2024/06/24 by Zoey Liu, Haiyin Yang, Jarrod Cruz +1
#child language development #constituent ordering preferences #the English dative alternation
paper · doi:10.7275/scil.2224
This study investigates syntactic ordering preferences in child and parent speech in English, using the dative alternation as the test case. To that end, we present the largest-to-date dataset of the dative construction containing 38,780 utterances (child: 8,066; parent: 30,714). We show that: (1) children's production of the dative structure starts as early as 12-18 months, with the production of the double object structure preceding that of the prepositional object structure; (2) there is a relatively consistent preference for the double object structure along children's developmental trajectory; (3) overall, children's production of the dative alternation does not reach parent levels until around 54-60 months; (3) from logistic regression analysis, there is a significant effect for the length, givenness, and nominal type of the theme, respectively, and that their effects are robust starting at an early age of the children.