Volume 17 Language Research in the 21st Century
Graduate Working Papers

A Corpus Study on the Item-based Nature of Early Grammar Acquisition

Adam Hodges
Carnegie Mellon University
Valerie Krugler
Stanford University
Deborah Law
University of Colorado Boulder

Keywords

  • corpus linguistics, language acquisition

How to Cite

Hodges, A., Krugler, V., & Law, D. (2004). A Corpus Study on the Item-based Nature of Early Grammar Acquisition. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 17. https://doi.org/10.25810/ekag-3410

Abstract

This paper explores the item-based nature of child language acquisition by examining data from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). Two studies are explicated: the first uses pooled data from several children, and the second follows a single child longitudinally. The results show that the learning of the complex construction consisting of a main clause followed by an infinitival compliment, e.g. I want to play, center around a single verb, want, even though other candidate verbs exist in the children’s vocabulary. We provide empirical evidence to show that children initially learn grammar via item-based units and gradually break down complex constructions as units into smaller pieces in a process that leads towards the organization of language into the abstract categories consistent with a fully competent adult grammar.