Input Factors in Early Verb Acquisition: Do Word Frequency and Word Order Variability of Verbs Matter?

Chapter
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Part of the Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics book series (SITP, volume 39)

Abstract

While simplex verbs show word order variability in main clauses and subordinated clauses in standard German, the verb particle of morphologically complex particle verbs is syntactically less variable: It generally occurs in sentence final position. Acquisition data reveal that telic verb particles appear in German-speaking children’s speech around 14 months of age, even earlier than the first simplex verbs. Using a longitudinal design, we examine whether children’s early preference for telic verb particles can be explained by word frequency and/or word order variability in the ambient language. The analysed data comprises 5,001 utterances from three mothers recorded in eight 1-h home sessions when the children’s ages were 14, 16, 18, and 20 months. While simple input frequency does not influence children’s early verb acquisition, it is shown that the factor ‘word order variability’, i.e. less syntactic variation in the input, favours children’s early acquisition. Thus, it is concluded that children seem to adhere to learning mechanisms that make use of the parental input in a specific way, by taking into account the structural properties of the target language.

Keywords

Early verb acquisition Endstate-orientation Telic verb particles Simplex verbs Word frequency Word order variability Parental input 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This chapter is based on the first author’s diploma thesis and is part of the project ‘Language production and language comprehension’ within the research group German Language Development (GLAD), supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG, FOR 381) and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig. Portions of this work were presented at the conference on ‘Emergence of linguistic abilities’ (ELA) 2005, the GLOW (2007) Acquisition Workshop ‘Optionality in the input’, and at the University of Frankfurt. We are very grateful for the comments and suggestions from the audiences at these presentations. Furthermore, we like to thank Anne Ballhorn, Anja Kersten, Anja Müller, Katalin Sebestyen und Ramona Wenzel for their help in collecting the spontaneous speech data and Sybille Reif for help with the analysis of the child data.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University FrankfurtFrankfurt am MainGermany

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