How Do Children Acquire Early Grammar and Build Multiword Utterances? A Corpus Study of French Children Aged 2 to 4
In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean len...
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Published in | Child development Vol. 84; no. 2; pp. 647 - 661 |
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Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Malden, MA
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
01.03.2013
Wiley Blackwell Wiley-Blackwell Wiley |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean length of utterances (MLU). A total of 312 speech samples from high-low socioeconomic status (SES) French-speaking children aged 2–4 years were annotated with a part-of-speech-tagger. Multiple regression analyses show that grammatical categories, particularly the most frequent subcategories, were the best predictors of MLU both across age and SES groups. These findings support the view that early language learning is guided by grammatical rather than by lexical words. This corpus research design can be used for future cross-linguistic and cross-pathology studies. |
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Bibliography: | ArticleID:CDEV1873 istex:9435377400C23CF358EDCBED70ED5CC7018A270A ark:/67375/WNG-DMGMC20J-F We would like to thank one of the reviewers for constructive comments on earlier versions of the manuscript, and Zacharie Esmili for great help with the Monte Carlo analysis. Support Grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education (PR‐2009‐0277; PR‐2010‐0204) has been received by the second author. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-2 ObjectType-Feature-1 |
ISSN: | 0009-3920 1467-8624 |
DOI: | 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01873.x |