Annual Review of Language Acquisition - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2001

This article presents a model of prosodic structure development that takes account of the fundamental continuity between child and adult systems, the surface level divergence of child forms from their adult target forms, and the overall developmental paths of prosodic structure. The main empirical base for the study comes from longitudinal data collected from three Japanese-speaking children (1; 0–2; 6). Evidence for word-internal prosodic constituents including the mora and the foot is found in compensatory lengthening phenomena, syllable size restrictions and word size restrictions in early word production. By implementing the representational principles that organize these prosodic categories as rankable and violable constraints, Optimality Theory can provide a systematic account of the differences in the prosodic structure of child and adult Japanese while assuming representational continuity between the two. A constraint-based model of prosodic structure acquisition is also shown to demarcate the learning paths in a way that is consistent with the data.

In the literature, John threw the ball up and The baby threw his dinner up have both been treated as members of the set of verb particle constructions (VPC). Syntactic evidence from action nominalizations, insertion of degree adverbials, contrastive stress, and gapped constructions (Fraser, 1976) suggests that the VPC must be bifurcated into two classes: a verb adverb construction (VAC) containing a verb, a complement, and an adverb and a VPC with a verb, complement, and a particle. Literature on the acquisition of the VPC has not taken this distinction into account. This article focuses on the acquisition of the VAC. The patterning on syntactic tests is a result of the fact that adverbs are predicators and particles are not. Additional syntactic tests (initial coordination of adverbs and adverbs+PPs and placing locative adverbs in argument positions) suggest that adverbs (not particles) are phrasal constituents: the adverb takes the apparent object as its subject. The bifurcation of the VPC and the suggested structure are supported by evidence from child language acquisition. Children treat the two constructions differently from the earliest stages. Crucially, the overwhelming error (79%) in VAC use is dropping the grammatical object. The timing of this error corresponds to that of subject drop in the null subject stage.

The relationship is examined between two different domains of lexical development: innovative compounding and access to abstract lexical relations. The creation of novel compounds as appropriate labels for novel concepts requires the accessibility of relatively abstract relations between word meanings in the mental lexicon. In a picture naming task in which novel concepts have to be labeled (e.g., a vehicle that can both sail and drive) children’s production of appropriate novel compounds (e.g., car-boat) increases with age. This compound production is, independently of age, related to children’s ability to access coordinate lexical relations (such as between cat and dog) in a contrastive word association task (‘a cat is not a...?’). It is proposed that this connection between innovative compounding and access to coordinate relations is cognitive in nature and involves a common ability for lexical comparisons. Innovative compounding reflects comparison ‘on the spot’ between the novel concept and available related word meaning knowledge, and contrastive coordinate production reflects the results of developmentally earlier comparison processes evoked by adult contrastive input.