Early Word Order Representations: Novel Arguments Against Old Contradictions

Franck, Julie; Millotte, Séverine; Lassotta, Romy

doi:10.1080/10489223.2011.530536

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(29 reference statements)

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“…In a recent experiment replicating Matthews et al's (2007), we obtained significantly more WWO corrections with a slightly different procedure in which test sentences were presented via a computer voice (rather than the experimenter) and children were asked to describe the scene to a zebra whose eyes were hidden (Franck et al, 2011). Thus, it is incorrect to predict that if children have grammatical representations, they will correct ungrammatical word orders with novel verbs.…”

Section: From Theory To Data: Critical Issues With Empirical Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Second, model sentences were preregistered and presented via loudspeakers rather than by the experimenter. These two changes appear to have played an important role in children's performance since the younger group (aged 2.11, as in Matthews et al, 2007) was found to correct ungrammatical sentences at a similar rate to the older group (Franck et al, 2011). We believe that the effect of these changes operates at the level of the inferences children made as to the experimenter's intentions.…”

Section: The Representation Of Word Order In Young Childrenmentioning

confidence: 86%

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Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

Franck

Lassotta

2012

Lingua

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One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children’s early grammatical knowledge. This paper focuses on the early representation of word order. It questions the validity of the results obtained with the Weird Word Order methodology (Akhtar,1999) inwhichchildrenare presented with un grammatical sentences. These results have previously been considered as major evidence for the constructivist,usage-based approach to word order development according to which young children initially encode word order as a verb-specific lexical property which only slowly develops into abstract knowledge at age 3 or 4 (e.g., Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Matthews et al., 2005, 2007). The critical review presented here addresses various problems with the results and their interpretation. The discussion questions the relationship between theory and data as well asmethodological issues related to thesm all number of observations and the discarding of data not missing at random. It is argued that the data not only fail to support the constructivist account, but they actually bring evidence for the alternative hypothesis according to which children, from early on, represent word order abstractly

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Section: From Theory To Data: Critical Issues With Empirical Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: The Representation Of Word Order In Young Childrenmentioning

confidence: 86%

Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

Franck

Lassotta

2012

Lingua

Self Cite

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“…Comprehension paradigms, such as preferential-looking or pointing, have found evidence for syntactic abstractions for transitive structures as early as 1;7 (e.g., Dittmar et al, 2011;Naigles, 1990;Yuan et al, 2012). In contrast, naturalistic observations (e.g., Tomasello, 1992) and production paradigms, including weird word order, nonce verb and syntactic priming studies (Bencini & Valian, 2008;Brooks & Tomasello, 1999;Kemp et al, 2005;Matthews et al, 2005;Miller & Deevy, 2006;Shimpi et al, 2007;Stumper & Szagun, 2008; but see Franck et al, 2011) have found evidence for abstract syntactic representations only from around three years of age. Usage-based-constructivist accounts suggest that comprehension tasks require merely weak syntactic knowledge derived from fewer exemplars (Abbot-Smith et al, 2004;Dittmar et al, 2008), and thus do not robustly test for syntactic productivity.…”

Section: The Development Of Abstract Syntactic Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for robust abstract syntactic representations in production before age three

et al. 2020

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This study investigated whether we can find reliable comprehension-to-production syntactic priming effects in children aged 2;0 to 2;11 and how phonological working memory and sentence production skills relate to the syntactic priming process. A finding of reliable syntactic priming effects would provide strong evidence that children’s syntactic representations are abstracted over individual lexical items. To test children at this young age, they were primed with simple and early-acquired transitive (e.g., tickling (a) baby) and unergative intransitive (e.g., running) syntactic structures. Children aged 2;7 to 2;11, primed with alternating prime structures, revealed a reliable syntactic priming effect. In addition, phonological working memory (moderated by age) and sentence production skills positively affected transitive productions. Children aged 2;0 to 2;6, primed either with alternating or cumulative prime structures, showed no priming effect. Together, the data indicate that children have robust abstract syntactic representations for the tested structures before age three and that both phonological working memory and production skills relate to children’s syntactic priming behavior, albeit in different ways.

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Awareness is one thing and mastery is another: Korean-speaking children’s comprehension of a suffixal passive construction in Korean

Shin

2022

Cognitive Development

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Early Word Order Representations: Novel Arguments Against Old Contradictions

Cited by 6 publications

References 18 publications

Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

Evidence for robust abstract syntactic representations in production before age three

Awareness is one thing and mastery is another: Korean-speaking children’s comprehension of a suffixal passive construction in Korean

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