Acquiring basic word order: evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure  

Oleh:

Akhtar, Nameera

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Child Language (ada di PROQUEST) vol. 26 no. 2 (Jun. 1999), page 339-356.

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/JCL/26 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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Recent studies indicate that young English-speaking children do not have a general understanding of the significance of SVO order in reversible sentences; that is, they seem to rely on verb-specific formulas (e.g. NP pusher - form of the verb PUSH - NP PUShee) to interpret such sentences (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997). This finding raises the possibility that young children may be open to learning non-SVO structures with novel transitive verbs. To test this hypothesis, I2 children in each of three age groups (two-year-olds, three-year-olds, and four-year-olds) were taught novel verbs, one in each of three sentence positions: medial (SVO), final (SOV), and initial (VSO). The younger age groups were equally likely to use the novel (non-English) orders spontaneously as to correct them to SVO order, whereas the oldest children consistently corrected these structures to SVO order. These results suggest that English-speaking children's acquisition of a truly general understanding of SVO order may be a gradual process involving generalization (learning) from examples. The findings are discussed in terms of recent data-driven learning accounts of grammar acquisition.

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