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 s early multiword utterances, the development of the transitive construction and certain types of errors are presented to illustrate this approach.
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Article provided by Cambridge University Press in its journal European Review.
Volume (Year): 16 (2008) Issue (Month): 04 (October) Pages: 445-456 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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