Do young children have adult-like syntactic categories? Zipf’s law and the case of the determiner

• Published in: Cognition 2013-06, Vol.127 (3), p.345-360
• Main Authors: Pine, Julian M., Freudenthal, Daniel, Krajewski, Grzegorz, Gobet, Fernand
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adults; Biological and medical sciences; Caregivers; Child; Child Development; Child, Preschool; Comparative Analysis; Databases, Factual; Developmental psychology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grammatical development; Humans; Language; Language Development; Lexical specificity; Male; Nouns; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Sample Size; Sampling; Semantics; Statistical Distributions; Syntactic categories; Syntax; Vocabulary; Young Children; Zipf’s law
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.02.006

► We test the claim that the lexical specificity of children’s early category use is a sampling artifact. ► We show that measures that do not control for vocabulary range underestimate the flexibility of caregivers’ category use. ► We show that children’s category use is significantly less flexible than that of their caregivers’. ► We show that children’s category use becomes significantly more flexible with development. ► Our results suggest that children do not have adult-like categories during the early stages. Generativist models of grammatical development assume that children have adult-like grammatical categories from the earliest observable stages, whereas constructivist models assume that children’s early categories are more limited in scope. In the present paper, we test these assumptions with respect to one particular syntactic category, the determiner. This is done by comparing controlled measures of overlap in the set of nouns with which children and their caregivers use different instances of the determiner category in their spontaneous speech. In a series of studies, we show, first, that it is important to control for both sample size and vocabulary range when comparing child and adult overlap measures; second, that, once the appropriate controls have been applied, there is significantly less overlap in the nouns with which young children use the determiners a/an and the in their speech than in the nouns with which their caregivers use these same determiners; and, third, that the level of (controlled) overlap in the nouns that the children use with the determiners a/an and the increases significantly over the course of development. The implication is that children do not have an adult-like determiner category during the earliest observable stages, and that their knowledge of the determiner category only gradually approximates that of adults as a function of their linguistic experience.