joel 28/65 (43) 34/65 (52)Liz 15/48 (31) 39/63 (62)Nicole 51/99 (52) 47/70 (67)Warren 16/35 (46) 16/35 (46)

MCCLURE ET AL.

712

Evidence of 10 productive subject patterns was found: ‘I+X’, ‘me+X’,

‘the child’s name+X’, ‘Mummy/Mama+X’, ‘you+X’, ‘the cat’s

name+X’, ‘the investigator’s name+X’, ‘Daddy+X’, ‘that+X’, and

‘it+X’ (Table 10). In addition, evidence of seven productive object

patterns was found: ‘X+it ’, ‘X+that’, ‘X+them’, ‘X+this ’, ‘X+me’,

‘X+baby’, and ‘X+fly’ (Table 10). All 10 children had the ‘I+X’ and the

‘X+it ’ patterns. Table 10 presents the patterns that were productive for

each child by the end of each stage. For example, Aran had 12 verb types

that showed the pattern: ‘I+X’, where X was got, want hat, bite it, kick,

need book, pull, fall, ride, throw, kiss, walk, wipe it by the end of Stage I.

There were no counter-examples. By the end of Stage II he had acquired

19 additional verb types in this pattern for a total of 31 verb types. When

the number of verb types becomes productive for a pattern, it is highlighted

in bold. For example, Aran’s pattern ‘it+X’ did not become productive

in Stage I because there was one counter-example, but it did become

productive at Stage II with 8 verb types and only one counter-example.

The most important finding was that all of the 10 children had at least

one productive pattern by the end of Stage I and at least 3 by the end

of Stage II. Although lexically specific, such patterns are, by definition,

verb-general. The implication is that although children’s ability to produce

syntactic constructions can be seen as lexically specific (in the sense that it

does not automatically generalize across lexical items), it is not completely

verb-specific (in the sense that children appear to have lexically specific

constructions which accept a range of different verbs as slot-fillers). This

may explain how children who are producing Old Verbs in more complex

structures than New Verbs at Stage II are nevertheless able to generalize

at least some of the knowledge of argument structure that they have built

up during Stage I to New Verbs at Stage II.

Although this evidence of verb-general structure is not consistent with

a strict version of the Verb Island hypothesis, it is consistent with the

kind of limited scope formulae account of early grammatical development

proposed by Braine (1976). According to Braine, children’s early systems

are considerably less abstract than those of adults. For example, young

children do not have an adultlike subject category because their knowledge

of how to order some Subject+VP sequences (e.g. Agent+Action se-

quences such as ‘Doggie bark’) does not transfer to other Subject+VP

sequences (e.g. Located+Locative such as ‘Doggie in basket’) which

are often initially ordered incorrectly (e.g. ‘In basket doggie’). Children’s

systems are therefore best seen not as generative grammars, but as

inventories of limited scope formulae that map the components of semantic

representations into positions in the surface structure.

One advantage of this view over a strict version of the Verb Island

hypothesis is that it allows for the acquisition of lexically specific patterns


713

TABLE 10. All productive S+V and V+O patterns by end of Stage I and II

ChildrenPatterns

(counter-patterns)

No. verbtypes Stage I

(counter-examples)

No. verb typesStage I & II

(counter-examples

Aran I+X 12* 31(X+I) (0) (0)It+X 7 8(X+it) (1) (1)X+it 6 11

(It+X) (3) (3)X+that 2 9

(That+X) (0) (0)X+fly 3 6

(Fly+X) (0) (0)Becky I+X 24 30

(X+I) (0) (0)X+it 21 27

(It+X) (0) (0)X+this 4 6

(This+X) (0) (0)Dominic I+X 14 32

(X+I) (0) (0)Mummy+X 7 11(X+Mummy) (0) (0)Daddy+X 4 8(X+Daddy) (0) (0)That+X 10 11(X+that) (0) (0)

X+it 14 31(It+X) (0) (0)

Anne I+X 19 21(X+I) (0) (0)

Anne+X 21 24(X+Anne) (1) (1)

X+it 32 39(It+X) (0) (0)X+that 14 16

(That+X) (0) (0)X+baby 5 6(Baby+X) (0) (0)

Ruth Me+X 8 40(X+me) (1) (1)I+X 5 24

(X+I) (0) (0)Mummy+X 5 19(X+Mummy) (1) (1)

X+it 6(It+X) (0)X+that 10

(That+X) (1)X+baby 8(That+X) (0)

Gail Gail+X 5 13(X+Gail) (0) (0)

I+X 4 9

MCCLURE ET AL.

