Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Dev Sci. 2024 Nov;27(6):e13543. doi: 10.1111/desc.13543. Epub 2024 Jul 4.
There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as "She play tennis" and "Mummy eating" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such errors? In this study, we test the assumption that children's ability to recover from error is related to their developing sensitivity to longer-range dependencies. We use a pre-registered corpus analysis to explore the predictive value of different cues with regards to children's verb-marking errors and observe a developmental pattern consistent with this account. We look at context-independent cues (the identity of the specific verb being used) and at the relative value of context-dependent cues (the identity of the specific subject+verb sequence being used). We find that the only consistent effect across a group of 2- to 3-year-olds and a group of 3- to 4-year-olds is the relative frequency of unmarked forms of specific subject+verb sequences being used. The relative frequency of unmarked forms of the verb alone is predictive only in the younger age group. This is consistent with an account in which children recover from making errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to context, at first the immediately preceding lexical contexts (e.g., the subject that precedes the verb) and eventually more distant grammatical markers (e.g., the fronted auxiliary that precedes the subject in questions). RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We provide a corpus analysis investigating input effects on young children's verb-marking errors (e.g., Mummy go) across development (between 2 and 4 years of age). We find evidence that these apparent errors of omission are in fact input-driven errors of commission that persist into the third year of life. We compare the relative effect on error rates of context-independent (e.g., verb) and context-dependent (e.g., subject+verb sequence) cues across developmental time. Our findings support the proposal that children recover from making verb-marking errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to preceding context.
有大量证据表明，儿童在说出“她打网球”和“妈妈在吃饭”等句子时明显省略语法词素，实际上是一种合取错误，即儿童在语境许可的情况下，以一种无视语境的方式复制了输入语中的非标记形式。那么，儿童是如何停止犯此类错误的呢？在这项研究中，我们检验了这样一种假设，即儿童从错误中恢复的能力与他们对长距离依赖关系的敏感性发展有关。我们使用预先注册的语料库分析来探索不同线索对儿童动词标记错误的预测价值，并观察到与这一解释一致的发展模式。我们既关注语境独立线索（正在使用的特定动词的身份），也关注语境依赖线索（正在使用的特定主语+动词序列的身份）的相对价值。我们发现，在一组 2 至 3 岁儿童和一组 3 至 4 岁儿童中，唯一具有一致性的影响因素是正在使用的特定主语+动词序列的非标记形式的相对频率。仅在年龄较小的群体中，动词的非标记形式的相对频率具有预测性。这与一种解释一致，即儿童通过逐渐对语境更加敏感来从错误中恢复，首先是对紧邻的词汇语境（例如，在动词之前的主语）敏感，最终是对更远的语法标记（例如，在疑问句中位于主语之前的前置助动词）敏感。研究亮点：我们提供了一项语料库分析，研究了输入对年轻儿童动词标记错误（例如，妈妈走）的影响，该研究涉及发展过程（2 至 4 岁）。我们发现，这些明显的省略错误实际上是输入驱动的合取错误，它们一直持续到 3 岁。我们比较了语境独立（例如，动词）和语境依赖（例如，主语+动词序列）线索对错误率的相对影响，跨越了发展时间。我们的研究结果支持这样一种观点，即儿童通过对前面的语境变得越来越敏感来从动词标记错误中恢复。
