Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 178–196
This chapter reports an experimental study in which children aged 4;9–6;1 were taught two novel constructions with meanings of enabling/helping and preventing/stopping with OSV and VOS word order. The aim was to test Tomasello’s (2003) proposal that children form abstract constructions by performing analogical structure mapping across lexically-specific slot-and-frame patterns (e.g., He’s [X]ing it) and/or particular sentences that instantiate them. All surface cues were minimized, such that successful learning of the construction required children to align the relational structure (i.e., helper-action-helpee or preventer-action-preventee, as appropriate) of the training sentences. A forced-choice pointing test revealed that children did not successfully learn either the constructions’ global meanings or argument linking patterns (though a control group of adults succeeded at the latter task).