Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T05:26:49.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Syntactic distinctions in child language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, E10–105, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-Mail: bloom@psyche.mit.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper presents a study of young children's understanding of a constraint on English word order, which is that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by prenominai adjectives. For adults, this is a syntactic constraint: adjectives can only precede nouns, and pronouns and proper names are lexical Noun Phrases (NPs). In two analyses, the spontaneous speech of 14 one- and two-year-old children was studied. These analyses show that even in children's very first word combinations, they almost never say things like big Fred or big he. Some non-syntactic theories of this phenomenon are discussed and found to have serious descriptive problems, supporting the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through rules that order abstract linguistic categories. A theory is proposed as to how children could use semantic information to draw the noun/NP distinction and to acquire this restriction on English word order.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 343 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Kathryn Bock, Melissa Bowerman, Susan Carey, John Macnamara, and Steven Pinker for their comments, suggestions, and encouragement. This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

References

REFERENCES

Bloom, L. (1970). Language development:form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Bloom, L. (1973). One word ai a time: the use of single word utterances before syntax. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lightbown, P. & Hood, L. (1975). Structure and variation in child language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 40. No 160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1973). Early syntactic development: a cross-linguistic study, with special reference to Finnish. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S. (1976). Children's first word combinations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 41. No 164.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: its nature, origin, and use. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Elliot, N. & Wexler, K. (1986). A principle theory of categorical acquisition. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Fukui, N. (1987). A theory of category projection and its implications. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Taylor, M. (1984). How two-year-old children interpret proper and common names for unfamiliar objects. Child Development 55. 1535–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Kuczaj, S. A. II (ed.), Language development, Vol. II: Language, thought, and culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Eribaum.Google Scholar
Gordon, P. (1988). Count/mass category acquisition: distributional distinctions in children's speech. Journal of Child Language 15. 109–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenberg, J. H. (1963). Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Greenberg, J. H. (ed.), Universals of language. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Grimshaw, J. (1981). Form, function, and the language acquisition device. In Baker, C. L. & McCarthy, J. J. (eds), The logical problem of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Higginson, R. P. (1985). Fixing: a demonstration of the child's active role in language acquisition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Washington State University.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. (1986). Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1977). X-bar syntax: a study of phrase structure. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Katz, N., Baker, E. & Macnamara, J. (1974). What's in a name? A study of how children learn common and proper names. Child Development 45. 469–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Y.-J. (1987). The acquisition of relative clauses in English and Korean: development in spontaneous production. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1970). Global rules. Language 46, 627–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langacker, R. W. (1987). Nouns and verbs. Language 63. 53–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macnamara, J. (1982). Names for things: a study of child language. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Macnamara, J. (1986). A border dispute: the place of logic in psychology. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Snow, C. (1985). The Child Language Data Exchange System. Journal of Child Language 12. 271–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maratsos, M. (1983). Some current issues in the study of the acquisition of grammar. In Mussen, P. H. (ed.), Handbook of child psychology, 4th ed., Vol. 3: Cognitive development. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. (1988). Vote yes on nouns for semantic bootstrapping. Paper presented at the Thirteenth Annual Boston University Language Conference, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (1976). Some attributes of adjectives used by young children. Cognition 4. 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Radford, A. (1988). Transformational grammar. Cambridge: C.U.P.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: the emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language, Vol. 4. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Valian, V. (1986). Syntactic categories in the speech of young children. Developmental Psychology 22. 562–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar