The aim of the current study was to determine the degree to which a sample of one child's creative utterances related to utterances that the child previously produced. The utterances to be accounted for were all of the intelligible, multi-word utterances produced by the child in a single hour of interaction with her mother early in her third year of life (at age 2;1.11). We used a high-density database consisting of 5 hours of recordings per week together with a maternal diary for the previous 6 weeks. Of the 295 multi-word utterances on tape, 37% were ‘novel’ in the sense that they had not been said in their entirety before. Using a morpheme-matching method, we identified the way(s) in which each novel utterance differed from its closest match in the preceding corpus. In 74% of the cases we required only one operation to match the previous utterance and the great majority of these consisted of the substitution of a word (usually a noun) into a previous utterance or schema. Almost all the other single-operation utterances involved adding a word onto the beginning or end of a previous utterance. 26% of the novel, multi-word utterances required more than one operation to match the closest previous utterance, although many of these only involved a combination of the two operations seen for the single-operation utterances. Some others were, however, more complex to match. The results suggest that the relatively high degree of creativity in early English child language could be at least partially based upon entrenched schemas and a small number of simple operations to modify them. We discuss the implications of these results for the interplay in language production between strings registered in memory and categorial knowledge.

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This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein "to be" or werden "to become," and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein-before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently "sudden" acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. Keywords: Grammatical acquisition; Transfer; Passive and future constructionsOne of the key issues in language acquisition research is why children appear to learn certain aspects of grammar very quickly, whereas other aspects appear to develop only very gradually. Attempts to account for this can be divided into emergentist or usage-based theories on the one hand and, on the other, theories that assume innate representations of certain syntactic categories and principles (linguistic representational nativist theories). Emergentist and usage-based theories argue that grammar is learned through mechanisms that are not necessarily limited to language learning. Thus, input frequency crucially impacts the speed of acquisition as do other factors related to general cognitive constraints such as

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 children's unanalyzed chunks and abstract units found in adult language. In the second part, the empirical evidence is reviewed. Children's 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.

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A B S T R A C TSeveral descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, 'real' two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the acquisition of prosody, however, revealed that control of the phonetic parameters pitch, loudness, and duration is far from complete at such an early stage. In this study, we examine the interaction between the development of different types of syntactic structures and their prosodic organization. Data from a detailed production record of a monolingual German-learning boy is analysed both auditorily and acoustically with a focus on four different types of two-word utterances produced between 2; 0 and 2; 3. Two major findings are reported here. First, the different types of two-word utterances undergo individual trajectories of prosodic (re-)organization, in part depending on the time course in which they become productive. This suggests that different types of [*] The data collection and research was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, which also provided a stimulating environment for working on our ideas. We are grateful to several transcribers, most notably Solvejg Kü hnert, Jana Jurkat, and Susanne Mauritz for their indispensable groundwork in transcribing the data, and to Anne Alexander for her help in the acoustic analyses of a part of the data. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the continuous good spirit of Leo and his parents. We would like to thank the audience at the International Association for Child Language (IASCL) in Madison/Wisconsin, July 2002 for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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