Abstract knowledge of word order by 19 months: An eye-tracking study

Word order is one of the earliest aspects of grammar that the child acquires, because her early utterances already respect the basic word order of the target language. However, the question of the nature of early syntactic representations is subject to debate. Approaches inspired by formal syntax assume that the head-complement order, differentiating verb-object and object-verb languages, is represented very early on in an abstract, rulelike format. In contrast, constructivist theories assume that it is initially encoded as lexicalized, verb-specific knowledge. In order to address this issue experimentally, we combined the preferential looking paradigm using pseudoverbs with the weird word order paradigm adapted to comprehension. The results, based on highly reliable, coder-independent eye-tracking measures, provide the first direct evidence that as early as 19 months French-speaking infants have an abstract representation of the word order of their languag

Early Word Order Representations: Novel Arguments Against Old Contradictions

One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children's early representations of word order. While studies using preferential looking methods suggest that children as early as 20 months represent word order as an abstract, grammatical property, experiments using theWeird Word Order (WWO) paradigm suggest that it is represented as a lexical property until age four. In order to shed light on these contradictions, two types of arguments are developed. First, it is argued that the observations taken to support the lexical hypothesis, based on the WWO paradigm, have been incorrectly interpreted. Second, an experiment is reported using the standard WWO paradigm with minimal changes in the design. Two groups of French children were contrasted (mean ages 2;11 and 3;11). Both groups were found to (i) reproduce WWO at a similar, low rate; (ii) correct WWO at a similar rate, even with pseudo-verbs; (iii) reuse the grammatical, SVO order significantly more often than WWO; and (iv) produce grammatical markers, indicating productive use, in grammatical sentences only. We conclude that empirical evidence converges to support the grammatical hypothesis

Abstract knowledge of word order by 19 months: An eye-tracking study

Word order is one of the earliest aspects of grammar that the child acquires, since her early utterances already respect the basic word order of the target language. However, the question of the nature of early syntactic representations is subject to debate. Approaches inspired by formal syntax assume that the head-complement order, differentiating Verb-Object and Object-Verb languages, is represented very early on in an abstract, rule-like format. In contrast, constructivist theories assume that it is initially encoded as lexicalized, verb-specific knowledge. In order to address this issue experimentally, we combined the preferential looking paradigm using pseudo-verbs (following Gertner, Fisher & Eisengart, 2006) with the weird word order paradigm (following Akhtar, 1999) adapted to comprehension. The results, based on highly reliable, coder-independent eye-tracking measures, provide the first direct evidence that as early as 19 months French-speaking infants have an abstract representation of the word order of their language

Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds

In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun (“la balle”/the ball) or a target verb (“je mange”/I eat). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word (“une balle”/a ball or “on mange”/they eat), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (∗“on balle”/they ball or ∗“une mange”/a eat). We showed that 18-month-old s exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a determiner and vice-versa for nouns. These results suggest that 18-month-olds already know noun and verb contexts. As a result, they might be able to exploit them to categorize unknown words and constrain their possible meaning (nouns typically refer to objects whereas verbs typically refer to actions)