Analysis and generalization across verbs and constructions

Many studies have shown that children start to build schematic representations of syntactic constructions around those verbs that are most frequently used in these constructions. In some constructions, however, these frequent verbs are used with only a small number of other specific items. An analysis of German child-directed speech shows that many complement-taking verbs occur with a small variety of subject types. In an elicitation task German-speaking children at the age of 4;0 and 5;0 were asked to change the subject of high and low frequency verbs in simple transitive and complement-clause constructions. As has been shown before, children showed a stronger representation of the transitive construction when used with frequent verbs. For the complement-clause construction, however, we found reverse or no frequency effects, which suggest that items that are frequently used together are represented as unanalyzed chunks that only slowly turn into schematic representations. Keywords: Frequency; variability; complement clauses