714

TABLE 10. (Cont.)

ChildrenPatterns

(counter-patterns)

No. verbtypes Stage I

(counter-examples)

No. verb typesStage I & II

(counter-examples

(X+I) (0) (0)Caroline+X 3 8(X+Caroline) (1) (1)

You+X 6 7(X+you) (0) (0)X+it 21 41

(It+X) (0) (1)Joel I+X 25 41

(X+I) (0) (0)Mummy/Mama+X 7 8(X+Mummy/Mama) (0) (0)

You+X 1 7(X+you) (0) (0)X+it 15 32

(It+X) (0) (0)Liz Liz+X 13 23

(X+Liz) (0) (0)I+X 1 18

(X+I) (0) (0)Mummy+X 4 8(X+Mummy) (0) (0)

X+it 8 25(It+X) (0) (1)

Nicole I+X 35 50(X+I) (0) (0)

Nicole+X 31 43(X+Nicole) (2) (2)

Mummy/Mum+X 12 14(X+Mummy) (0) (1)

You+X 6 8(X+you) (0) (0)Molly+X 3 6(X+Molly) (0) (0)

X+it 22 44(It+X) (0) (0)X+that 11 14

(That+X) (0) (1)X+them 6 8

(Them+X) (0) (0)Warren I+X 12 20

(X+I) (0) (0)Warren+X 7 19(X+Warren) (0) (0)Mummy+X 6 12(X+Mummy) (0) (0)

X+It 9 15(It+X) (1) (1)

*Numbers in bold indicate when the pattern becomes productive.


715

based around items other than verbs. Thus, an English child might

have learned a formula that allows him to talk about himself as agent (or

as agent and experiencer) by placing the nominative pronoun ‘I’ in front

of the word that denotes the action or experience. Such a formula is

inconsistent with a strict version of the Verb Island hypothesis since it is,

by definition, verb-general. However, it is consistent with more recent

lexical constructivist formulations, which accept that grammatical structure

does not revolve exclusively around verbs (Pine et al., 1998; Akhtar, 1999;

Childers & Tomasello, 2001).

Another advantage of Braine’s limited scope formula account is that it

allows for the possibility that children’s early formulae can be represented

at a number of different levels of abstraction. Thus, although for Braine

some of children’s early rules were clearly lexically specific formulae, Braine

was also prepared to attribute more abstract patterns to children who

used a sufficiently wide range of lexical items to express similar semantic

relations. For example, he credited Bowerman’s (1973) subject Kendall

with an Agent+Action pattern on the grounds that, unlike some of the

other children for whom corpora were available, she produced a relatively

large number of lexically diverse and correctly ordered Agent+Action

sequences. This interpretation of the data is clearly inconsistent with the

claim that children’s early systems consist entirely of inventories of lexically

specific patterns. However, it is consistent with the claim that children

are gradually building adultlike representations by a process of functionally-

based distributional analysis of the input (Tomasello, 1992, 2003). It is also

consistent with the idea that, although children do not have adultlike

knowledge of the transitive construction, they may have weak or partial

representations that are sufficiently abstract to support performance in

syntactic bootstrapping experiments (Tomasello & Abbot-Smith, 2002).

DISCUSSION

The main purpose of the present study was to use data from 10 children to

test the claim that children’s early knowledge of argument structure builds

up gradually around particular verbs. The results provide evidence that

children build grammatical structure in a lexically specific way; however,

they also show that this structure is not necessarily verb-specific.

Among the findings consistent with the view that children’s knowledge

builds up gradually around verbs was the fact that most of the children

were like Travis in having few of their verbs first appearing with two or

more arguments. The implication is that, rather than reflecting a somewhat

extreme approach to early word combination, the lexical specificity of

Travis’s early speech is actually quite typical of English-speaking children

during the early stages.

MCCLURE ET AL.

716

Also consistent with the view that children’s early knowledge of argu-

ment structure is verb-specific was the evidence that children were able

to use some verbs in more complex structures than other verbs with similar

argument structures. Thus, the children in the study appeared to know

significantly more about Old Verbs at Stage II than New Verbs at Stage II,

even when the analysis was restricted to transitive verbs. Old Verbs had

more argument structure and higher MLUs for both tokens and first uses

of verb types. These findings suggest that the children were not able to

automatically generalize what they knew about one verb to another verb

with the same argument structure and hence that their knowledge of

argument structure was not fully verb-general in the sense that it did

not allow them to use all verbs of a particular type (e.g. transitive verbs) in

the same range of sentence types (e.g. (S) V+O and S+V+O).

