What kinds of mistakes do kids make in their sentences? Why do we see them leaving things out so much more often than putting things in wrong? In this week's episode, we talk about grammatical conservatism: what it means, some ways it shows up, and what it can tell us about language and how kids use it.
This is Topic #64!
This week's tag language: Mongolian!
Related topics:
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Last episode:
A Finite State of Affairs: The Chomsky Hierarchy and the Complexity of Language - • How Complex is Natural Language? The ...
Other of our language acquisition videos:
Flipping Switches: Parameter Resetting and Second Language Acquisition - • How Much Can We Adjust Our Second Lan...
Kids Be Frontin': Children's Phonological Mistakes - • Why Do Little Kids Make So Many Speec...
Child Actors and Child Judges: How To Test Young Kids' Language - • Child Language Experiments
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If you're curious about the analysis of the Compounding Parameter and what underlies it that lets it capture both verb-particle constructions and creative compounding, take a look at section 5 of William Snyder's 2011 paper here: web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/BUCLD35_Plenary.pdf
Sources:
Much of the discussion of grammatical conservatism comes from William Snyder's work, on his own and with various colleagues. We used the following sources:
Maratsos, Michael (1998). The acquisition of grammar. In Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 2, 421–466.
Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, Miguel (2008). The acquisition of Differential Object Marking in Spanish. Probus 20:111–145.
Snyder, William (2001). On the nature of syntactic variation: Evidence from complex predicates and complex word-formation. Language 77: 324-342.
Snyder, William (2007). Child Language: The Parametric Approach. OUP.
Snyder, William (2008). Children’s Grammatical Conservatism: Implications for linguistic theory. In T. Sano et al. (eds.), An Enterprise in the Cognitive Science of Language: A Festschrift for Yukio Otsu. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobu.
Snyder, William. (2011). Children's Grammatical Conservatism: Implications for syntactic theory [Plenary Address]. In Nick Danis, Kate Mesh & Hyunsuk Sung (eds.) BUCLD 35: Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Volume I, 1-20. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Sugisaki, Koji and Miwa Isobe (2000). Resultatives result from the compounding parameter: On the acquisitional correlation between resultatives and N-N compounds in Japanese. In Proceedings of the 19th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 493-506. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Sugisaki, Koji & William Snyder. (2003) Do parameters have default values? Evidence from the acquisition of English and Spanish. In Yukio Otsu (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, 215-237. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.
Looking forward to next week!
The Ling Space