Heike Behrens

The relationship between syntactic and prosodic organisation in early multiword speech

Speech in children should be viewed as a developing skill. During acquisition the child becomes increasingly capable of organizing linguistic structure at a number of different levels concurrently. One boy seemed to have strategies for simplifying the tasks of speech reception and production. He would incorporate the immediately prior utterance, or some portion of it, intact into his utterance as if to avoid structuring his entire utterance from scratch. Another strategy was to extend his repertoire of structures to express more complex ideas simply by combining two existing structures without reordering any of the elements to match adult syntax. If such strategies are widespread they may account for the recorded facts about the development of childrens question forms. Psychological variables, commonly called performance factors, should not be regarded merely as putting restrictions on the extent to which a childs linguistic knowledge can be expressed. Rather, they affect the manner in which syntactic structures develop. Just as the acquisition of linguistic structure is affected by psychological processes, so is the efficiency of these processes affected in its turn by the childs growing linguistic knowledge.

The input-output relationship in first language acquisition

This study provides an account of the distributional information and the production rates in a particularly rich corpus of German child and adult language. Three structural domains are analysed: the parts-of-speech distribution for a coded corpus of circa one million words as well as the internal constituency of 300,000 noun phrases and almost 200,000 verb phrases. In all three domains, the distribution over time in the adult input is extremely homogenous. The child shows a steady approximation towards the adult distribution. It is argues that two notions of acquisition have to be distinguished: acquisition in terms of the availability of a given structure, for example in terms of first occurrence of a structure or according to various criteria of productivity, and acquisition in terms of full communicative competence, i.e., using structures in the way adults use them (cf. Slobin, 1991, 1997). The data presented here show that the child acquires not only the structural options of German but also highly conventionalised ways of encoding concepts. The amount of information about the structure and conventions of German that is available in the input has the potential of making innate stipulations unnecessary. Instead, the data support usage-based and probabilistic theories of language and language processing.

Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition*

Abstract It was long considered to be impossible to learn grammar based on linguistic experience alone. In the past decade, however, advances in usage-based linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and developmental psychology changed the view on this matter. So-called usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition state that language can be learned from language use itself, by means of social skills like joint attention, and by means of powerful generalization mechanisms. This paper first summarizes the assumptions regarding the nature of linguistic representations and processing. Usage-based theories are nonmodular and nonreductionist, i.e., they emphasize the form-function relationships, and deal with all of language, not just selected levels of representations. Furthermore, storage and processing is considered to be analytic as well as holistic, such that there is a continuum between childrens unanalyzed chunks and abstract units found in adult language. In the second part, the empirical evidence is reviewed. Childrens linguistic competence is shown to be limited initially, and it is demonstrated how children can generalize knowledge based on direct and indirect positive evidence. It is argued that with these general learning mechanisms, the usage-based paradigm can be extended to multilingual language situations and to language acquisition under special circumstances.

How difficult are complex verbs? Evidence from German, Dutch and English

Most research on the acquisition of verbs has focused on acquiring the syntactic category verb and on the verbs argument structure. It is assumed that due to their specific syntactic nature verbs are acquired in a different fashion than nouns, and that due to their specific semantic nature verbs do not simply denote activities or situations, but rather package meaning components in a (language-) specific way. This paper refines the problem of acquiring verbs by paying attention to differences in the internal constituency of the verb lexicon in three closely related West Germanic languages - German, Dutch, and English. It is argued that the verb lexicon is not a uniform class but consists of various semantically or morphologically defined subsets, most notably simplex verbs like cover and complex verbs like uncover or cover up. It is shown that while complex verbs do not form an acquisition problem per se, not all (groups of) verbs are acquired in the same fashion and with the same ease. In particular, differences in the acquisition of particle and prefix verbs are discussed as well as differences in the lexical diversity of the verbal subsets in the three languages under investigation

Konstruktionen im Spracherwerb

Abstract The concept of ‘constructions’ covers the range from fully unanalyzed or “frozen” units to abstract and productive schemas that can be used to form new utterances, even with verbs that usually have a different valency (coercion). The dynamic nature of the construction as well as its functional grounding makes the construction particularly suitable for describing and explaining the course of language acquisition. Distributional analyses of the linguistic structures used across development as well as experimental tests on the productivity of these structures are the methodological means to assess the degree of freedom of constructions used at each point in development. In the earliest stages of development children rely heavily on bottom up processes and generalize only slowly. But with growing productivity they are able to generate new utterances top down.

Language Development: Morphology

This article summarizes relevant research regarding the acquisition of morphology. Children tend to show a similar order in learning the morphemes of their target language. However, the course of acquisition also depends on individual learning styles and language type. Typological differences also affect the semantic notions and contrasts children first encode. From a psycholinguistic point of view, the assessment of productivity is of particular relevance: when do children represent complex forms in an adult-like way? There is an ongoing debate about whether children are helped by special rule-processing mechanisms or whether all linguistic abstraction is achieved by pattern detection and generalization.