No abstract

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by taking a developmental approach to structural priming. Using a dialog comprehension-to-production paradigm, we primed participants (3-4year olds, 5-6year olds and adults) with double object datives (Wendy gave Bob a dog) and prepositional datives (Wendy gave a dog to Bob). Half the participants heard the same verb in prime and target (e.g. gave-gave) and half heard a different verb (e.g. sent-gave). The results revealed substantial differences in the magnitude of priming across development. First, there was a small but significant abstract structural priming effect across all age groups, but this effect was larger in younger children than in older children and adults. Second, adding verb overlap between prime and target prompted a large, significant increase in the priming effect in adults (a lexical boost), a small, marginally significant increase in the older children and no increase in the youngest children. The results support the idea that abstract syntactic knowledge can develop independently of verb-specific frames. They also support the idea that different mechanisms may be needed to explain abstract structural priming and lexical priming, as predicted by the implicit learning account (Bock, K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology - General, 129(2), 177-192). Finally, the results illustrate the value of an integrative developmental approach to both theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntax acquisition.

This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian () claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive verb utterances early in development in comparison with later stages of development and to omit direct objects much more frequently with mixed verbs (where direct objects are optional) than with transitive verbs. To test these claims, data from nine children aged between  ;. and  ;. matched with Valian's subjects on MLU were examined. When analysed in terms of abstract syntactic structures Valian's findings are supported. However, a detailed lexical analysis of the data suggests that the children were not selecting argument structure on the basis of syntactic complexity.[*] We would like to thank all the families who took part in the research reported here.Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Pine & Lieven (1993) suggest that a lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children's early multiword corpora. The present study tests this claim on a second, larger sample of eleven children aged between 1;0 and 3;0 from a different social background, and extends the analysis to later in development. Results indicate that the positional analysis can account for a mean of 60% of all the children's multiword utterances and that the great majority of all other utterances are defined as frozen by the analysis. Alternative explanations of the data based on hypothesizing underlying syntactic or semantic relations are investigated through analyses of pronoun case marking and of verbs with prototypical agent–patient roles. Neither supports the view that the children's utterances are being produced on the basis of general underlying rules and categories. The implications of widespread distributional learning in early language development are discussed.

a b s t r a c tIn this study, we investigated when children develop adult-like verb-structure links, and examined two mechanisms, associative and error-based learning, that might explain how these verb-structure links are learned. Using structural priming, we tested children's and adults' ability to use verb-structure links in production in three ways; by manipulating: (1) verb overlap between prime and target, (2) target verb bias, and (3) prime verb bias. Children (aged 3-4 and 5-6 years old) and adults heard and produced double object dative (DOD) and prepositional object dative (PD) primes with DOD-and PD-biased verbs. Although all age groups showed significant evidence of structural priming, only adults showed increased priming when there was verb overlap between prime and target sentences (the lexical boost). The effect of target verb bias also grew with development. Critically, however, the effect of prime verb bias on the size of the priming effect (prime surprisal) was larger in children than in adults, suggesting that verb-structure links are present at the earliest age tested. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that children begin to acquire knowledge about verb-argument structure preferences early in acquisition, but that the ability to use adult-like verb bias in production gradually improves over development. We also argue that this pattern of results is best explained by a learning model that uses an error-based learning mechanism.

