Usage-based approaches to language acquisition argue that children acquire the grammar of their target language using general-cognitive learning principles. The current paper reports on an experiment that tested a central assumption of the usage-based approach: argument structure patterns are connected to high frequency verbs that facilitate…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., "The frog is pushing the lion", when the lion was actually the "agent" or "doer" of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All…

Using the weird word order methodology (Akhtar, 1999), we investigated children's understanding of SVO word order in French, a language with less consistent argument ordering patterns than English. One hundred and twelve French children (ages 2;10 and 3;9) heard either high or low frequency verbs modelled in either SOV or VSO order (both…

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this "distributed learning effect" with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children…

Analyzed three main types of English dative constructions--the double-object dative, the "to" dative, and the "for" dative--in the spontaneous speech of seven children aged 1.6-5 years. Results provide a starting point for determining the underlying representations for the different kinds of dative constructions and for explicating how children…

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in…

Examined the role of animacy and pronouns as children ages 2 to 3 years acquired transitive construction. Participants learned two nonce verbs, one of which was modeled in several transitive sentence frames and the other in neutral sentence frames. Many children produced transitive sentences with the first verb, but only children near age 3…