The role of Function Words to build syntactic knowledge in French-speaking children

The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers. Are early multiword utterances based on lexically specific patterns or rather abstract grammatical relations? In this corpus study, we analyzed FWs having a highly predictable distri...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2022-01, Vol.12 (1), p.544-544, Article 544
Main Authors: Le Normand, Marie-Thérèse, Thai-Van, Hung
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/477
631/477/2811
Auxiliary verbs
Child language
Children
Cognitive science
Computer applications
Corpus analysis
Demonstratives
Early second language learning
Factor analysis
French language
Function words
Grammatical relations
Grammatical subject
Humanities and Social Sciences
Hypotheses
Knowledge
Language
Linguistics
Mean length of utterance
Monolingualism
Morphemes
Morphological analysis
Morphology
multidisciplinary
Phonology
Prepositions
Pronouns
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Speaking
Statistical analysis
Syntactic complexity
Syntax
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Summary:The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers. Are early multiword utterances based on lexically specific patterns or rather abstract grammatical relations? In this corpus study, we analyzed FWs having a highly predictable distribution in relation to Mean Length Utterance (MLU) an index of syntactic complexity in a large naturalistic sample of 315 monolingual French children aged 2 to 4 year-old. The data was annotated with a Part Of Speech Tagger (POS-T), belonging to computational tools from CHILDES. While eighteen FWs strongly correlated with MLU expressed either in word or in morpheme, stepwise regression analyses showed that subject pronouns predicted MLU. Factor analysis yielded a bifactor hierarchical model: The first factor loaded sixteen FWs among which eight had a strong developmental weight (third person singular verbs, subject pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, modals, demonstrative pronouns and plural markers), whereas the second factor loaded complex FWs (possessive verbs and object pronouns). These findings challenge the lexicalist account and support the view that children learn grammatical forms as a complex system based on early instead of late structure building. Children may acquire FWs as combining words and build syntactic knowledge as a complex abstract system which is not innate but learned from multiple word input sentences context. Notably, FWs were found to predict syntactic development and sentence complexity. These results open up new perspectives for clinical assessment and intervention.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-021-04536-6