Children learn the syntactic principle of complementation with determiner-noun combinations

What is it about?

When children learn to produce some kind of syntactic word-combination, they also internalize a general principle which can help them to learn similar kinds of word-combinations. Determiner-noun combinations (such as "this doll") are an early productive pattern in child speech, but linguists disagree whether they represent a kind of head-dependent complementation (like verb-object, for example) or whether they are a kind of adjunct or modifier relation (like adjective-noun, for example). We computed a correlation coefficient, relating the production of determiner-noun combinations to clear complement-noun exemplars and clear adjjective-noun exemplars in the speech of a large sample of young English speaking childen. The results showed that determiner-noun combinations are a kind of complement relation, as they are much stronger correlated with sentences with a clear complement relation than with sentences with a modification relation. There is a good chance that the early acquisition of determiner-noun combination assists the children in learning other type of complementation relations via transfer of learning.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This study takes formal linguistics as its framework for the study of children's developing a syntactic system. In many studies carried out in the last decades, researchers shy away from terms and relations offered in lingusitics and prefer, instead, to propose models of learning based on children approximating syntactic structure by computing statistical distributions and probabilities instead. The present study shows that it can actually be much easier for children to learn to produce word-combinations based on lingustic units and relations than on statistics.

Perspectives