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Investigating the abstractness of children's early
knowledge of argument structure
KATHLEEN MCCLURE, JULIAN M. PINE and ELENA V. M. LIEVEN
Journal of Child Language / Volume 33 / Issue 04 / November 2006, pp 693 - 720
DOI: 10.1017/S0305000906007525, Published online: 08 November 2006
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305000906007525
How to cite this article:
KATHLEEN MCCLURE, JULIAN M. PINE and ELENA V. M. LIEVEN (2006).
Investigating the abstractness of children's early knowledge of argument structure.
Journal of Child Language, 33, pp 693-720 doi:10.1017/S0305000906007525
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J. Child Lang. 33 (2006), 693–720. f 2006 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0305000906007525 Printed in the United Kingdom
Investigating the abstractness of children’s early
knowledge of argument structure*
KATHLEEN MCCLURE
Lehman College, City University of New York
J U L I A N M. P I N E
University of Liverpool
AND
E L E N A V. M. L I E V E N
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
(Received 15 March 2004. Revised 23 August 2005)
ABSTRACT
In the current debate about the abstractness of children’s early
grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have
suggested that children might first develop ‘weak ’ or ‘partial’
representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts
to characterize these structures by comparing the development of
constructions around verbs in Tomasello’s (1992) case study of Travis,
with those of 10 children (Stage I–II) in a year-length, longitudinal
study. The results show some evidence that children’s early knowledge
of argument structure is verb-specific, but also some evidence that
children can generalize knowledge about argument structure across
verbs. One way to explain these findings is to argue that children are
learning limited scope formulae around high frequency subjects and
objects, which serve as building blocks for more abstract structures
such as S+V and V+O. The implication is that children may have
some verb-general knowledge of the transitive construction as early as
Stage I, but that this knowledge is still far from being fully abstract
knowledge.
[*] Address for correspondence : Kathleen McClure, Lehman College, CUNY, Department
of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, Bronx, NY
10468, USA. tel : 1-718-960-8460; e-mail : [email protected]
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M C C L U R E E T A L.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years there has been a debate about how abstract children’s
knowledge is at the beginning of multi-word speech. On one side is
Tomasello (2000) and his constructivist account of early grammatical
development ; on the other side, is Fisher (2002 a, b) and a syntactic bootstrapping proposal. For Tomasello, children do not start out with abstract
syntactic categories ; rather, grammatical structure builds around individual
lexical items and these item-specific constructions only gradually become
more general. Tomasello outlines a position in stark contrast to that
proposed in generative accounts of grammatical development, which
ascribe adultlike syntactic categories to the child at the beginning of word
combination. Although Fisher does not specify just how much syntactic
competence children start out with, she cites results from comprehension
studies that point to children having more abstract knowledge and earlier
than Tomasello proposes. In response, Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002)
have suggested that in the process of moving towards the adult system
from low-scope representations, children might develop ‘weak ’ or ‘ partial’
representations of more abstract linguistic structures. However, they do
not specify in detail what these representations might consist of. This
paper attempts to give them a preliminary characterization by looking at the
development of constructions around verbs at the earliest stages of syntactic
development.
The recent Tomasello–Fisher debate concerns two main questions : (1)
how lexically specific is children’s early grammatical knowledge and (2)
at what point do children possess abstract syntactic categories. According
to Tomasello (2000) young children do not come to the task of combining
words with ‘ abstract categories and schemas ’. Instead their earliest
combinations ‘ revolve around concrete items and structures ’ (Tomasello,
2000 : 215). These specific words and phrases develop in their own way
depending upon the individual child’s experience. For example, children do
not start out with an abstract ‘ verb’ category or an abstract ‘transitive ’ or
‘ intransitive ’ construction with which to assimilate new verbs. Rather they
learn the argument structure of individual verbs on a case-by-case basis.
They learn, for example, that the verb hit can have a hitter, a thing hit, and
a thing hit with argument.
This lexically specific view of early syntactic development derived from
observational as well as experimental data. Tomasello (1992) conducted a
detailed diary study of all the different uses of his daughter Travis’s
early verbs and word combinations from age 1;0 to 2;0. He found that
Travis was conservative in how she used her verbs. Almost half of the
162 verbs and relational words she produced were used in only one verb–
argument construction type (e.g. ‘ Mommy break ’ is one type, ‘break cup ’
is another). Furthermore, he found that the verbs developed grammatical
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
structure in quite individual ways. For semantically similar verbs like cut
and draw, where one would expect to find the child using them in the same
construction type (cut with, draw with), he found that cut was used in only
one, whereas draw was used in many. He also found unevenness in how
certain arguments were used across verbs. For example, at the same stage
of development one verb might be marked with an instrument whereas
another would not. These findings led Tomasello to conclude that, with
the exception of some kind of ‘ noun’ category, early language learners
did not possess syntactic categories. Instead their earliest categories were
‘ lexically specific categories such as ‘ kisser’, ‘ kissee’, ‘seer ’, ‘thing seen ’, ’
etc. (Tomasello, 2000 : 215). This lexically specific view has been supported
by other observational studies (Pizzuto & Caselli, 1992 ; Pine & Lieven,
1993 ; Pine & Martindale, 1996 ; Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997; Pine,
Lieven & Rowland, 1998 ; Rubino & Pine, 1998).
Although Tomasello’s case study was highly informative about what
one particular child did and did not produce, it could not control for what
the child heard and thus address the issue of how productive her language
was. To do this, experimental studies were needed. Tomasello and his
colleagues conducted a series of experiments (see Tomasello, 2000, for a
review) in which they taught children new verbs in one construction frame
and investigated whether they could use them productively in another.
If they could, then this would imply the presence of syntactic categories.
If, on the other hand, the children used the new verbs conservatively,
that is, only in the ways they had heard them, then this would imply the
lack of an abstract syntactic system, and that children were learning the
verbs individually. The experiments involved presenting children with
new verbs in different constructions (e.g. intransitive, passive, and nonSVO word order) and then seeing whether they could produce them in
correct transitive constructions. For example, Tomasello & Brooks (1998)
presented 16 children at 2 ; 0 and 16 children at 2;6 with a new verb
modelled as an intransitive (e.g. The ball is dacking) and another as a
transitive ( Jim is tamming the car). The experimenter then tried to elicit
transitive uses by asking, ‘ What’s X doing? ’ with X being the agent. If
the child was able to say, ‘ He’s dacking the ball ’, this would mean he was
using the verb productively because he had switched from intransitive to
transitive, and if he said, ‘ He’s tamming the car ’, this would mean he
was using the verb in the way it had been modelled. Results showed that
although 11 out of 16 of the two-year-olds and all of the older children
could produce a new transitive sentence, only one two-year-old and three of
the older children could switch from the intransitive model to the transitive.
This developmental pattern was found in numerous experiments using
different constructions, though most involved the transitive (see Tomasello,
2000, Figure 1). The youngest children (under age 3;0) were found least
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M C C L U R E E T A L.
able to produce a transitive utterance when they had heard a new verb
modelled in another construction, but older children (above 3; 0) were
able to do so. Tomasello (2000) interpreted this reluctance of children to
innovate early on as an indication that they lacked verb-general knowledge
and an abstract transitive construction.