However, not consistent with the view that children’s early knowledge

of argument structure is verb-specific was the evidence that the children

were able to generalize some of their knowledge about Verbs at Stage I to

New Verbs at Stage II. Thus, there was a significant difference between

the number of arguments surrounding New Verbs at Stage II and New

Verbs at Stage I. This suggests that the children were learning something

about verbs at Stage I that they were able to apply spontaneously to

New Verbs at Stage II. The Verb Island hypothesis cannot explain this

finding. However, one way in which it could be explained is in terms of

the learning of limited scope formulae such as ‘Mummy+X’, or ‘I+X’,

‘me+X’, ‘the child’s name+X’, or ‘X+it ’. Structures like these, which

are composed of high frequency subjects and objects, and accept verbs

as slot-fillers, may allow the child to use their New Verbs at Stage II in

slightly more complex structures than they were able to use their New

Verbs at Stage I. They may also serve as the building blocks for more

abstract structures such as S+V and V+O.

Although this evidence of verb-general structure is not consistent with

a strict version of the Verb Island hypothesis, it is consistent with

Tomasello’s more recent formulation that grammatical structure does

not have to revolve exclusively around verbs, but can include other lexical

items, particularly pronouns (Childers & Tomasello, 2001). Childers &

Tomasello found that for English-speaking children, pronouns play a

very important role in the acquisition of the transitive construction. They

found that when children (M=2;6) were trained with utterances that had

pronoun frames, such as he’s [verb]-ing it and closely associated noun

frames, this helped them to use novel verbs productively. Childers &

Tomasello concluded that as children are learning individual words, they

are also learning constructions (e.g. the transitive) and this may be

facilitated by low-scope representations such as I’m [verb]-ing it or he’s

[verb]-ing it or [verb]-it.


717

Other evidence that children may be using pronoun frames comes

from Akhtar (1999). In the cases where children heard a novel verb in a

non-English word order and then were able to use it productively in

an utterance in SVO word order, they did so, in all but one case, using

pronouns. This suggests they may be learning the privileges of occurrence

of certain high-frequency pronouns (he, him, it) and that this knowledge

helps them produce utterances in SVO word order. A pronoun frame

in SVO order may therefore constitute partial knowledge of what a full

abstract transitive construction might consist of. In other words, children

learn which pronouns frequently occur in preverbal position and which

pronouns occur frequently in post-verbal position and they use this

knowledge to structure sentences with new verbs.

In fact, the youngest children in Akhtar’s study were 2;8, though similar

results have also been found for slightly younger children (Abbott-Smith

et al., 2001). The results of the present study suggest that children may

have some verb-general knowledge of transitive structure as early as Stage

I – in the sense that they appear able to use new verbs with a variety of

high frequency subjects and objects. However, they also underline the

dangers of assuming that such knowledge necessarily represents fully

abstract knowledge of the transitive construction. To have such knowledge

would presumably mean to have knowledge that was not tied to any

specific lexical items, whether they are particular verbs or particular high

frequency subjects and objects. It is not clear to us that there is currently

any strong evidence that children have such knowledge. However, as

Tomasello & Akhtar (2003) point out, one way of showing that they do,

would be to demonstrate syntactic priming effects for transitive sentences

that show little or no lexical overlap with the transitive sentences that they

primed. Interestingly, in a recent study that adopted this kind of approach

Savage, Lieven, Theakston & Tomasello (2003) found that while older

children did show syntactic priming effects for sentences with both high

and low levels of lexical overlap, younger children only showed priming

effects for sentences in which the level of lexical overlap was high. These

results, like those of the present study, are consistent with the view that

although children’s knowledge of argument structure is not completely

verb-specific, nor is it fully abstract during the early stages. The question

for future research is therefore how do young children construct such

abstract syntactic representations in the course of development. One way of

addressing this issue is to use comprehension and production studies to

investigate the precise nature of children’s early grammatical represen-

tations at different points in development (e.g. Fisher, 2002b ; Savage et al.,

2003; Matthews, Lieven, Theakston & Tomasello, 2005). Another is to

build models of language learning that can provide an integrated account of

the results of comprehension and production studies, and hence shed light

MCCLURE ET AL.