Participants (aged 5-6 yrs, 9-10 yrs and adults) rated (using a five-point scale) grammatical (intransitive) and overgeneralized (transitive causative) 1 uses of a high frequency, low frequency and novel intransitive verb from each of three semantic classes [Pinker, S. (1989a). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]: ''directed motion'' (fall, tumble), ''going out of existence'' (disappear, vanish) and ''semivoluntary expression of emotion'' (laugh, giggle). In support of Pinker's semantic verb class hypothesis, participants' preference for grammatical over overgeneralized uses of novel (and English) E-mail address: Ben.Ambridge@Liverpool.ac.uk (B. Ambridge). 1 Throughout this paper, the term ''intransitive'' (whether referring to a verb or construction) refers only to non-causative intransitives -sometimes termed ''inchoative intransitives'' -(e.g., The man laughed) and not to intransitives with unspecified or unexpressed objects (e.g., The man ate). The term ''transitive causative'' (e.g., The sun melted the snow) is used to contrast sentences of this type with both transitive noncausatives (e.g., John saw Bill) and periphrastic causatives (e.g., The sun made the snow melt).www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Cognition 106 (2008) 87-129 verbs increased between 5-6 yrs and 9-10 yrs, and was greatest for the latter class, which is associated with the lowest degree of direct external causation (the prototypical meaning of the transitive causative construction). In support of Braine and Brooks's [Braine, M.D.S., & Brooks, P.J. (1995). Verb argument strucure and the problem of avoiding an overgeneral grammar. In M. Tomasello & W. E. Merriman (Eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children's acquisition of verbs (pp. 352-376). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum] entrenchment hypothesis, all participants showed the greatest preference for grammatical over ungrammatical uses of high frequency verbs, with this preference smaller for low frequency verbs, and smaller again for novel verbs. We conclude that both the formation of semantic verb classes and entrenchment play a role in children's retreat from argument-structure overgeneralization errors.

The present paper reports an analysis of correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in one child's early wh-question data (age  ; . to  ; .). It is argued that two current movement rule accounts (DeVilliers,  ; Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, ) cannot explain the patterning of early wh-questions. However, the data can be explained in terms of the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-wordjauxiliary combinations, and the pattern of inversion and uninversion predicted from the relative frequencies of these combinations in the mother's speech. The results support the claim that correctly inverted wh-questions can be produced without access to a subject-auxiliary inversion rule and are consistent with the constructivist claim that a distributional learning mechanism that learns and reproduces lexically-specific formulae heard in the input can explain much of the early multi-word speech data. The implications of these results for movement rule-based and constructivist theories of grammatical development are discussed. Many current rule-based theories of language acquisition are based on the assumption that in producing multi-word speech, children are manipulating syntactic categories such as subject, verb and auxiliary to produce rulegoverned grammatical utterances. Rule-based theories of object wh-question acquisition make the additional assumption that children are applying the following grammatical movement rules to transform an underlying declarative sentence into a wh-question. First, the object of the sentence (the apple in he is eating the apple) is replaced by the wh-word (he is eating what ?). Secondly, the object wh-word is preposed to the beginning of the sentence, moving into the specifier position of the complementizer phrase, CP (what he

There has been a growing trend in recent years toward the attribution of adultlike syntactic categories to young, language-learning children. This has derived support from studies which claim to have found positive evidence for syntactic categories in the speech of young children (e.g., Valian, 1986). However, these claims contradict the findings of previous research which have suggested that the categories underlying children's early multiword speech are much more limited in scope (e.g., Braine, 1976). The present study represents an attempt to differentiate and test these models of early multiword speech: focusing on the syntactic category of determiner, we investigated the extent to which 11 children showed overlap in the contexts in which they used different determiner types in their early multiword corpora. The results demonstrated that, although children do use determiners with a semantically heterogeneous collection of different noun types, there is very little evidence that they know anything about the relationship between the different determiner types, and thus there is no real case for the attribution of a syntactic determiner category. Indeed, this pattern of determiner use seems perfectly consistent with a limited-scope formula account of children's early multiword speech, as proposed by Braine (1976). These findings suggest that the development of an adultlike determiner category may be a gradual process, one involving the progressive broadening of the range of lexically specific frames in which different determiners appear, and are broadly consistent with a number of recent constructivist models of children's early grammatical development.There has been a growing awareness in recent years of the shortcomings of models of grammatical development based on the gradual extension of broad cognitive-semantic categories. First, there is the problem that children's early grammatical knowledge does not appear to be restricted in the way that such models seem to predict (e.g.