I can believe it: Quantitative evidence for closed-class category knowledge in an English-speaking 20- to 24-month-old child
Alandi Bates, Lisa Pearl, Susan Braunwald
July 2018 

There’s been significant debate about when children develop syntactic categories and how to accurately assess what category knowledge they have when. We review prior approaches to assessing children’s developing knowledge of syntactic categories, and then present our quantitative approach, which synthesizes insights primarily from Yang (2010, 2011). This approach allows us to (i) define possible child representations for multi-word combinations, and (ii) calculate the observed vs. expected linguistic production properties for each possible representation. We use this approach to investigate the existence of both closed-class and open-class syntactic categories in a 20- to 24-month-old child’s verb phrases. We evaluate whether the child’s observed production matches the expected production when the child uses a specific category representation, and find that the child’s productions are compatible only with representations that have adult-like closed-class categories (negation, auxiliary), but not adult-like open-class categories (noun, verb). We conclude with implications for the development of syntactic categories.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004110 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Berkeley Linguistics Society 44 Proceedings
keywords:	syntactic categories, development, closed-class categories, quantitative approach, developmental modeling, verb phrases, negation, auxiliary, syntax
Downloaded:	251 times

 

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