Content uploaded by Stan Kuczaj
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Stan Kuczaj on Jun 27, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
Arguments against Hurford's ‘Aux Copying Rule’
Abstract
-
... Specifically, Spivey (2005, 2006) explored three dyads' lexical and syntactic alignment during multiple interactions in the home and whether recurrence varied by temporal proximity and child age. The three corpora were Brown's Sarah from ages 2 years 9 months to 5 years 1 month old (Brown, 1973), Kuczaj's Abe from 2 years 5 months to 5 years 0 months (Kuczaj, 1976), and Sachs' Naomi from 1 year 11 months to 4 years 8 months (Sachs, 1983). Lexical alignment referred to the recurrence of individual words or tokens (e.g., "the" or "you") used by parents and children, and syntactic alignment referred to the re-visitation of word classes or parts of speech (e.g., verb, noun, pronoun, determiner). ...
... Its assumption that children are born with innate linguistic knowledge termed Universal Grammar (UG) and the subsequent Principles and Parameters framework is widely used in language acquisition research (Kania, 2016). Particularly, children question formation which involves inversion (or movement) has attracted many researchers' interests (Santelmann et al., 2002), and their research in inversion and child question formation make great contributions for constructing and improving generative account of child question acquisition (e.g., Borer & Wexler, 1987;De Villiers, 1991;Erreich, 1984;Ingram & Tyack, 1979;Klee, 1985;Klima & Bellugi, 1966;Kuczaj, 1976;Labov & Labov, 1978;Radford, 1990Radford, , 1994Rowland, 2007;Theakston et al., 2001Theakston et al., , 2005Valian, 1991). Specifically, many generativists propose that inversion or movement is an essential component of UG which is constantly available to children (e.g., De Villiers, 1991;Stromwold, 1990), and children could utilise this innate linguistic knowledge to form adult-like questions from the very beginning of the language acquisition process (Rowland, 2007;Theakston et al., 2005). ...
This study explores whether the generativist account, specifically the integration theory, could explain children’s percentage of errors in questions in general and whether it also applies to yes-no and non-subject wh-question. The current study adopts a corpus-based method to compare 2-to-3-year-old children’s percentages of errors in questions (and in yes-no and wh-question separately) including auxiliary DO and auxiliary HAVE. The results show that children’s rate of errors in questions including auxiliary DO is higher than that including auxiliary HAVE, which is also applicable to yes-no and non-subject wh-questions. The findings indicate that the generativist theory of child language acquisition could successfully explain children’s patterns of errors in questions. This study also emphasises the impact of the question type which should be carefully considered when constructing and improving the generativist theory of child question formation. The study provides empirical evidence for improving and refining the generativist account of child language acquisition generally and language question acquisition specifically.
... The child and caregiver data used in this study comes from the Kuczaj corpus (Kuczaj, 1976) in the North American English collection in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). This is a longitudinal corpus containing transcriptions of spontaneous speech from the child Abe and his interactions with his parents and other interlocutors from age 2;4 to 5;0. ...
The acquisition of prepositions presents a difficult learning challenge for child language learners of English because they are highly relational and polysemous. This mapping problem may be particularly acute for non-spatial and highly grammaticized prepositions, such as with , which denotes semantic relationships such as instrument or accompaniment. One way children might resolve this mapping problem is by utilizing input frequencies and the surrounding linguistic contexts in which these senses occur to learn these meanings. To explore this question, we examine a corpus of one child’s production and his surrounding input of three relatively non-spatial and highly grammaticized prepositions: of, with, and by . We examine these prepositions’ sense frequencies, and their surrounding syntactic and semantic contexts in the production and input. Broad analyses show that for of and with , input frequencies of preposition senses and syntactic contexts are strongly correlated with production of preposition senses and syntactic contexts. This suggests that input frequencies may play a crucial role in the acquisition of these senses. Preposition sense frequencies and syntactic contexts for by however, do not seem to be significantly similar between the input and production. This may be due to Abe’s uses of by that do not conform to his parents’ patterns of usage, specifically his use of passive agent by and instrumental by . The influence of usage patterns in the input on a child’s acquisition of different preposition senses suggests that statistical learning may play a role in children’s acquisition of highly polysemous words.
