How Do Children Acquire Early Grammar and Build Multiword Utterances? A Corpus Study of French Children Aged 2 to 4

• Published in: Child development Vol. 84; no. 2; pp. 647 - 661
• Main Authors: Le Normand, M. T., Moreno-Torres, I., Parisse, C., Dellatolas, G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Malden, MA Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.03.2013; Wiley Blackwell; Wiley-Blackwell; Wiley
• Subjects: Age Differences; Age groups; Attitudes; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child development; Child Development - physiology; Child psychology; Child, Preschool; Children; Children & youth; Developmental psychology; EMPIRICAL ARTICLES; Female; Foreign Countries; France; French; French language; Function words; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grammar; Humans; Language; Language Acquisition; Language Development; Language Research; Learning; Lexicology; Life Sciences; Linguistics; Male; Multiple Regression Analysis; Neurons and Cognition; Pragmatics; Predictor Variables; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Social Class; Socioeconomic factors; Socioeconomic Status; Speech; Symbolic Play Test (Lowe and Costello); Utterances; Verbal Behavior - physiology; Vocabulary Development; Words; Young Children; France; Human; Preschool age; Lexicon; Cognition; Grammar; Verbal production; Learning; Acquisition process; French; Language; Language development; Child; Sentence
• ISSN: 0009-3920; 1467-8624
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01873.x

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.