718

on the mechanisms that underlie this process (e.g. Chang, 2002, 2004;

Alishahi, 2004).

REFERENCES

Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2001). What preschool children do and donot do with ungrammatical word orders. Cognitive Development 16, 679–92.

Akhtar, N. (1999). Acquiring basic word order : evidence for data-driven learning ofsyntactic structure. Journal of Child Language 26, 339–56.

Akhtar, N. & Tomasello, M. (1997). Young children’s productivity with word order andverb morphology. Developmental Psychology 33, 952–65.

Alishahi, A. (2004). A computational model for early argument structure acquisition.Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto.

Bowerman, M. (1973). Early syntactic development: a crosslinguistic study with specialreference to Finnish. Cambridge : CUP.

Braine, M. (1976). Children’s first word combinations. Monographs of the Society forResearch in Child Development 41(1) (serial no. 164).

Brooks, P. J. & Tomasello, M. (1999). Young children learn to produce passives with nonceverbs. Developmental Psychology 35(1), 29–44.

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Chang, F. (2002). Symbolically speaking: a connectionist model of sentence production.Cognitive Science 26, 609–51.

Chang, F. (2004). The development of the transitive construction : a connectionistaccount. Paper presented at the 29th Annual Boston University Conference on LanguageDevelopment.

Childers, J. B. & Tomasello, M. (2001). The role of pronouns in young children’sacquisition of the English transitive construction. Developmental Psychology 37, 739–48.

Fisher, C. (1996). Structural limits on verb mapping: the role of analogy in children’sinterpretations of sentences. Cognitive Psychology 31, 41–81.

Fisher, C. (2002a). The role of abstract syntactic knowledge in language acquisition : a replyto Tomasello (2000). Cognition 82, 259–78.

Fisher, C. (2002b). Structural limits on verb mapping: the role of abstract structure in2.5-year-olds’ interpretations of novel verbs. Developmental Science 5(1), 55–64.

Ingram, D. (1989). First language acquisition: method, description and explanation.Cambridge : C.U.P.

Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.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. (2000). The CHILDES project : tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Mahwah,

NJ: Erlbaum.Matthews, D., Lieven, E. V. M., Theakston, A. L. & Tomasello, M. (2005). The role of

frequency in the acquisition of English word order. Cognitive Development 20, 121–36.Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language

17, 357–74.Naigles, L. & Kako, E. (1993). First contact in verb acquisition : defining a role for syntax.

Child Development 64, 1665–87.Pine, J. M. & Lieven, E. V. M. (1993). Reanalysing rote-learned phrases : individual

differences in the transition to multi-word speech. Journal of Child Language 20, 551–71.Pine, J. M. & Martindale, H. (1996). Syntactic categories in the speech of young children :

the case of the determiner. Journal of Child Language 23, 369–95.Pine, J. M., Lieven, E. V. M. & Rowland, C. F. (1998). Comparing different models of the

development of the English verb category. Linguistics 36, 807–30.


719

Pizzuto, E. & Caselli M. C. (1992). The acquisition of Italian morphology: implicationsfor models of language development. Journal of Child Language 19, 491–557.

Rubino, R. B. & Pine, J. M. (1998). Subject–verb agreement in Brazilian Portuguese :what low error rates hide. Journal of Child Language 25, 35–59.

Savage, C., Lieven, E., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2003). Testing the abstractnessof children’s linguistic representations : lexical and structural priming of syntactic con-structions in young children. Developmental Science 6, 557–67.

Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. (2001). The role ofperformance limitations in the acquisition of verb–argument structure. Journal of ChildLanguage 28, 127–52.

Tomasello, M. (1992). First verbs : a case study of early grammatical development. Cambridge :C.U.P.

Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74,209–53.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, M. & Abbot-Smith, K. (2002). A tale of two theories : response to Fisher.Cognition 83, 207–14.

Tomasello, M. & Akhtar, N. (2003). What paradox? A response to Naigles (2002). Cognition88, 317–23.

Tomasello, M. & Brooks, P. J. (1998). Young children’s earliest transitive and intransitiveconstructions. Cognitive Linguistics 9, 379–95.

MCCLURE ET AL.

720

journal of child language …... additional services for journal of child language ... (1992) case...

Documents