Fisher (2002a), however, challenges this interpretation. She argues that
Tomasello’s experiments rest on faulty assumptions. First, she claims that
Tomasello’s experiments rest on the assumption that children will infer
‘ that any new verb could be used transitively ’, which is why when children
fail to produce transitives in elicitation tasks, this is taken as evidence
that they do not have an abstract transitive construction. However, she
argues, children’s failure may reflect the fact that they have not yet learned
that a verb used in one particular context could be used in another. This
takes time and experience and ‘ only after learning a great deal about how a
particular language organizes its verbs could a child guess that a new verb
can be extended into a new syntactic structure ’ (Fisher, 2002 a : 264). This
is what one would expect, she says, and is a better explanation of the
gradual trajectory found in Tomasello’s (2000) Figure 1 summary of his
results. Here Fisher seems to agree with Tomasello’s characterization of
children’s early verb knowledge as lexically specific, but disagree with
him that the interpretation of his results show that children lack abstract
syntactic knowledge at the very beginning of word combination. Tomasello
& Abbot-Smith (2002) reply that the verbs used in the relevant experiments
(except for those in the earliest studies) were all carefully chosen so that
they would ‘ fall into the appropriate semantic classes, as outlined, for
example in Levin (1993), thus ensuring that they were of a type that
adults use both as transitives and in other constructions depending upon the
study (e.g. active–passive or transitive–intransitive alternation) ’ (Tomasello
& Abbot-Smith, 2002 : 208).
Second, Fisher claims that Tomasello does not consider any other reasons
besides the lack of syntactic categories to explain children’s reluctance to
innovate with new verbs. Performance factors such as syntactic priming
may explain the conservative findings. Again Tomasello & Abbot-Smith
(2002) respond that Fisher has not accurately represented Tomasello (2000)
and that three alternative explanations and possible controls that seemed to
rule them out were discussed.
Third, Fisher claims that children may not interpret new verbs in the
ways the experimenters expect. For example, if children do not interpret
the new verbs as causative, they would not then switch to the transitive.
Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002) acknowledge that some children in
the intransitive–transitive studies might have done this. However, they
argue that this criticism does not apply to all the studies (e.g. studies of
the active–passive constructions), because it focuses on differences in the
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
number of arguments around verbs in the transitive and intransitive studies,
which is not the case in the active–passive studies.
Tomasello is quite clear in his claim that children’s early grammatical
knowledge is lexically specific ; whereas Fisher’s (2002 a) position seems to
be that children’s early grammatical knowledge is a mixture of abstract
and item-based knowledge. Thus, she argues that children must have
some kind of relatively abstract ‘ noun’ category, but also ‘abstract
representations of sentence structure ’ (Fisher, 2002 b : 56) that allow them
to interpret sentences and ‘ structure-matching biases’ (Fisher, 2002 a : 274)
that allow them to map structures found in the sentence to referents in the
scene being observed. For example, children use the number of nouns in
an utterance in order to interpret the meanings of sentences ‘by mapping an
utterance containing two known nouns onto a salient conceptual relation
between their referents, and an utterance containing one noun phrase onto
the most salient conceptual predicate involving the referent of that noun ’.
The number of nouns gives a ‘ probabilistic estimate of the number of
syntactic arguments of the sentence’s verb’ (Fisher, 2002 a : 273). Thus, the
structure of a sentence helps the child interpret it. If there are two nouns,
the child matches this structure to a conceptual representation of a
particular event with two participants. If there is only one, it is matched to
an event with only one participant (Fisher, 1996).
The second major issue concerns when children begin to have abstract
grammatical knowledge. Tomasello’s (2000) position is that children do
not have innate abstract grammatical categories. Instead these grammatical
categories grow gradually as the child has more and more experience with
individual lexical items. For example, an abstract ‘verb ’ category develops
as children become more familiar with different verbs and their argument
structure. Although Fisher (2002 a) agrees with Tomasello that children do
not start out with ‘ adult syntactic competence ’ (Fisher, 2002 a : 272), she
argues that children have abstract knowledge earlier than Tomasello claims
(i.e. earlier than 3 ; 0). As evidence she cites Brooks & Tomasello’s (1999),
study 2, in which children aged 2 ; 10 were presented with new verbs in
both an active and a passive sentence and then encouraged to produce
a sentence in a new frame. Brooks & Tomasello found that 40% of the
children who were presented with the active sentence were able to switch
to the passive and 35% of those presented with the passive could produce
the active. These were higher rates than those found in study 1, and Brooks
& Tomasello attribute the difference to priming effects. The children in
study 2 were trained on a nonce verb in both active and passive utterances.
Fisher notes the high percentages and concludes that these children (who
were younger than 3; 0) also had some ‘ notion of both active transitive
and passive sentence constructions that was already abstract enough to be
primed across different newly-learned verbs ’ (Fisher, 2002 a : 270).
697
M C C L U R E E T A L.
Furthermore, Fisher (2002 a) cites a study by Akhtar (1999) in which
children at 2 ; 8, 3 ; 6, and 4; 4 were trained with new verbs in three different
word orders : SVO, SOV and VSO. Akhtar found that the younger children
(2 ; 8, 3; 6) used the non-SVO word orders as often as they corrected them
to SVO word orders ; whereas the older children (4;4) corrected their
utterances to SVO almost all of the time. These findings support
Tomasello’s claim that the process of acquiring an abstract grammatical
structure is a gradual one. However, they also show more verb-general
knowledge in younger children than had previously been thought.
When presented with a new verb in an odd word order and encouraged
to respond, about half of the two-year-olds switched to the SVO word
order, and when presented with a new verb in the SVO order, all of them
responded with an SVO order. This demonstrates some knowledge of
the transitive construction. Akhtar concludes that between the ages of 2 ;0
and 4; 0 children are developing an understanding of what word order is
in English : ‘ Whereas the younger children seem to be in the process of
constructing a truly general understanding of the syntactic significance
of word order (that all English sentences must employ SVO order), the
four-year-olds were simply not willing to use the non-SVO structures ’
(Akhtar, 1999 : 354).
Finally, Fisher (2002 a) presents evidence from comprehension studies
(Naigles, 1990 ; Naigles & Kako, 1993) that children have more abstract
knowledge of the transitive construction than Tomasello’s (2000) production data demonstrate. She cites a preferential looking study by Naigles
(1990) in which children with a mean age of 2;1 looked longer at a videorecorded scene showing a transitive action (a duck bending a rabbit over)
when they heard a novel verb used in a transitive frame and longer at a
scene showing an intransitive action (a duck and a rabbit making circles
with one of their arms) when they heard a novel verb used in an intransitive
frame. This is taken to mean that the children used sentence structure
(either transitive or intransitive) to help them learn the meanings of new
verbs, and hence that they did have some abstract knowledge of these
structures.
In response to Fisher, Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002) concede that
children under 3 ; 0 may have more abstract syntactic knowledge than had
previously been demonstrated, acknowledging Akhtar’s (1999) results and
citing similar results in Abbot-Smith, Lieven & Tomasello (2001). The
new finding in Abbot-Smith et al.’s study is that the youngest children
(2 ; 4) corrected the non-canonical word orders 21 % of the time, which is
less than half that of the children aged 2; 8 in Akhtar’s study. However, this
is what one would expect if the children were acquiring a transitive
schema gradually. The children also demonstrated some familiarity with
the transitive construction – they used the new verb they heard in the
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
SV order more often than the new verb in the VS order. To explain these
findings Tomasello & Abbot-Smith suggest that perhaps these very young
children have a ‘ weak transitive schema – one that enables certain kinds
of linguistic operations but not others – whereas older children have a
stronger and more robust schema based on a wider range of stored linguistic
experience’ (Tomasello & Abbot-Smith, 2002 : 210).
