Body Regions and Early Grammatical Structure

Previous research on early grammatical development has proposed that grammar develops from regularities in linguistic experience. We suggest that these regularities may extend to bodily experiences. A previous study on early-learned verbs suggests strong correlations between verbs and specific body regions. It follows that young children may perceive these regularities and connect the body region with grammatical structure. A corpus of 3000 sentences from a transcription of speech recorded during a free play session between 20 children (20 or 28 months old) and their mothers were analyzed in verb frame appearance and their correlations with body parts. We hypothesized that a particular body region would be more likely to appear within a specific grammatical framework. We then analyzed the correlation between six sentence structures (SV,VNP, VNPNP, VNPLOC, VLOC, VS) and body region (Leg, Hand, Head) using chi-square test of independence and found significant relationships between them