Slides

A study of 6 English-speaking children aged between 2 years and 2 years 5 months,
with MLU ranging from 2.93 to 4.14.
Example 2: Modal auxiliaries in English (Valian 1991)
A study of 21 American children aged between 1;10 and 2;8, divided into 4 age
groups, the youngest group having the mean age of 2;0 and mean MLU 1.77, and the
oldest group having the mean age of 2;7 and MLU 4.22.
All children except the lowest MLU child produced modal auxiliaries. In every group,
'can' and 'll/will' were the two most common modals.
Modal usage was infrequent: in Group I, only 3% of utterances with verbs contained
modals, a total of 14 tokens. There was a steady gradual increase to 6% in Group II
(61 tokens), 9% in Group III, and 14% in Group IV.
Valian argued that Group I children have knowledge of modals as a category separate
from verbs, ie. knowledge of INFL.
"First appearance correlates highly with more stringent criteria...Sampling
considerations alone would suggest that a child has been using a form before our data
demonstrate it. ....At present any criterion beyond initial correct use appears arbitrary.
Since the Group I children made no distributional errors with the modals they used,
we have called their use genuine." (p. 60)
Example 3: Finite vs nonfinite distinction of verbs in Dutch
Table 2. Verb use by Dutch children (aged 1;7-3;7; N=47) (Wexler 2003)
All normal children V2 Vfinal
Finite 1953 (99%) 11 (2%)
Non-finite 20 (1%) 606 (98%)
"Very little leeway has to be given to measurement error or noise, even at the
youngest ages. This is the kind of data that psychologists studying cognitive
development almost never see, close to categorical data." (Wexler 2003)
2.2 Pre-requisite for distributional analysis: demonstrating the productivity of
early word combinations
How to analyze a multiword utterance W1 W2
(a) W 1+2
(frozen form)
(b) W1+W2
(genuine word combination)
(c) Category1 + Category2 (category sequence)
4