Tomasello & Abbot-Smith (2002) also use this notion of a ‘weak
verb-general representation of the transitive construction ’ (Tomasello
& Abbot-Smith, 2002 : 212) to explain the results from the preferential
looking studies that Fisher (2002a) cites. A weak verb-general representation would mean that the children have partial knowledge of what
is involved in the transitive construction. It might explain why
two-year-olds in comprehension tasks were found to be sensitive to a
difference between transitive and intransitive but similar aged children in
production tasks (Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997) did not do well in acting out
transitive sentences with novel words. The performance tasks of the
older children may have required a stronger cognitive representation of
the category.
In summary, there is evidence from numerous observational (Tomasello,
1992 ; Pine & Lieven, 1993; Pine & Martindale, 1996 ; Lieven, Pine &
Baldwin, 1997 ; Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998) as well as experimental
studies (cited above) that children’s early grammatical knowledge is
lexically specific or limited in scope. For example, Tomasello’s (1992)
findings from the case study of his daughter indicated that syntactic
structure developed around individual verbs in a lexically specific way. In
what became known as the VERB ISLAND HYPOTHESIS, verbs had a special role
to play. They acted like ‘ islands’ around which children attached arguments
and syntactic markings ‘ in an otherwise unorganized grammatical system ’
(Tomasello, 1992 : 23). However, despite this evidence of verb-specific
knowledge, there is also evidence of some more verb-general knowledge
building up in children between 2 ; 0 and 3; 0 (Akhtar, 1999; Brooks &
Tomasello, 1999 ; Abbot-Smith et al., 2001; Tomasello & Abbot-Smith,
2002). To investigate just how verb-specific early grammatical knowledge
is, this study seeks to compare Tomasello’s (1992) findings of one child’s
development with those of a larger group of children. The aim was to
investigate :
’
’
’
To what extent Tomasello’s description of Travis generalizes to a
larger group of children
To what extent children’s knowledge seems to be growing gradually
around specific lexical items
To what extent children show evidence of verb-general knowledge in
the early stages.
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M C C L U R E E T A L.
It was also hoped that, by identifying instances of verb-general knowledge
at the early stages, it would be possible to develop a more precise description
of what ‘ partial’ knowledge of syntactic constructions might actually
consist of.
METHOD
Participants
Ten children participated in the study (6 girls, 4 boys). They were part
of a year-length longitudinal study of early language development of 12
first-born children. Two children were excluded from the present study
because they did not have Stage I data. The children were recruited from
newspaper advertisements, local nurseries, and doctors ’ surgeries. They
were all from monolingual English-speaking families and were, for the most
part, from middle-class homes. Their ages ranged between 1;10.7 and 2 ;0.7
at the beginning of the study (M=23.12 months) and 2;03 and 3 ;0.10 at
the end (M=27.2 months). The children’s MLUs were between 1.06
and 2.01 at the beginning (M=1.46) and between 2.03 and 3.261 at
the end (M=2.43). Table 1 presents the age, MLU, and number of
audio-recorded sessions at Stage I and Stage II for all the children in
the study. Note that the MLU and age ranges refer to the first and last
recording for each stage.
Design of study
In his case study, Tomasello (1992) observed his daughter Travis from
age 1 ; 0 to 2 ; 0 and kept a detailed diary record of all the verbs and verb
combinations she produced by age of acquisition. Beginning when she
was 1; 5, Travis was video-recorded at the start of each month for an hour
until the end of the study. Her MLU at the first recording was 1.56 and her
MLU at the final recording was 2.58. MLUs for the recordings in between
are not provided. However, since it is clear that Tomasello’s study focuses
primarily on data from Stage I and Stage II, only data from Stage I (MLU,
1.0–1.99 [Brown, 1973]) and Stage II (MLU, 2.0–2.49) were used in the
present study, and all of the developmental analyses involved comparisons
between Stage I and Stage II data. This design obviously prevents us
from looking for developmental changes in children’s language within
[1] To make a transition from one stage to another, a child had to have three consecutive
sessions (hours of data) in which the MLUs were above the relevant borderline. The
MLU of 3.26 reflects a particularly high MLU in one session for a child who failed to
meet the criterion for transition to Stage III (because her MLU subsequently dropped
below 2.5).
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
TABLE
1. Age, MLU, and number of audio-recorded sessions for the
Manchester children at Stage I and Stage II
Children
Aran
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Becky
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Dominic
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Anne
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Ruth
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Gail
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Joel
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Liz
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Nicole
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Warren
Age
MLU
Tape Session
Stage I
(No.)
1; 11.12–2; 0.2
1.41–1.83
1–3
Stage II
2; 0.9–2; 1.28
2.22–2.27
4–8
(No.)
2; 0.7–2; 2.22
1.46–1.97
1–8
2; 2.30–2; 3.20
2.06–2.41
9–11
(No.)
1; 10.24–2; 1.26
1.20–1.78
1–10
2; 2.9–2; 5.22
2.12–2.48
11–21
(No.)
1; 10.7–1; 11.20
1.61–1.92
1–6
2; 0.15–2; 1.18
2.27–2.21
7–10
(No.)
1; 11.15–2; 3.6
1.41–1.97
1–12
2; 3.25–2; 7.24
2.04–2.03
13–25
(No.)
1; 11.27–2; 0.19
1.76–1.88
1–3
2; 0.25–2; 2.12
2.04–2.42
4–8
(No.)
1; 11.1–2; 1.10
1.33–1.87
1–8
2; 1.23–2; 4.2
2.00–2.48
9–16
(No.)
1 ;11.9–2; 1.21
1.35–1.88
1–5
2; 0.28–2; 2.30
2.02–2.42
6–12
(No.)
2; 0.25–2; 6.16
1.06–1.71
1–17
2; 6.23–3; 0.10
2.04–3.26
18–34
(No.)
1 ;10.6–1; 10.15
2.01–1.95
1–2
1; 10.29–2; 0.3
2.36–2.33
3–6
stages (Ingram, 1989). However, it does increase the reliability of those
comparisons that are made by ensuring that they are based on relatively
large amounts of data for each child for each developmental stage.
Three predictions that derive from the Verb Island hypothesis were
tested. The first concerns argument structure and the way that it builds
around individual verbs. Tomasello (1992) hypothesized that syntactic
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M C C L U R E E T A L.
structure builds gradually from simple to complex; therefore, one can
predict that :
1. Few verbs will first appear in multi-argument structures.
This was true for Travis, but would it generalize to other children as well?
The second prediction concerns how lexically specific children’s early
multi-word speech is. If verbs show individual developmental trajectories,
as Tomasello proposes, then structure should be more complex around
verbs that the child has known for a longer period of time. Using Stage II
data one can test this by comparing verbs that had been acquired at Stage I
and then reappeared at Stage II (called Old Verbs), with verbs that had just
been acquired at Stage II (called New Verbs). One can therefore predict
that :
2. Utterances with Old Verbs at Stage II will have more complex
structures than utterances with New Verbs at Stage II.
Complexity was measured by calculating the MLUs and the number of
arguments per utterance. MLUs for both tokens and first uses of verb types
were calculated. One would expect that the MLUs for utterances with
Old Verbs would be greater than the MLUs of utterances with New Verbs.
However, as MLU measures more than just argument structure, a more
precise test of the hypothesis is to measure the number of arguments per
utterance for Old and New Verbs. One would predict that utterances with
Old Verbs would have more arguments than utterances with New Verbs.
