Aguado-Orea Javier, Pine Julian M
Department of Psychology, Sociology and Politics, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2015 Mar 11;10(3):e0119613. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0119613. eCollection 2015.
How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge of verb inflection is only partially productive is tested by comparing the average number of different inflections per verb in matched samples of child and adult speech. The generativist claim that children's early use of verb inflection is essentially error-free is tested by investigating the rate at which the children made subject-verb agreement errors in different parts of the present tense paradigm. Our results show: 1) that, although even adults' use of verb inflection in Spanish tends to look somewhat lexically restricted, both children's use of verb inflection was significantly less flexible than that of their caregivers, and 2) that, although the rate at which the two children produced subject-verb agreement errors in their speech was very low, this overall error rate hid a consistent pattern of error in which error rates were substantially higher in low frequency than in high frequency contexts, and substantially higher for low frequency than for high frequency verbs. These results undermine the claim that children's use of verb inflection is fully productive from the earliest observable stages, and are consistent with the constructivist claim that knowledge of verb inflection develops only gradually.
儿童如何习得动词屈折变化的知识是语言习得研究中一个长期存在的问题。在本研究中，我们通过关注两名年龄在2岁至2岁6个月之间的讲西班牙语儿童的数据，来检验当前一些关于动词屈折变化发展的建构主义和生成主义观点的预测。通过比较儿童和成人言语匹配样本中每个动词不同屈折变化的平均数量，来检验建构主义者关于儿童早期动词屈折变化知识仅部分具有生成性的观点。通过调查儿童在现在时范式不同部分出现主谓一致错误的比率，来检验生成主义者关于儿童早期动词屈折变化的使用基本无错误的观点。我们的结果表明：1）尽管即使是成年人在西班牙语中使用动词屈折变化在某种程度上也似乎受到词汇限制，但两个儿童使用动词屈折变化的灵活性明显低于他们的照顾者；2）尽管这两个儿童在言语中产生主谓一致错误的比率非常低，但这个总体错误率掩盖了一种一致的错误模式，即在低频语境中的错误率明显高于高频语境，并且低频动词的错误率明显高于高频动词。这些结果削弱了儿童从最早可观察阶段起使用动词屈折变化就完全具有生成性的观点，并且与建构主义者关于动词屈折变化知识是逐渐发展的观点一致。
