Children’s Early Acquisition of Syntactic Category: A Corpus-Based Analysis of English Determiner-Noun Combinational Flexibility

Abstract

While the generativist account posits that an abstract specification of syntactic categories is innate and children show adult-like performance from an early stage, the constructivist account postulates that children’s early acquisition of grammatical categories is item-based and reflects limited rules later. The present study tests these assumptions in a specific category, the English determiners. More specifically, we took the controlled measures of overlap (e.g., the use of definite article the and indefinite articles a/an before the same noun type) in 16 children and their mothers’ spontaneous speech as an indicator of determiner-noun combinational flexibility. A series of three studies were conducted, in which we strictly controlled the impact of differences between children and adults in lexical knowledge. In Study 1 and Study 2, we find that children’s use of determiners shows a significant difference from adults but this difference disappeared later. Furthermore, Study 3 investigates the influence of external environment with birth order and family’s social class as factors and emphasizes that the input factor is worthy of further investigation in future studies. These findings are consistent with one of the constructivist claims, namely that children’s early acquisition of determiners is not category-based and their flexibility in using determiners gradually approximates that of adults with development.