A third prediction concerns whether children are acquiring any verbgeneral knowledge. According to Tomasello, knowledge about structure
from verbs already learned should not generalize to new verbs. To test this
prediction New Verbs at Stage I were compared to New Verbs at Stage II.
The specific prediction was that :
3. Utterances with New Verbs at Stage II should be no more complex
than utterances with New Verbs at Stage I.
If children were generalizing some of their knowledge about the verbs
they learned at Stage I to the verbs they were learning at Stage II, then
utterances with New Verbs at Stage II would have more complex structures
than utterances with New Verbs at Stage I.
Procedure
The children were audio-recorded in their homes for one hour twice every
three weeks for a year. They were recorded interacting with their mothers,
half the time playing with their own toys in a free play session, and half
the time with toys brought by the investigator in a structured play session.
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
In the structured session the investigator introduced a number of additional
toys to stimulate the child’s interest in play ; however, the child was not
restricted to playing with these toys in any way. The investigator did not
play with the child, but did respond to talk. The recordings were
transcribed orthographically using the CHAT system from the CHILDES
project (MacWhinney, 2000) and can be accessed from the CHILDES
archive as the Manchester Corpus (Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland,
2001).
Children’s speech corpora. The corpus for each child was searched for
utterances that included verbs at Stage I and II, and these were extracted
from the transcripts and collected into separate files. Excluded were
incomplete or unclear utterances, imitations, self-repetitions, and routines
(songs, counting sequences). A verb was defined in the adult sense of the
word. This definition departs slightly from Tomasello’s (1992) definition,
which also included predicates such as off, on, over, up, and down.
Once these files had been organized, they were further divided into three
categories of verbs per child :
(1) Stage I New Verbs : all verbs acquired at Stage I;
(2) Stage II Old Verbs : verbs that had first appeared at Stage I and then
reappeared at Stage II; and
(3) Stage II New Verbs: verbs that had only first appeared at Stage II.
Excluded from these categories were copula constructions, double-verb
constructions (e.g. want to go) and formulaic expressions (e.g. thanks, thank
you, excuse me, bless you, pardon me).
Three additional categories were then organized per child, but this time
they only included first uses of Old and New Verbs at Stage I and II. Note
that since the Manchester corpus does not include any maternal diary data,
first use simply refers to the first utterance including a given verb in the
child’s spontaneous speech data from a particular MLU stage.
Coding. In order to evaluate the predictions concerning the number of
arguments per verb, all first uses of Old and New Verb types were coded for
the number of arguments they appeared with. Argument was defined, as per
Tomasello (1992) to mean constructions developing around the verb.
Because the Verb Island hypothesis proposes that the child does not
start out with abstract argument structure but has to construct it, each
verb has its own argument types and by rights should have its own
terminology. However, developing verb-specific terminology that is not
overly cumbersome (e.g. ‘ the one who hits’ and ‘thing hit ’) is not easy, and
Tomasello compromises and uses terms such as Actor (to include agent
and experiencer), Object (to include patient and theme), Instrumental,
Locative, and Recipient. As the purpose of this study was to compare Travis
to a larger group of children, these categories were also used and refer to
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M C C L U R E E T A L.
TABLE
2. Argument frames
1-Argument frames
___OBJ
___LOC
___REC
__ACT
ACT___
INST___
OBJ___
2-Argument frames
‘ Climb it’. (Aran)
‘ Crawl in dark ditch’. (Aran)
‘ Give Caroline’. (Gail)
‘ Read rabbit’. (Warren)
‘ Lady repair’. (Aran)
‘ The key start’. (Aran)
‘ Cake drop’. (Aran)
ACT___OBJ
ACT___REC
ACT___LOC
OBJ___LOC
REC___OBJ
OBJ__REC
___OBJ LOC
___OBJ ACT
___REC OBJ
___OBJ REC
‘ I shot a dog ’. (Aran)
‘ I show lady’. (Aran)
‘ I sit there’. (Warren)
‘ Tractor lives here’. (Aran)
‘ That called Diesel’. (Dominic)
‘ They fit me, no ’. (Ruth)
‘ Put him in train’. (Gail)
‘ See it Anne’. (Anne)
‘ Feed duck bread’. (Dominic)
‘ Make tea a baby please’. (Ruth)
ACT OBJ___
ACT LOC___
OBJ LOC___
OBJ ACT__
LOC OBJ___
‘ Mama me stop’. (Ruth)
‘ Me on there knock’. (Ruth)
‘ Me there roll too’. (Ruth)
‘ What do you think?’ (Gail)
‘ There it goes ’. (Anne)
3-Argument frames
ACT___OBJ LOC
ACT___OBJ REC
ACT___REC OBJ
‘ I load one there’. (Aran)
‘ Nicola give that me’. (Aran)
‘ I’ll tell you what’. (Anne)
NPs required by the verb, NPs in prepositional phrases not necessarily
required by the verb, and the locative adjuncts there and here. Each
argument was also categorized as to whether it contained one or more
words.
The verbs were then organized into three tables for each child
(New Verbs at Stage I, New Verbs at Stage II, and Old Verbs at Stage II)
according to the number of arguments they first appeared with : zero, one,
two, or three and their argument frames. Table 2 shows all the argument
frames that were found along with an example utterance from the data. The
reliability of the argument frame coding was assessed by having a second
independent coder re-code 400 of the 725 utterances to which argument
frames were assigned. Agreement was a satisfactory 94.8% (Kappa=0.93).
Analyses. Once files for Old and New Verbs for each child were set up,
the MLUs for tokens and the MLUs for first uses of Old and New Verb
types were calculated. The average number of arguments per utterance
was then calculated for each child. A larger figure for Old Verbs meant
704
INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
that these verbs had more surrounding argument structure. Because an
argument can be more than one word long, the differences in MLU
and in the number of arguments were examined to see to what extent
any differences were due to differences in the number of arguments and
differences in the complexity of the arguments. Finally, the percentage of
multi-argument utterances was calculated. According to the hypothesis, few
verbs should first appear with two or more arguments.
Two additional types of analysis were conducted to investigate the extent
to which the results generalized across different types of verbs. The first of
these involved calculating the number of transitive, mixed and intransitive
verb types that first appeared with more than one argument in order to see
whether transitive verbs were more likely to appear in multi-argument
structures than mixed and intransitive verbs. All verbs both for Travis and
for the children in the present study were divided into fixed transitive,
mixed, or fixed intransitive verbs. ‘ Fixed transitive ’ or ‘fixed intransitive ’
verbs were verbs that were categorized as only transitive or only intransitive
in Levin (1993). ‘ Mixed’ verbs were those listed as both transitive and
intransitive in Levin. If the verbs were not included in Levin, then the
same procedure was followed using the Oxford English Dictionary, but
ignoring rare, idiomatic and literary uses. The reliability of this procedure
was assessed by recoding the verbs found in Levin (1993) using the Oxford
English Dictionary. Agreement was a satisfactory 93.9 % (Kappa=0.85).
The second type of analysis involved repeating the Old versus New Verbs
at Stage II and New Verbs at Stage I and Stage II analyses on transitive
verbs only. Since, in practice, the category of mixed verbs includes many
verbs that are unlikely to be mixed from the child’s point of view, for the
purposes of this analysis, transitive verbs were defined as verbs for which
the utterance being examined either included a direct object argument or
lacked an obligatory direct object argument. This allowed us to include in
the analysis mixed verbs that were clearly being used transitively by the
child rather than restricting the analysis to an artificially small group of
transitive verbs that could never be used intransitively even in the adult
language. Note that if we had not used this more realistic child-centred
definition of transitivity, there would have been so few fixed transitive verbs
in the relevant subsections of some of the children’s data that meaningful
comparison of the number of arguments with which children used Old
and New transitive verbs during Stage II and transitive verbs at Stage I and
Stage II would not have been possible.