... Young children often produce overtensing errors, in which {Past} is expressed on both the auxiliary and the main verb (e.g. Hurford, 1975;Kuczaj, 1976b;Fay, 1978;Maratsos & Kuczaj, 1978;Pinker, 1984;Roeper & Hollebrandse, 1995), though the error rate is rarely more than 20% during the period of maximal use. Adults also occasionally make such errors, at a very low rate in natural speech, which can be pushed as high as 6% of trials in experimental situations for the most susceptible verbs. ...
This paper is concerned with the acquisition of the morphosyntax of finite verbs by monolingual children acquiring British English as their first language. The primary data are drawn from a large naturalistic sample of more than 100,000 early child utterances (based on the corpus of 39 cross-sectional and 94 longitudinal studies described in Radford, 1990a:11-13). The theoretical framework used will be that of Government and Binding Theory (=GB), in the version outlined in Chomsky (1986), with modifications introduced by Abney (1987) and Pollock (1989). In order to clarify some of the descriptive assumptions made here, I shall beg in by providing a brief outline of the morphosyntax of finite verbs in adult English.
The two papers, one by Haegeman and one by Felix, in this volume, both represent a subtle new approach to a Universal Grammar (UG)-determined model of second language (L2) acquisition, one wherein L2 learning is viewed as involving the resetting of parameters and the application of universal principles of UG. triggered by positive evidence. On this view, L2 learning is considered to be at least partially similar to first language (L1) acquisition, and the UG model of the initial state is viewed as a constant property of biological competence. The emphasis throughout is on adult L2 acquisition.
Demonstrating how children learn to produce and distinguish between sounds, and their acquisition of words and meanings, this book explains their incredible mastery of language. William O'Grady provides readers with an overview not only of the language acquisition process itself, but also of the ingenious experiments and techniques that researchers use to investigate this mysterious phenomenon.
Errors in child speech show that some children initially formulate tense-hopping and subject-auxiliary inversion as copying without deletion. Other errors suggest that some children may formulate other movement rules as deletion without copying. A claim about the nature of the language acquisition device is made on the basis of our analysis of these errors: the language acquisition device formulates hypotheses about transformations in terms of basic operations. The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in child speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule.RésuméLes erreurs rencontrées dans le discours des enfants montrent que certains enfants formulent d'aboard la transformation affixe et l'inversion sujet-auxiliaire comme copie sans effacement. D'autres erreurs suggèrent que certains enfants peuvent formuler d'autres règles de mouvement comme l'effacement sans copie. En se fondant sur l'analyse de ces erreurs on fait une proposition sur le mécanisme de l'acquisition du langage: ce mécanisme d'acquisition du langage formule les hypothèses sur les transformations en terme d'opérations fondamentales. Cette hypothése d'opérations fondamentales prédit que pour chaque transformation composée de plus d'une opération fondamentale, il existe une classe d'erreur dans le langage de l'enfant. Cette classe d'erreur peut s'analyser comme unéchecàappliqueràune (ou plus) des opérations spécifiées par la formulation adulte de la régle.
The following report presents some of the findings of several years' research on the relations between standard English and the non-standard English used by Negro speakers in various urban ghetto areas. The immediate subject is the status of the copula and auxiliary be in Negro non-standard English. The approach to the problem combines the methods of generative grammar and phonology with techniques for the quantitative analysis of systematic variation. The notion 'rule of grammar' is enlarged to include the formal treatment of inherent variation as a part of linguistic structure. Furthermore, a model is presented for the decisive solution of abstract questions of rule form and rule relations, based upon the direct study of linguistic behavior.
