Syntactic Categories in the Speech of \Bung Children

$Syntactic Categories in the Speech of \Bung Children$ Developmental Psychology Copyright 1986 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 1986, Vol. 22, No. 4,562-579 00l2-1649/86/$0O.75 Syntactic Categories in the Speech of \bung Children Virginia Valian Columbia University This article demonstrates that very young children have knowledge of a range of syntactic categories. Speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance (MLUs) ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: Deter- miner, Adjective, Noun, Noun Phrase, Preposition, and Prepositional Phrase. Performance was eval- uated by the conformance of the children's speech to criteria developed for each category. Known syntactic diagnostics served as models for the criteria developed; the criteria exploited distributional regularities. All children showed evidence of all categories, except for the lowest MLU child, whose performance was borderline on Adjectives and Prepositional Phrases. The results suggest that children are sensitive very early in life to abstract, formal properties of the speech they hear and must be credited with syntactic knowledge at an earlier point than heretofore generally thought. The results argue against various semantic hypotheses about the origin of syntactic knowledge. Finally, the methods and results may be applicable to future investigations of why children's early utterances are short, of the nature of children's semantic categories, and of the nature of the deviance in the speech of language-deviant children and adults. The grammars of mature speakers consist of rules and princi- Levin, 1985). Unless children can select the proper phrasal cate- ples that capture generalizations about the language. Languages gories they will be unable to determine semantic roles. For in- have (minimally) semantic, syntactic, and phonological regular- stance, if a child were asked to act out a sentence like "The large ities, and mature grammars represent all three levels of regular- woman pushed the small pencil," using items from an array ities. Three enduring questions of language acquisition are to consisting of women and pencils of different sizes, the child can what extent a child's grammar resembles a mature grammar, succeed only if he or she can group together the correct Deter- how a child's grammar develops over time, and how the compo- miners, Adjectives, and Nouns into units. nents of the child's grammar are interrelated. Since syntactic Second, from a syntactic viewpoint, most treatments of regularities are stated in terms of syntactic categories like Ad- grammatical relations, such as subject of the sentence or direct jective, Noun, and Noun Phrase, categories are particularly im- object of the verb, define such relations over syntactic catego- portant entities. If the child's grammar lacks syntactic categories. Unless children can identify Noun Phrases they cannot ries, it also lacks a level of syntactic description, and thus differs determine subjects and objects. Similarly, grammatical rules from a mature grammar in a crucial way. are written in terms of grammatical categories. Without catego- By what point in development has the child acquired the ba- ries the child cannot form rules. sics of formal grammatical categories like Adjective and Noun? Third, from a developmental point of view, category acquisi- The present study addresses a special case of this question by tion puts temporal constraints on theories of how syntactic examining corpora of 2-year-olds for evidence of formal regu- knowledge is acquired. For example, the earlier category acqui- larities characterizing six categories. The results bear on several sition can be demonstrated, the more plausible it is that the theoretical concerns about acquisition. child grammar uses the same theoretical vocabulary as the First, from a semantic viewpoint, treatments of semantic adult grammar, even though it includes fewer accurate general- roles presuppose a phrasal segmentation of the sentence, with izations. The earlier the child demonstrates knowledge of for- the senses of Noun Phrases identifying roles like agent of the mal categories, the more likely it is that the child is learning action or recipient of the action (e.g., Hardy & Braine, 1981; simultaneously about all levels of the language—phonology, syntax, and semantics—from the onset of acquisition. In addi- tion, many models of acquisition presuppose category knowl- Excerpts were presented at the Boston University Conference on Lan- edge on the child's part, ranging from Wexler and Culicover's guage Acquisition, 1984. (1980) learnability model to our hypothesis-testing model (Er- My thanks to J. J. Katz, M. C. Potter, D. T. Langendoen, B. Landau, reich, Valian, & Winzemer, 1980; Mayer, Erreich, & Valian, L. Gerken, R. May, A. Zwicky, J. Gee, R. Fiengo, T. G. Bever, and the 1978; Valian, Winzemer, & Erreich, 1981). Providing evidence anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments; to A. Erreich and of early category knowledge increases the plausibility of such S. Pazer for their transcripts; and to P. Wason and the Department of models. Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, for their gener- ous hospitality during an early phase of this research. Semantic and syntactic relations have concerned investiga- Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Virginia tors more than syntactic categories, but there are several studies Valian, who is now at the Department of Psychology, Wellesley College, of the development of syntactic categories and sub-categories, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02181. and a few estimates of when children acquire categories. Vari- 562 SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES IN THE SPEECH OF YOUNG CHILDREN 563 ous fine-grained analyses of child knowledge of distinctions in guage there are groundsof positing a Determiner-Adjective dis- the adult grammar have shown, for example, that some Ger- tinction. man-speaking children can handle syntactic gender by age 3 What complicates the enterprise in investigating child lan- (MacWhinney, 1978), and that English-speaking children are guage is the unavailability of informant judgments. Here at least partially aware of the count-mass distinction by age 2 Bloom's (1970) method of rich interpretation can be used to (Gordon, 1985). Other analyses have examined regularities in advantage. Her method allows the observer to use the surround- child speech that partially, though not completely, overlap with ing linguistic and social context to tentatively classify lexical distinctions in the adult grammar. For example, early work by items and phrases as examples of, say, Determiners or Adjec- Brown and colleagues (Brown & Belhigi, 1964; Brown, Cazden, tives. Linguistic tests, exploiting distributional regularities for & Bellugi, 1969; Brown & Fraser, 1964; Brown, Fraser, & Bel- those categories in the adult English grammar, can then be used lugi, 1964; Miller & Ervin, 1964) demonstrated regularities in to determine whether the tentative classification holds up, by very early child speech, such as that different sets of prenominal seeing whether the items pattern w the children's corpora as words in the speech of children at Mean Length of Utterance they would be expected to on the basis of the tentative classifi- (MLU) 2 patterned nonrandomly. Similarly, Bloom and her col- cation. leagues (Bloom, Lightbown, & Hood, 1975) demonstrated The present study, then, analyzes the corpora of six children structural-semantic regularities in early child speech. to determine whether items that appear, on the basis of sur- The picture emerging from such studies has not, however, rounding linguistic and social context, to be members of partic- afforded a clear answer to the question of by what point cate- ular syntactic categories do in fact obey distributional regulari- gory acquisition is well underway. In one review Maratsos ties characteristic of such categories in English. If so, then the (1982, p. 256) puts the upper limit at the end of the preschool children's knowledge of those categories will be inferred. No- years or earlier. One reason for the uncertainty may be that the tice that such an inference is an inference to the best explana- fine-grained analyses, although precise and focused on knowl- tion and not a logical inference. Only if there is no better expla- edge of adult distinctions, have necessarily been limited in nation does the inference hold. Thus, it is important to raise scope; the broader analyses, on the other hand, have often dem- the question of whether the distributional regularities could be onstrated regularities that are not proper parts of the adult adventitiously or artifactualry mimicked by a child whose pro- grammar, and thus the point at which acquisition of adult con- ductions were guided purely by cognitive, pragmatic, or seman- cepts takes place remains unclear. tic notions. Although such a concern cannot be definitively The present study seeks a clearer answer by synthesizing eliminated, great care was taken to maximize the use of regular- different features of previous research methods. The scope is ities with no known semantic correlate (see Methods). six syntactic categories—Determiner, Adjective, Noun, Noun It is also important to raise the question of how the joint con- Phrase, Preposition, and Prepositional Phrase—which are used tributions of semantic and syntactic knowledge to children's in most descriptions of the adult language. The method involves productions can best be determined. One suggestion

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