RESULTS
Table 3 presents the number of New Verbs (types) at Stage I and New and
Old Verbs (types) at Stage II for the children in this study. If one adds
705
M C C L U R E E T A L.
TABLE
3. Number of verb types for Stage I New Verbs and Stage II
New and Old Verbs for each child
Children
Stage I
New Verbs
Stage II
New Verbs
Stage II
Old Verbs
Aran
Becky
Dominic
Anne
Ruth
Gail
Joel
Liz
Nicole
Warren
56
89
49
87
15
65
65
48
99
35
52
24
50
26
61
60
65
63
70
35
40
48
41
58
12
43
46
38
83
28
the number of Stage I New Verbs and Stage II New Verbs, one gets the
total number of verb types per child. The table shows that, contrary to what
one might expect, the number of Old Verbs in Stage II is always lower
than New Verbs in Stage I. This is because not all the verbs that first
appeared in Stage I reappear in the Stage II data.
Multi-argument analysis
The central claim of the Verb Island hypothesis is that verbs first appear
in simple structures and show individual developmental trajectories. The
Verb Island hypothesis therefore predicts that few verbs should first
appear with two or more arguments. The results for the multi-argument
analysis are presented in Table 4. The children in this study are compared
with Travis in terms of how many verbs first appear in the data with
two or more arguments and the results show that the first prediction was
confirmed. The table shows that in Tomasello’s (1992) study, only 16 of
Travis’s 115 verbs, or 13.9 %, first appeared with two or more arguments.
The total number of Travis’s verb types was 162. This number, however,
included 22 relational words, 12 holophrases, and several instances of
different forms of the same verb. Since the present study did not include
relational words, holophrases, or duplicate forms and the purpose was to
compare the children in this study as closely as possible with Travis, these
words were excluded from Tomasello’s total. The table also shows that the
children have a mean of 19.8% (range, 8.8 %–37.3%) of their verbs first
appearing with more than one argument. From the table, which combines
Stage I New Verbs and Stage II New Verbs to make it easier to compare
with Travis, it is clear that most of the children do in fact look like Travis.
For example, Becky has 9% of her verbs first appearing with two or more
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
T A B L E 4. Comparison of Travis with Manchester children for number and
percentage of first uses of verb types with more than one argument in Stage I
& II combined
Children
No. ( %)
16/115 (13.9)
18/108 (16.7)
10/113 (8.8)
27/99 (27.3)
21/112 (18.8)
28/75 (37.3)
17/125 (13.6)
25/130 (19.2)
16/108 (14.8)
38/169 (22.5)
13/69 (18.8)
(19.8)
Travis
Aran
Becky
Dominic
Anne
Ruth
Gail
Joel
Liz
Nicole
Warren
Mean
arguments; Gail, 14% ; Liz, 15% ; Aran 17% ; and Anne, Joel, and Warren
all have 19%. There are only two exceptions : Dominic and Ruth, and only
Ruth, with 37% of her verbs first appearing with more than one argument,
looks radically different from Travis.
These results suggest that, like Travis, the children in this study do
initially tend to use their verbs in single argument structures. This finding
is consistent with the Verb Island hypothesis and a lexically specific view
of early grammatical development, and suggests that Travis is not an
isolated case. However, the results presented in Table 4 do not address
the issue of whether certain verb types (e.g. transitive verbs) may be
more likely to first appear in multi-argument structures than others. To
investigate this possibility, all verb types for Travis and the Manchester
children were categorized as either fixed transitive, mixed, or fixed intransitive verbs (following Levin’s, 1993, categorization scheme or the OED).
The results are presented in Table 5.
It is clear from Table 5 that the data for Travis and the Manchester
children are still broadly comparable (33.3% versus a mean of 37.1% for
fixed transitive verbs ; 10.5% versus a mean of 17.0% for mixed verbs and
0% versus a mean of 8.4% for fixed intransitive verbs). However, it is
also clear that a higher percentage of fixed transitive verbs first occurred in
multi-argument structures than mixed verbs or fixed intransitive verbs.
These differences were analysed by conducting a one way repeated
measures analysis of variance on the data from the Manchester children.
This analysis revealed a significant effect of verb-type (F(2, 9)=14.87,
p<0.001). Additional post hoc analyses using Scheffe tests revealed a
significant difference between fixed transitive verbs and mixed verbs
707
M C C L U R E E T A L.
5. Comparison of Travis with Manchester children for percentage of
fixed transitive, mixed and fixed intransitive verb types with more than one
argument
TABLE
Children
Travis
Aran
Becky
Dominic
Anne
Ruth
Gail
Joel
Liz
Nicole
Warren
Mean
Fixed
transitive
7/21
9/22
3/20
9/20
4/21
8/16
6/19
4/16
7/17
10/30
7/10
33.3%
40.9%
15.0%
45.0%
19.0%
50.0%
31.6%
25.0%
41.2%
33.3%
70.0%
37.1%
Fixed
intransitive
Mixed
9/86
9/81
7/87
18/73
15/84
19/51
10/97
20/104
8/82
27/128
6/55
10.5 %
11.1 %
8.0 %
24.7 %
17.9 %
37.3 %
10.3 %
19.2 %
9.8 %
21.1 %
10.9 %
17.0 %
0/8
0%
0/5
0/6
0/6
2/7
1/8
1/8
1/10
1/9
1/11
0/4
0%
0%
0%
28.6%
12.5%
12.5%
10.0%
11.1%
9.1%
0%
8.4%
(F=13.79, p<0.01), a significant difference between fixed transitive
verbs and fixed intransitive verbs (F=28.24, p<0.001, but no significant
difference between mixed verbs and fixed intransitive verbs (F=2.56, NS).
When taken as a whole, these results suggest that Travis’s data are fairly
typical of children learning English. However, they also suggest that the low
percentage of children’s early verbs that first occur in complex structures
is at least partly a reflection of the kind of verbs that children are learning
during the early stages. The implication is that the percentage of verbs
that first occur in multi-argument frames may not be a particularly
informative measure, and hence that a better way to evaluate the Verb
Island hypothesis may be to focus on differences in the complexity of the
structures in which children use new and old verbs at the same stage of
development.
Stage II Old Verb vs. Stage II New Verb analysis
Results for Old versus New Verbs at Stage II are presented in Table 6.
They show that the second prediction was confirmed : Old Verbs at Stage II
do tend to occur in more complex structures than New Verbs at Stage II.
MLU analyses. The table indicates that the MLUs for tokens of Old
Verbs are greater than the MLUs for tokens of New Verbs at Stage II.
The mean MLU for Old Verbs is 3.26, whereas that for New Verbs is 3.02.
