Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA.
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, Merseyside, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Dev Sci. 2021 Nov;24(6):e13125. doi: 10.1111/desc.13125. Epub 2021 Jun 1.
Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently-encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word sequences that are infrequent and thus unfamiliar to them than for those that are frequent. In this study, we investigate whether children's knowledge of multiword sequences can explain a phenomenon that has long represented a key theoretical fault line in the study of language development: errors of subject-auxiliary non-inversion in question production (e.g., "why we can't go outside?"). In doing so we consider a type of error that has been ignored in discussion of multiword sequences to date. Previous work has focused on errors of omission - an absence of accurate productions for infrequent phrases. However, if children make use of dedicated representations for frequent sequences of words in their productions, we might also expect to see errors of commission - the appearance of frequent phrases in children's speech even when such phrases are not appropriate. Through a series of corpus analyses, we provide the first evidence that the global input frequency of multiword sequences (e.g., "she is going" as it appears in declarative utterances) is a valuable predictor of their errorful appearance (e.g., the uninverted question "what she is going to do?") in naturalistic speech. This finding, we argue, constitutes powerful evidence that multiword sequences can be represented as linguistic units in their own right.
过去十年的心理语言学研究表明，儿童的语言知识包括专门用于频繁出现的多词序列的表示。这方面的重要证据来自对儿童产出的研究：研究反复表明，对于儿童来说不常见且不熟悉的词序列，他们的言语错误率更高，而对于那些常见的词序列则更低。在这项研究中，我们探讨了儿童对多词序列的知识是否可以解释一个长期以来一直是语言发展研究中的关键理论分歧的现象：在疑问句中主语-助动词不反转的错误（例如，“为什么我们不能出去？”）。在这样做的过程中，我们考虑了到目前为止在讨论多词序列时被忽略的一种类型的错误。以前的工作主要集中在省略错误上——即对不常见的短语缺乏准确的产生。然而，如果儿童在其产生中使用了专门针对高频词序列的表示，我们也可能会看到误用错误——即高频短语出现在儿童的言语中，即使这种短语不合适。通过一系列语料库分析，我们首次提供了证据表明，多词序列的全局输入频率（例如，在陈述句中出现的“she is going”）是其在自然语言中出现错误的有价值的预测指标（例如，未反转的疑问句“what she is going to do?*”）。我们认为，这一发现有力地证明了多词序列可以作为独立的语言单位来表示。
