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Early syntactic productivity : evidence from dative shift

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/146835

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Title: Early syntactic productivity : evidence from dative shift
Related: Cognition, Vol. 103, Issue 2, (2007), p.163-179
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.03.003
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2007
Author/Creator: Conwell, Erin
Author/Creator: Demuth, Katherine
Description: The abstractness of children’s early syntactic representations has been questioned in the recent acquisition literature. While some research has suggested that children’s knowledge of basic constructions such as the transitive is robust and abstract at a very young age, other work has proposed that young children only have constructions that are specific to individual lexical items. The present paper seeks to resolve this discrepancy by examining children’s abstract knowledge of the English dative alternation via a production study. The studies ask whether young children who hear a sentence like I pilked the cup to Petey know that the same meaning can be expressed with the sentence I pilked Petey the cup. This generalization is well-attested in the language that children hear and represents a strong test-case for determining the nature of children’s early syntactic representations. The results indicate that three-year-old children have productive knowledge of the English dative alternation, but that their performance can be influenced by small changes in the nature of the task. A preference for the prepositional dative form is also found and the possible reasons for this preference are discussed.
Description: 17 page(s)
Subject Keyword: Syntactic generalization
Subject Keyword: Language acquisition
Subject Keyword: Dative shift
Resource Type: journal article
Organisation: Macquarie University. Dept. of Linguistics

Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/146835
Identifier: ISSN:0010-0277
Identifier: mq-rm-2011001109
Language: eng
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