Who is afraid of constructivism? (¿Quién tiene miedo del constructivismo?)

Both generative and constructivist researchers agree that children are able to form abstractions and produce novel grammatically patterned utterances. Both approaches are able to explain such abilities, and hence their existence does not entail an innate Universal Grammar. However, generativists and constructivists differ in their views on the nature of early generalisations: while generative researchers assume that adult-like linguistic representations are present from the very beginning, constructivists argue that children begin with relatively specific, low level schemas and gradually extract more abstract patterns. There is considerable empirical evidence for the latter position. Moreover, constructivist theories provide a better explanation for principled behaviour -not just the observed patterns, but also the absence of certain constructions in children's early productions and various developmental asynchronies. Tanto los investigadores generativistas como constructivistas coinciden en que los niños son capaces de formar abstracciones y de producir emisiones novedosas gramaticalmente estructuradas. Ambos enfoques son capaces de explicar tales habilidades, y por eso su existencia no implica una Gramática Universal innata. Sin embargo, los investigadores generativistas y constructivistas difieren en su visión sobre la naturaleza de las generalizaciones tempranas: mientras que los investigadores generativistas asumen que las representaciones lingüísticas parecidas a las adultas están presentes desde edades tempranas, los constructivistas argumentan que los niños comienzan con esquemas de bajo nivel, relativamente específicos, y que gradualmente extraen esquemas más abstractos. Existe considerable evidencia empírica en apoyo de esta segunda posición. Además, las teorías constructivistas proporcionan una mejor explicación de las conductas basadas en reglas; no sólo de los patrones observados, sino también de la ausencia de ciertas construcciones en las producciones verbales tempranas de los niños y de diversas asincronías evolutivas

Parent's reports of lexical and grammatical aspects of toddlers's language in European Portuguese: developmental trends, age and gender differences

The results from a large-scale study on toddlers’ language acquisition in European Portuguese are presented. Toddlers’ lexical and grammatical competencies were assessed using the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results, based on 3012 reports completed by parents, indicate an increase in the lexical size and on five measures of grammatical development (production of regular morphology, irregular morphology, over-regularizations, mean length of utterances and sentence complexity) across age groups. A main effect of gender was found for lexical size, production of regular and irregular morphology, production of over-regularizations and sentence complexity, with girls obtaining overall higher scores than boys. All lexical and grammatical development measures are positively correlated, even after controlling for age and gender effects. These findings are discussed in terms of their consistency with those obtained for other languages.CiPsi - Psychology Research Centre, Uminho (UID/PSI/ 01662/2013), PortugalCIEC – Research Centre on Child Studies, IE, UMinho (FCT R&D unit 317), Portugalinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Comparing different models of the development of verb inflection in early child Spanish

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge of verb inflection is only partially productive is tested by comparing the average number of different inflections per verb in matched samples of child and adult speech. The generativist claim that children's early use of verb inflection is essentially error-free is tested by investigating the rate at which the children made subjectverb agreement errors in different parts of the present tense paradigm. Our results show: 1) that, although even adults ' use of verb inflection in Spanish tends to look somewhat lexically restricted, both children's use of verb inflection was significantly less flexible than that of their caregivers, and 2) that, although the rate at which the two children produced subjectverb agreement errors in their speech was very low, this overall error rate hid a consistent pattern of error in which error rates were substantially higher in low frequency than in high frequency contexts, and substantially higher for low frequency than for high frequency verbs. These results undermine the claim that children's use of verb inflection is fully productive from the earliest observable stages, and are consistent with the constructivist claim that knowledge of verb inflection develops only gradually