Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis…

Using a preferential looking methodology with novel verbs, Gertner, Fisher and Eisengart (2006 ) found that 21-month-old English children seemed to understand the syntactic marking of transitive word order in an abstract, verb-general way. In the current study we tested whether young German children of this same age have this same understanding.…

We present empirical data showing that the relative frequency with which a verb normally appears in a syntactic construction predicts young children's ability to remember and repeat sentences instantiating that construction. Children aged 2;10-5;8 years were asked to repeat grammatical and ungrammatical sentential complement sentences (e.g., "I…

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this "distributed learning effect" with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children…

Describes the cornerstone of traditional descriptive grammars as the construction (a recurrent patterns of linguistic elements that serves a communicative function), examining argument structure constructions, verbs and constructions, and implications for studying language development. Discusses Adele Goldberg's recent book, which develops the…

Responds to 12 commentators who commented on an essay by the author about Adele Goldberg's recent book, "Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure," which develops the theory of construction grammar for a set of problems associated with verb-argument structure. (SM)

Details findings indicating that most early linguistic competence is item based. Maintains that language development proceeds without evidence of system-wide syntactic categories, schemas, or parameters. Suggests that findings are not easily explained by the development of children's skills of linguistic performance, pragmatics, or other external…

Determined the degree to which a sample of one child's creative utterances related to utterances that the child previously produced. Utterances were intelligible, multi-word utterances produced by the child in a single hour of interaction with her mother. Results suggest the high degree of creativity in early English child language could be…

Eight 20- to 26-month-old children were exposed to 4 novel nouns in a game context over several weeks to determine whether, when, and in what ways the children would use them beyond their original linguistic forms. The majority were productive in their use of the nouns, indicating that the grammatical category for noun is operational by age 2.…

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in…

Examined young children's language productivity with newly learned forms by teaching them four new words: two nouns and two verbs. Findings indicate children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs--by many orders of magnitude and several children pluralized the new nouns,…

Presents evidence that the supposed paradox in which infants find abstract patterns in speech-like stimuli whereas even some preschoolers struggle to find abstract syntactic patterns within meaningful language is no paradox. Asserts that all research evidence shows that young children's syntactic constructions become abstract in a piecemeal…

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…