Children's First Word Combinations

Abstract

A descriptive analysis is presented of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 children learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morphemes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data indicate that each child has learned a number of positional formulae that map components of meaning into positions in the surface structure. Each formula expresses a specific, often quite narrow, range of relational conceptual content. In each corpus, the bulk of the combinations are generated by a small number of such formulae; the differences between one corpus and another are considerable, and their nature indicates that the formulae are independent acquisitions. The formulae are not broad rules of the kind usual in transformational grammars; and the semantic categories are usually much more specific than those of case grammars or those proposed by Schlesinger (although Schlesinger's views are supported in other respects). Also, there is no evidence for grammatical word classes. In general, the evidence indicates less grammatical competence at this stage of development than children are being credited with in much current work. Two kinds of phenomena involving free word order are noted. One kind, not previously reported, is called a "groping pattern": positional formulae are sometimes preceded by an earlier stage in which the components are unordered. The lack of order is due to the child groping to express a meaning before he has learned a rule that determines the position of the elements. The other kind is due to the learning of two formulae, one for each order: longitudinal study of some cases indicates that the two orders were learned at separate times and that they may have subtly different semantic content.