Research article summary (published 30 Jul 2006):

Learning words and rules: abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension.

Full Abstract

Children quickly acquire basic grammatical facts about their native language. Does this early syntactic knowledge involve knowledge of words or rules? According to lexical accounts of acquisition, abstract syntactic and semantic categories are not primitive to the language-acquisition system; thus, early language comprehension and production are based on verb-specific knowledge. The present experiments challenge this account: We probed the abstractness of young children's knowledge of syntax by testing whether 25- and 21-month-olds extend their knowledge of English word order to new verbs. In four experiments, children used word order appropriately to interpret transitive sentences containing novel verbs. These findings demonstrate that although toddlers have much to learn about their native languages, they represent language experience in terms of an abstract mental vocabulary. These abstract representations allow children to rapidly detect general patterns in their native language, and thus to learn rules as well as words from the start.

Author information

Author/s: Gertner, Yael (Y); Fisher, Cynthia (C); Eisengart, Julie (J);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. ygertner(-atsign-)cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu

Grants: F32-HD054503 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS) ; HD044458 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Journal: Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS (Psychol Sci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-Aug; vol 17 (issue 8) : pp 684-91

Dates: Created 2006/08/17; Completed 2006/10/05; Revised 2007/11/14;

PMID: 16913951, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Child Language Child, Preschool Cognition Female Humans Linguistics

Linguistics Male Speech Perception Verbal Behavior Verbal Learning Vocabulary

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