A t-test indicated a significant difference between Old and New Verbs for
tokens : t (9)=4.88, p<0.001, one-tailed. A similar result was found
for first uses of verb types. The mean MLU for Old Verbs is 3.10 and for
708
INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
TABLE
6. Means (and S.D.s) for MLU and number of arguments/utterance
for Old vs. New Verbs at Stage II
Analyses
MLU tokens
MLU types
(first uses at St. II)
Arguments/Utterance
(first uses at St. II)
Arguments/Transitive
utterance (first uses at St. II)
Stage II
New Verbs
Stage II
Old Verbs
t-test
3.02 (0.31)
2.81 (0.41)
3.26 (0.22)
3.10 (0.32)
***
**
1.0 (0.21)
1.14 (0.21)
*
1.25 (0.15)
1.41 (0.17)
*
* p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001.
New Verbs, 2.81. A t-test indicated a significant difference between the
two : t (9)=3.47, p<0.01, one-tailed. This result indicates that there is
more complexity surrounding Old Verbs than New Verbs at Stage II.
However, as it is unclear whether this difference in complexity reflects
differences in the average number of arguments per utterance, a separate
analysis was performed.
Argument analyses. When one looks at the analysis for the number
of arguments per utterance, Table 6 shows that utterances with Old Verbs
have more arguments than utterances with New Verbs at Stage II, which
is what the Verb Island hypothesis predicts. Old Verbs have a mean of
1.14 arguments per utterance, whereas New Verbs have a mean of 1.0. A
significant difference was found between Old and New Verbs (t (9)=2.26,
p<0.05, one-tailed), thereby giving further support to the Verb Island
hypothesis. When one looks at the difference in the size of the mean
differences in the MLU for types and the number of arguments, it appears
that the children are both using more arguments and extending the length
of their utterances in other ways. The mean difference for MLU types is
0.29 and the mean difference for number of arguments is 0.14, indicating
that half of the effect for MLU is due to the difference in number of
arguments and the rest to other differences in complexity, including
differences in the complexity of the verb forms produced (e.g. the inclusion
of modals or auxiliaries) and differences in the complexity of the arguments
produced (e.g. the inclusion of determiners or adjectives).
Transitive analyses. The difference in the number of arguments for
Old and New Verbs suggests that children’s knowledge about argument
structure is not fully verb-general. However, this result could also reflect
differences in the type of verbs that first appear at Stage I and II. For
example, it could be that a higher proportion of the children’s Old Verbs at
Stage II is transitive, which would explain why Old Verbs at Stage II tend
709
M C C L U R E E T A L.
TABLE
7. Number and percentage of transitive Old vs. New
Verbs at Stage II
Children
Stage II
Old Verbs
no. (%)
Stage II
New Verbs
no. (%)
Aran
Becky
Dominic
Anne
Ruth
Gail
Joel
Liz
Nicole
Warren
17/40
17/48
20/41
35/58
3/12
22/43
28/46
15/38
51/83
16/28
38/52
17/24
36/50
13/26
43/61
36/60
34/65
39/63
47/70
16/35
(43)
(35)
(49)
(60)
(25)
(51)
(61)
(39)
(61)
(57)
(73)
(71)
(72)
(50)
(70)
(60)
(52)
(62)
(67)
(46)
to have more arguments. To evaluate this possibility, an analysis of the
percentages of Old and New Verbs that were transitive was conducted.
Table 7 shows that Old Verbs at Stage II do not have a higher percentage
of transitive verbs than New Verbs at Stage II. For 7 out of 10 children,
New Verbs have a higher percentage of transitive verbs. Furthermore,
when the analysis for arguments was restricted to just transitive verbs
(Table 6), a significant effect for arguments between Old and New
Transitive Verbs at Stage II was still found (t (9)=2.41, p<0.05, onetailed). This result indicates that the difference found between all Old and
New Verbs at Stage II (Table 6) was not simply due to the category of Old
Verbs including more transitive verbs, and suggests that the children’s
ability to use verbs in more complex structures is related to the length of
time that they have known the relevant verb, which is consistent with a
lexically specific view of early grammatical knowledge.
Stage I New Verb vs. Stage II New Verb analysis
The Verb Island hypothesis states that children’s knowledge about verbargument structure is entirely verb-specific. Therefore, it not only predicts
that Old Verbs at Stage II will occur in more complex structures than
New Verbs at Stage II as seen above ; it also predicts that there will be
no difference in children’s ability to manipulate New Verbs at Stage I and
New Verbs at Stage II. The results indicate, however, that this is not the
case. Table 8 shows that MLUs and the number of arguments per utterance
for New Verbs at Stage II are greater than those for New Verbs at Stage I.
This suggests that children’s knowledge about argument structure is not
entirely verb-specific.
710
INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
TABLE
8. Means (and S.D.s) for MLU and number of arguments/utterance
for New Verbs at Stage I and Stage II
Analyses
MLU tokens
MLU types
(first uses)
Arguments/Utterance
(first uses)
Arguments/Transitive
utterance (first uses)
Stage I
New Verbs
Stage II
New Verbs
t -test
2.53 (0.19)
2.27 (0.22)
3.02 (0.31)
2.81 (0.41)
***
**
0.77 (0.15)
1.0 (0.2)
*
1.13 (0.16)
1.25 (0.15)
*
* p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001, one-tailed.
MLU analyses. Table 8 shows the mean MLU for New Verb tokens at
Stage II was 3.02, and that of New Verb tokens at Stage I, 2.53. A significant difference between Stage I and II was found for tokens : t (9)=6.19,
p<0.001, one-tailed. The mean MLU for New Verb first uses of verb
types was 2.81 at Stage II and 2.27 at Stage I. This difference was also
significant : t (9)=4.59, p<0.01, one-tailed.
Argument analyses. The analysis of the number of arguments per
utterance shows that utterances with New Verbs at Stage II have more
arguments than New Verbs at Stage I. New Verbs at Stage II have one
argument per utterance ; those at Stage I have 0.77. Again, the results for
first uses are significant : t (9)=2.72, p<0.05, one-tailed. The difference
in size of the means of the MLU types (0.54) and the number of arguments
(0.23), indicates that there are more, and more complex, arguments around
New Verbs at Stage II.
Transitive analyses. As with the analysis between Old and New Verbs at
Stage II, this effect for arguments could be an artifact of difference in the
type of verbs learned during Stage I and Stage II. For example, if a higher
proportion of the children’s Stage II verbs was transitive than their Stage I
verbs, this might have the effect of increasing the number of arguments
per verb in Stage II. Table 9 shows the proportions of New Verbs at
Stage I and II that were transitive. It can be seen that a greater proportion
of each child’s verbs at Stage II was transitive. However, when the analysis
for arguments was restricted to transitive verbs (Table 8), a significant
difference was still found (t (9)=1.84, p<0.05, one-tailed). This suggests
that the increase in the number of arguments for New Verbs at Stage II was
not just an artifact of changes in the proportion of the children’s verbs
that was transitive.
The implication is that although there is some evidence from the analysis
of Old versus New Verbs at Stage II that the children’s knowledge about
711
M C C L U R E E T A L.
TABLE
9. Number and percentage of transitive New Verbs at Stage I vs.
transitive New Verbs at Stage II
Children
Stage I
New Verbs
no. (%)
Stage II
New Verbs
no. (%)
Aran
Becky
Dominic
Anne
Ruth
Gail
Joel
Liz
Nicole
Warren
17/56
17/89
20/49
35/87
3/15
22/65
28/65
15/48
51/99
16/35
38/52
17/24
36/50
13/26
43/61
36/60
34/65
39/63
47/70
16/35
(30)
(19)
(41)
(40)
(20)
(34)
(43)
(31)
(52)
(46)
(73)
(71)
(72)
(50)
(70)
(60)
(52)
(62)
(67)
(46)
argument structure is not fully verb-general, there is also evidence from
the analysis of New Verbs at Stage I versus Stage II that it is not fully
verb-specific either.
