Syntactic Categories in Early Child English: A Corpus Study of Article Production

초록

A topic of ongoing debate in regard to the acquisition of English articles is whether the articles very young children produce are abstract categories or limited scope formulae. This study investigates the issue by analyzing five English-speaking children’s corpus data, classified into four phases according to the number of article+noun combinations. The study has two main findings. First, the analysis found no sign of a U-shaped curve in the development of overt articles in obligatory contexts, a finding which indicates that the children did not pass through an initial stage of producing articles only as part of rote-learned formulae. Second, it was found that children produced predicate adjectives but no postverbal articles lacking nouns, a finding which constitutes evidence for the acquisition of articles. Taken together, the results provide positive evidence that English-speaking children’s early articles are an overt instantiation of an adult-like syntactic category. ©2020 Institute for Cognitive Science, Seoul National University

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