Multiunit Sequences in First Language Acquisition

Abstract

Theoretical and empirical reasons suggest that children build their language not only out of individual words but also out of multiunit strings. These are the basis for the development of schemas containing slots. The slots are putative categories which build in abstraction while the schemas eventually connect to other schemas in terms of both meaning and form. Evidence comes from the nature of the input, the ways in which children construct novel utterances, the systematic errors that children make, and the computational modelling of children's grammars. However, much of this research is on English, which is unusual in its rigid word order and impoverished inflectional morphology. We summarise these results and explore their implications for languages with more flexible word order and/or much richer inflectional morphology.

Structural Relationship Between Cognitive Processing and Syntactic Sentence Comprehension in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

“…Evidence in the developmental literature is emerging to suggest that multiword chunks are important building blocks for syntactic development and that such chunks are used for comprehension and production (Arnon & Clark, 2011;Arnon, McCauley, & Christiansen, 2017;Bannard & Lieven, 2012;Bannard & Matthews, 2008;Cornish, Dale, Kirby, & Christiansen, 2017;McCauley & Christiansen, 2013, 2014McCauley, Isbilen, & Christiansen, 2017). As already noted, repeated language processing experiences enable children to acquire and store multiword representations, which provides them crucial information about the distributional and structural relationships across words and the opportunity to reuse the component parts of the units (Ns, Vs, NV) to acquire new multiword units (Cornish et al, 2017;Theakston & Lieven, 2017).…”

More Than Words: The Role of Multiword Sequences in Language Learning and Use

“…Together, the articles by Theakston and Lieven (2017) as well as Ellis and Ogden (2017), along with the contributions by Arnon and Christiansen (2017) as well as McCauley and Christiansen (2017) underscore the fundamental importance of multiword sequences for understanding first-language (L1) acquisition. Given the broad interest in language acquisition within the cognitive science community, these four articles should provide much food for thought, while also challenging several common assumptions about the nature of linguistic representations and the primacy of words in the process of language acquisition.…”

“…Complicating matters further, researchers from various disciplines often refer to multiword sequences using different terms. The set of terms used in this topic alone includes “multiword construction” (Culicover, Jackendoff, & Audring, ; Ellis & Ogden, ), “multiword unit” (Arnon & Christiansen, ; Geeraert, Newman, & Baayen, ), “multiword chunks” (McCauley & Christiansen, ), “multiunit string” (Theakston & Lieven, ), and “formulaic sequence” (Wray, ) (see Table for additional terms). Importantly, the differences in the specific terms used in this topic to refer to multiword sequences illustrate the breadth of theoretical perspectives and backgrounds of the contributing authors.…”

Thinking About Multiword Constructions: Usage‐Based Approaches to Acquisition and Processing

“…Collocations play key roles both in usage-based theories of human language learning and in the practice of computational linguistics. Usage-based approaches to first language (L1) acquisition hold that grammar emerges as children create linguistic constructions from their analysis of recurring sequences of language (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011;Theakston & Lieven, 2017;Tomasello, 2003). Distributional data have long been recognized as a cue to syntactic word class (Kiss, 1973;Redington, Chater, & Finch, 1998).…”