Productive positional patterns
One way of reconciling these findings is to propose that children are not
restricted to learning lexically specific patterns around verbs, as Tomasello
(1992) suggests, but can also learn lexically specific patterns around
other high frequency items (Braine, 1976; Pine et al., 1998). In order to
investigate this issue each of the children’s corpora was searched for
evidence of lexical patterns of the form : ‘ high frequency subject+X’ or
‘ X+high frequency object ’, where X is a verb. The following procedure
was used. First, each child’s corpus was searched for verb types (at Stage I
and Stage II) that occurred with subjects and then these were examined
to see whether any of the subjects occurred with 6 or more different
verb types. Thus, ‘ high frequency subject ’ was defined as any subject
that occurred with 6 or more different verb types. The same procedure
was followed for verb types with objects.
The consistency of the patterns was evaluated using Braine’s (1976)
statistical criterion for the attribution of a productive positional pattern
based on the binomial theorem (i.e. six different instances in the same
order and no instances in a different order, or eight instances in the
same order and one instance in a different order, etc.). For example, ‘X+it ’
was considered a productive pattern if there were 6 correct examples of
it used as an object and no examples of it used as an object in the opposite
pattern, ‘ It+X’.
712
INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
Evidence of 10 productive subject patterns was found: ‘I+X’, ‘me+X ’,
‘ the child’s name+X’, ‘ Mummy/Mama+X ’, ‘you+X’, ‘the cat’s
name+X ’, ‘ the investigator’s name+X’, ‘ Daddy+X’, ‘that+X ’, and
‘ it+X ’ (Table 10). In addition, evidence of seven productive object
patterns was found : ‘ X+it ’, ‘ X+that’, ‘ X+them ’, ‘X+this ’, ‘ X+me ’,
‘ X+baby ’, and ‘ X+fly’ (Table 10). All 10 children had the ‘ I+X ’ and the
‘ X+it ’ patterns. Table 10 presents the patterns that were productive for
each child by the end of each stage. For example, Aran had 12 verb types
that showed the pattern : ‘ I+X’, where X was got, want hat, bite it, kick,
need book, pull, fall, ride, throw, kiss, walk, wipe it by the end of Stage I.
There were no counter-examples. By the end of Stage II he had acquired
19 additional verb types in this pattern for a total of 31 verb types. When
the number of verb types becomes productive for a pattern, it is highlighted
in bold. For example, Aran’s pattern ‘ it+X’ did not become productive
in Stage I because there was one counter-example, but it did become
productive at Stage II with 8 verb types and only one counter-example.
The most important finding was that all of the 10 children had at least
one productive pattern by the end of Stage I and at least 3 by the end
of Stage II. Although lexically specific, such patterns are, by definition,
verb-general. The implication is that although children’s ability to produce
syntactic constructions can be seen as lexically specific (in the sense that it
does not automatically generalize across lexical items), it is not completely
verb-specific (in the sense that children appear to have lexically specific
constructions which accept a range of different verbs as slot-fillers). This
may explain how children who are producing Old Verbs in more complex
structures than New Verbs at Stage II are nevertheless able to generalize
at least some of the knowledge of argument structure that they have built
up during Stage I to New Verbs at Stage II.
Although this evidence of verb-general structure is not consistent with
a strict version of the Verb Island hypothesis, it is consistent with the
kind of limited scope formulae account of early grammatical development
proposed by Braine (1976). According to Braine, children’s early systems
are considerably less abstract than those of adults. For example, young
children do not have an adultlike subject category because their knowledge
of how to order some Subject+VP sequences (e.g. Agent+Action sequences such as ‘ Doggie bark’) does not transfer to other Subject+VP
sequences (e.g. Located+Locative such as ‘ Doggie in basket ’) which
are often initially ordered incorrectly (e.g. ‘ In basket doggie ’). Children’s
systems are therefore best seen not as generative grammars, but as
inventories of limited scope formulae that map the components of semantic
representations into positions in the surface structure.
One advantage of this view over a strict version of the Verb Island
hypothesis is that it allows for the acquisition of lexically specific patterns
713
M C C L U R E E T A L.
TABLE
Children
Aran
Becky
Dominic
Anne
Ruth
Gail
10. All productive S+V and V+O patterns by end of Stage I and II
Patterns
(counter-patterns)
No. verb
types Stage I
(counter-examples)
No. verb types
Stage I & II
(counter-examples
12*
(0)
7
(1)
6
(3)
2
(0)
3
(0)
24
(0)
21
(0)
4
(0)
14
(0)
7
(0)
4
(0)
10
(0)
14
(0)
19
(0)
21
(1)
32
(0)
14
(0)
5
(0)
8
(1)
5
(0)
5
(1)
31
(0)
8
(1)
11
(3)
9
(0)
6
(0)
30
(0)
27
(0)
6
(0)
32
(0)
11
(0)
8
(0)
11
(0)
31
(0)
21
(0)
24
(1)
39
(0)
16
(0)
6
(0)
40
(1)
24
(0)
19
(1)
6
(0)
10
(1)
8
(0)
13
(0)
9
I+X
(X+I)
It+X
(X+it)
X+it
(It+X)
X+that
(That+X)
X+fly
(Fly+X)
I+X
(X+I)
X+it
(It+X)
X+this
(This+X)
I+X
(X+I)
Mummy+X
(X+Mummy)
Daddy+X
(X+Daddy)
That+X
(X+that)
X+it
(It+X)
I+X
(X+I)
Anne+X
(X+Anne)
X+it
(It+X)
X+that
(That+X)
X+baby
(Baby+X)
Me+X
(X+me)
I+X
(X+I)
Mummy+X
(X+Mummy)
X+it
(It+X)
X+that
(That+X)
X+baby
(That+X)
Gail+X
(X+Gail)
I+X
5
(0)
4
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
TABLE
Children
Joel
Liz
Nicole
Warren
10. (Cont.)
Patterns
(counter-patterns)
No. verb
types Stage I
(counter-examples)
No. verb types
Stage I & II
(counter-examples
(X+I)
Caroline+X
(X+Caroline)
You+X
(X+you)
X+it
(It+X)
I+X
(X+I)
Mummy/Mama+X
(X+Mummy/Mama)
You+X
(X+you)
X+it
(It+X)
Liz+X
(X+Liz)
I+X
(X+I)
Mummy+X
(X+Mummy)
X+it
(It+X)
I+X
(X+I)
Nicole+X
(X+Nicole)
Mummy/Mum+X
(X+Mummy)
You+X
(X+you)
Molly+X
(X+Molly)
X+it
(It+X)
X+that
(That+X)
X+them
(Them+X)
I+X
(X+I)
Warren+X
(X+Warren)
Mummy+X
(X+Mummy)
X+It
(It+X)
(0)
3
(1)
6
(0)
21
(0)
25
(0)
7
(0)
1
(0)
15
(0)
13
(0)
1
(0)
4
(0)
8
(0)
35
(0)
31
(2)
12
(0)
6
(0)
3
(0)
22
(0)
11
(0)
6
(0)
12
(0)
7
(0)
6
(0)
9
(1)
(0)
8
(1)
7
(0)
41
(1)
41
(0)
8
(0)
7
(0)
32
(0)
23
(0)
18
(0)
8
(0)
25
(1)
50
(0)
43
(2)
14
(1)
8
(0)
6
(0)
44
(0)
14
(1)
8
(0)
20
(0)
19
(0)
12
(0)
15
(1)
* Numbers in bold indicate when the pattern becomes productive.
