TY - JOUR
T1 - Abstract Morphosyntax in Two- and Three-Year-Old Children
T2 - Evidence from Priming
AU - Rissman, Lilia
AU - Legendre, Geraldine
AU - Landau, Barbara
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by NSF IGERT grant 907667, Award ID DGE0549379, awarded to the Johns Hopkins University Cognitive Science department. Many thanks to Colin Wilson and Don Mathis for their invaluable statistical assistance, and to Eva Yopes and Maggie Raible for their hard work transcribing and coding. We are additionally grateful to the children and their families for participating in our study. Helpful comments and suggestions were offered by the reviewers of this paper and our colleagues at various presentations of this work, including the Cognitive Science Society, the Boston University Conference on Language Development, the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, and the International Conference on Infant Studies, as well as presentations to the Language and Cognition Lab and Acquisition Lab (Johns Hopkins University).
PY - 2013/7
Y1 - 2013/7
N2 - Young English-speaking children often omit auxiliary verbs from their speech, producing utterances such as baby crying alongside the more adult-like baby is crying. Studies have found that children's proficiency with auxiliary BE is correlated with frequency statistics in the input, leading some researchers to argue that children's auxiliary knowledge is item-specific and slow to develop. In a priming experiment, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-old children represent auxiliary is and are as part of an abstract syntactic frame. We tested whether children could be primed to increase their auxiliary production when the prime and target differed by subject, verb and auxiliary type (is or are). We found these patterns of priming, indicating children represent auxiliary BE as part of an abstract syntactic frame that minimally contains is and are, despite the frequency-based effects reported in the literature.
AB - Young English-speaking children often omit auxiliary verbs from their speech, producing utterances such as baby crying alongside the more adult-like baby is crying. Studies have found that children's proficiency with auxiliary BE is correlated with frequency statistics in the input, leading some researchers to argue that children's auxiliary knowledge is item-specific and slow to develop. In a priming experiment, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-old children represent auxiliary is and are as part of an abstract syntactic frame. We tested whether children could be primed to increase their auxiliary production when the prime and target differed by subject, verb and auxiliary type (is or are). We found these patterns of priming, indicating children represent auxiliary BE as part of an abstract syntactic frame that minimally contains is and are, despite the frequency-based effects reported in the literature.
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U2 - 10.1080/15475441.2012.755902
DO - 10.1080/15475441.2012.755902
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84878118669
SN - 1547-5441
VL - 9
SP - 278
EP - 292
JO - Language Learning and Development
JF - Language Learning and Development
IS - 3
ER -