First Language Acquisition Ch.9-10

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Children have to master the range of constructions conventionally used to

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convey each shade of meaning they are trying to express

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Children add to their repertoire by indicating more consistently

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whether information is given in the discourse

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They add greater precision for the addressee by

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adding adjectives to noun phrases

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They also add demonstratives and

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quantifiers

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They start to use relative clauses to pick out the

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referents when there are several possible candidates

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Children elaborate verbs and VP's by

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adding inflections and auxiliary verbs, they become more adept at tracking referents, substituting pronouns for lexical noun phrases

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In their earliest word combinations, children simply tend to

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assign given information to one position and new information to the other

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But as their utterances become more elaborate, they rely on what has been called

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the Preferred Argument Structure

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The Preferred Argument Structure is:

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the favored pattern for presenting information within a language to manage the flow of information

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Preferred Argument Structure...

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Reflects the management of flow in discourse
Leads people to favor pronouns

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Preferred Argument Structure...

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Children's acquisition of preferred argument structures appears to reflect a convergence of word-choice, referential form, and grammatical role.
This convergence arises in conversation, where children learn to introduce new information with particular verbs in specific argument slots
children are more likely to use nouns where these are more informative, and what is informative is generally information that is new in context

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In English, each utterance can be considered in terms of the

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argument roles it contains

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The argument roles in each utterance are:

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agent, recipient, location, instrument, theme (all the participants)
-subject, direct object, indirect object or oblique (grammatical relations)

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The canonical linking hypothesis predicts that children should give priority

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to canonical over non canonical linking

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In subordinate constructions, one clause (the subordinate clause) is embedded in the

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matrix or main clause.

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This embedding can happen in one of two ways:

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1. Embedded clause fills one of the grammatical roles in the matrix clause and acts as the subject or object, this is a type of complementation.
-"That Tim arrived early shocked them"

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This embedding can happen in one of two ways:

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The embedded clause modifies one of the constituents of the matrix clause, it can modify a noun phrase, for instance with a relative clause
-"The house that was covered with ivy stood back form the street"

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In two word combos, children may actually be combining two distinct

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propositions or protoclauses

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Around age two, children can connect events, but the precise connection

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can only be inferred in context.

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The primary markers of relations between clauses are

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conjunctions like "and"

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How do children interpret different forms of coordination-coordinations with transitive or intransitive verb phrases?

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Ardery (1979) argued, from her findings, that children's comprehensions of coordinate structures is best considered in terms of surface constraints and processing strategies.

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Verb primacy is...

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the verb serves as the primary unit of clausal structure

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Linear Sequencing:

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declarative sentences in English should consist of an initial subject immediately followed by a verb that, when transitive, is immediately followed by an object

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Coordination strategy

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any sequence of two or more phrases joined by and should be interpreted as a single larger constituent with the same function as the individual phrases.

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clauses linked by and may be

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additive
temporal
clausal
or even adversative in meaning

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Children begin to produce relative clauses at around age

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two

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The function of these relative clauses was to

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specify the entity referred to-whether it was a building, place or person.

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Children's early relative clauses generally lack

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relativizers, the elements introducing the relative clause itself.

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Slobin (1973) says that children generally seem to avoid interrupting

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linguistic units (with the placement of early relative clauses attached to the last noun phrase in the clause)

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Relative clauses are produced at first only in

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utterance final position

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Complement constructions in English consist of

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finite clauses (inflected verb) or nonfinite clauses (infinitive verb) embedded in one of the argument slots of the main verb.

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When children first talk about more than one event and link them in time, they simply

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juxtapose them.

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By age three, children have begin to produce temporal descriptions with what to mark both co-occurrence and sequence

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"when"

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Children begin to express causation within events from around age

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two to two and a half

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for what the agent does in causing a change of state in the patient or theme what is used?

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A causative verb

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Grasping the meaning of the conditional construction has several cognitive prerequisites:

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contingency, hypotheticality, inference and genericity

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Do children show any preferences in the forms they favor in their earliest conditional constructions?

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Yes, the seem to start from the semantic pattern used for future predictives, where the first of two events is possible, but uncertain and the second is contingent on the first