Abstract

Much of children's early syntactic development can be seen as the acquisition of sentence-level constructions that correspond to relatively complex events and states of affairs. The current study was an attempt to determine the relative concreteness (verb-specificity) or abstractness (verb-generality) of such constructions for children just beginning to produce large numbers of multi-word utterances. Sixteen children at 2.0 years of age and sixteen children at 2,5 years of age participated (all English speaking). Each child was taught two novel verbs for a highly transitive action: one in a transitive construction (Ernie is tamming the car) and one in an intransitive construction (with patient äs subject: The ball is meeking). They were then given opportunities to use their newly learned verbs, in many cases in discourse situations that encouraged use of the "opposite" construction (i.e., agent and patient-focused questions). Results showed that 2.0-year-old children almost never produced an utterance using a novel verb in anything other than the construction in which it had been modeled. Children at 2.5 years of age were somewhat more productive, but still the large majority of these children avoided using the experimental verbs in nonmodeled constructions. These results suggest that when English-speaking children produce simple transitive and intransitive utterances in their spontaneous speech, they are doing so on a verb-specific basis (verb Island constructions), schematizing more abstract constructions only later äs they discover patterns that apply across many such lexically specific constructions.