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Building Language Competence in First Language Acquisition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Elena Lieven
Elena Lieven*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany; School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, UK
*
E-mail: lieven@eva.mpg.de
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Abstract

Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic tools adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for whether they are psychologically real for young children. However, when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic representations only gradually on the basis of the language they hear and use and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of use only gradually as well – again on the basis of linguistic experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from empirical analyses of children’s early multiword utterances, the development of the transitive construction and certain types of errors are presented to illustrate this approach.

Type
Focus: The Origin of Language
Information
European Review , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2008 , pp. 445 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2008

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