Shatz M, Hoff-Ginsberg E, Maciver D
J Child Lang. 1989 Feb;16(1):121-40. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900013477.
Children aged 2;0 to 2;6 participated in a longitudinal study examining their acquisition of the English auxiliary system following a six-week period in which they were exposed to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Groups of children received enrichment utterances with the auxiliary could either in first position in the sentence, in middle position, or in both positions. Children in the front position group were significantly advanced over the other experimental groups in acquiring modal auxiliaries but not non-modals. However, none of the experimental groups differed significantly from a baseline group which received no additional could input. The implications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms of auxiliary acquisition and the nature of children's grammatical categories are discussed.
年龄在2岁0个月至2岁6个月的儿童参与了一项纵向研究，该研究考察了他们在六周时间内接触不同句子语境中额外助动词输入后对英语助动词系统的习得情况。儿童组接受的丰富话语中，助动词“could”要么处于句子首位，要么处于句子中间位置，要么在两个位置都出现。处于首位组的儿童在习得情态助动词方面比其他实验组有显著进步，但在习得非情态助动词方面并非如此。然而，没有一个实验组与未接受额外“could”输入的基线组有显著差异。文中讨论了这些发现对于理解助动词习得机制以及儿童语法类别的性质的意义。
