Theakston Anna L, Lieven Elena V M, Tomasello Michael
Department of Psychology, University of Manchester, U.K.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2003 Aug;46(4):863-77. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2003/067).
During the early stages of language acquisition, children pass through a stage of development when they produce both finite and nonfinite verb forms in finite contexts (e.g., "it go there," "it goes there"). Theorists who assume that children operate with an abstract understanding of tense and agreement marking from the beginnings of language use tend to explain this phenomenon in terms of either performance limitations in production (e.g., V. Valian, 1991) or the optional use of finite forms in finite contexts due to a lack of knowledge that tense and agreement marking is obligatory (the optional infinitive hypothesis; K. Wexler, 1994, 1996). An alternative explanation, however, is that children's use of nonfinite forms is based on the presence of questions in the input ("Where does it go?") where the grammatical subject is immediately followed by a nonfinite verb form. To compare these explanations, 2 groups of 24 children aged between 2 years 6 months and 3 years were exposed to 6 known and 3 novel verbs produced in either declaratives or questions or in both declaratives and questions. The children were then questioned to elicit use of the verbs in either finite or nonfinite contexts. The results show that for novel verbs, the children's patterns of verb use were closely related to the patterns of verb use modeled in the language to which they were exposed. For known verbs, there were no differences in the children's use of individual verbs, regardless of the specific patterns of verb use modeled in the language they heard. The implications of these findings for theories of early verb use are discussed.
在语言习得的早期阶段，儿童会经历一个发展阶段，在此阶段他们在限定语境中会同时产出限定动词形式和非限定动词形式（例如，“it go there”，“it goes there”）。那些假设儿童从开始使用语言起就对时态和一致标记有抽象理解的理论家，倾向于从产出方面的限制（例如，V. 瓦利安，1991）或者由于缺乏对时态和一致标记具有强制性的认识而在限定语境中对限定形式的随意使用（随意不定式假设；K. 韦克斯勒，1994，1996）来解释这一现象。然而，另一种解释是，儿童对非限定形式的使用是基于输入中存在的问题（“Where does it go?”），其中语法主语后紧接着是非限定动词形式。为了比较这些解释，两组年龄在2岁6个月至3岁之间的24名儿童接触了在陈述句、疑问句或者陈述句和疑问句中产出的6个已知动词和3个新动词。然后对儿童进行提问，以引出他们在限定或非限定语境中对这些动词的使用。结果表明，对于新动词来说，儿童的动词使用模式与他们所接触语言中示范的动词使用模式密切相关。对于已知动词，无论他们所听到的语言中示范的具体动词使用模式如何，儿童对单个动词的使用都没有差异。文中讨论了这些发现对早期动词使用理论的启示。