715
M C C L U R E E T A L.
based around items other than verbs. Thus, an English child might
have learned a formula that allows him to talk about himself as agent (or
as agent and experiencer) by placing the nominative pronoun ‘I ’ in front
of the word that denotes the action or experience. Such a formula is
inconsistent with a strict version of the Verb Island hypothesis since it is,
by definition, verb-general. However, it is consistent with more recent
lexical constructivist formulations, which accept that grammatical structure
does not revolve exclusively around verbs (Pine et al., 1998 ; Akhtar, 1999 ;
Childers & Tomasello, 2001).
Another advantage of Braine’s limited scope formula account is that it
allows for the possibility that children’s early formulae can be represented
at a number of different levels of abstraction. Thus, although for Braine
some of children’s early rules were clearly lexically specific formulae, Braine
was also prepared to attribute more abstract patterns to children who
used a sufficiently wide range of lexical items to express similar semantic
relations. For example, he credited Bowerman’s (1973) subject Kendall
with an Agent+Action pattern on the grounds that, unlike some of the
other children for whom corpora were available, she produced a relatively
large number of lexically diverse and correctly ordered Agent+Action
sequences. This interpretation of the data is clearly inconsistent with the
claim that children’s early systems consist entirely of inventories of lexically
specific patterns. However, it is consistent with the claim that children
are gradually building adultlike representations by a process of functionallybased distributional analysis of the input (Tomasello, 1992, 2003). It is also
consistent with the idea that, although children do not have adultlike
knowledge of the transitive construction, they may have weak or partial
representations that are sufficiently abstract to support performance in
syntactic bootstrapping experiments (Tomasello & Abbot-Smith, 2002).
DISCUSSION
The main purpose of the present study was to use data from 10 children to
test the claim that children’s early knowledge of argument structure builds
up gradually around particular verbs. The results provide evidence that
children build grammatical structure in a lexically specific way; however,
they also show that this structure is not necessarily verb-specific.
Among the findings consistent with the view that children’s knowledge
builds up gradually around verbs was the fact that most of the children
were like Travis in having few of their verbs first appearing with two or
more arguments. The implication is that, rather than reflecting a somewhat
extreme approach to early word combination, the lexical specificity of
Travis’s early speech is actually quite typical of English-speaking children
during the early stages.
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INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
Also consistent with the view that children’s early knowledge of argument structure is verb-specific was the evidence that children were able
to use some verbs in more complex structures than other verbs with similar
argument structures. Thus, the children in the study appeared to know
significantly more about Old Verbs at Stage II than New Verbs at Stage II,
even when the analysis was restricted to transitive verbs. Old Verbs had
more argument structure and higher MLUs for both tokens and first uses
of verb types. These findings suggest that the children were not able to
automatically generalize what they knew about one verb to another verb
with the same argument structure and hence that their knowledge of
argument structure was not fully verb-general in the sense that it did
not allow them to use all verbs of a particular type (e.g. transitive verbs) in
the same range of sentence types (e.g. (S) V+O and S+V+O).
However, not consistent with the view that children’s early knowledge
of argument structure is verb-specific was the evidence that the children
were able to generalize some of their knowledge about Verbs at Stage I to
New Verbs at Stage II. Thus, there was a significant difference between
the number of arguments surrounding New Verbs at Stage II and New
Verbs at Stage I. This suggests that the children were learning something
about verbs at Stage I that they were able to apply spontaneously to
New Verbs at Stage II. The Verb Island hypothesis cannot explain this
finding. However, one way in which it could be explained is in terms of
the learning of limited scope formulae such as ‘Mummy+X ’, or ‘I+X ’,
‘ me+X’, ‘ the child’s name+X’, or ‘ X+it ’. Structures like these, which
are composed of high frequency subjects and objects, and accept verbs
as slot-fillers, may allow the child to use their New Verbs at Stage II in
slightly more complex structures than they were able to use their New
Verbs at Stage I. They may also serve as the building blocks for more
abstract structures such as S+V and V+O.
Although this evidence of verb-general structure is not consistent with
a strict version of the Verb Island hypothesis, it is consistent with
Tomasello’s more recent formulation that grammatical structure does
not have to revolve exclusively around verbs, but can include other lexical
items, particularly pronouns (Childers & Tomasello, 2001). Childers &
Tomasello found that for English-speaking children, pronouns play a
very important role in the acquisition of the transitive construction. They
found that when children (M=2; 6) were trained with utterances that had
pronoun frames, such as he’s [verb]-ing it and closely associated noun
frames, this helped them to use novel verbs productively. Childers &
Tomasello concluded that as children are learning individual words, they
are also learning constructions (e.g. the transitive) and this may be
facilitated by low-scope representations such as I’m [verb]-ing it or he’s
[verb]-ing it or [verb]-it.
717
M C C L U R E E T A L.
Other evidence that children may be using pronoun frames comes
from Akhtar (1999). In the cases where children heard a novel verb in a
non-English word order and then were able to use it productively in
an utterance in SVO word order, they did so, in all but one case, using
pronouns. This suggests they may be learning the privileges of occurrence
of certain high-frequency pronouns (he, him, it) and that this knowledge
helps them produce utterances in SVO word order. A pronoun frame
in SVO order may therefore constitute partial knowledge of what a full
abstract transitive construction might consist of. In other words, children
learn which pronouns frequently occur in preverbal position and which
pronouns occur frequently in post-verbal position and they use this
knowledge to structure sentences with new verbs.
In fact, the youngest children in Akhtar’s study were 2;8, though similar
results have also been found for slightly younger children (Abbott-Smith
et al., 2001). The results of the present study suggest that children may
have some verb-general knowledge of transitive structure as early as Stage
I – in the sense that they appear able to use new verbs with a variety of
high frequency subjects and objects. However, they also underline the
dangers of assuming that such knowledge necessarily represents fully
abstract knowledge of the transitive construction. To have such knowledge
would presumably mean to have knowledge that was not tied to any
specific lexical items, whether they are particular verbs or particular high
frequency subjects and objects. It is not clear to us that there is currently
any strong evidence that children have such knowledge. However, as
Tomasello & Akhtar (2003) point out, one way of showing that they do,
would be to demonstrate syntactic priming effects for transitive sentences
that show little or no lexical overlap with the transitive sentences that they
primed. Interestingly, in a recent study that adopted this kind of approach
Savage, Lieven, Theakston & Tomasello (2003) found that while older
children did show syntactic priming effects for sentences with both high
and low levels of lexical overlap, younger children only showed priming
effects for sentences in which the level of lexical overlap was high. These
results, like those of the present study, are consistent with the view that
although children’s knowledge of argument structure is not completely
verb-specific, nor is it fully abstract during the early stages. The question
for future research is therefore how do young children construct such
abstract syntactic representations in the course of development. One way of
addressing this issue is to use comprehension and production studies to
investigate the precise nature of children’s early grammatical representations at different points in development (e.g. Fisher, 2002 b; Savage et al.,
2003 ; Matthews, Lieven, Theakston & Tomasello, 2005). Another is to
build models of language learning that can provide an integrated account of
the results of comprehension and production studies, and hence shed light
718
INVESTIGATING ABSTRACTNESS
on the mechanisms that underlie this process (e.g. Chang, 2002, 2004 ;
Alishahi, 2004).
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