A Corpus Study on the Item-based Nature of Early Grammar Acquisition

Adam Hodges, Valerie Krugler, and Deborah Law

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ABSTRACT. This paper explores the item-based nature of child language acquisition by examining data from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). Two studies are explicated: the first uses pooled data from several children, and the second follows a single child longitudinally. The results show that the learning of the complex construction consisting of a main clause followed by an infinitival compliment, e.g. I want to play, center around a single verb, want, even though other candidate verbs exist in the children's vocabulary. We provide empirical evidence to show that children initially learn grammar via item-based units and gradually break down complex constructions as units into smaller pieces in a process that leads towards the organization of language into the abstract categories consistent with a fully competent adult grammar.

Adam Hodges is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, and editor of Colorado Research in Linguistics. He can be reached at Adam.Hodges@Colorado.EDU. Valerie Krugler is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. Deborah Law is a graduate student in Human Language Technology at the University of Colorado.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 1 - June 2004