[Paper Review - Psycholinguistics] Syntactic Categories in the Speech of Young Children (Valian, 1986)

Syntactic categories in the speech of young children

Valian (1986)

 2;0, 2;5 MLU 2.93-4.14 

• Determiner, adjective, noun, noun phrase, preposition, & prepositional phrase 
• Showed evidence all categories 
• Children are sensitive very early in life to abstract, formal properties of the speech / syntactic knowledge at an earlier point  

1. Semantic viewpoint: treatments of semantic roles presuppose a phrasal segmentation of the sentence (e.g., NP -> agent) 
2. Syntactic viewpoint: most treatments of grammatical relations define such relations over syntactic categories. 
3. Developmental viewpoint: category acquisition puts temporal constraints on theories of how syntactic knowledge is acquired. 

• Subjects: 6 children (2;0-2;5), MLU 2.93-4.14, utterances 52-689 

• Recording & transcribing: tape-recorded & transcribed by the observer 
  

• Utterances: by intonation and syntax 
• Preliminary category assignment: the child's error of not knowing which category a word belonged to would be misdescribed as the child's having deficient understanding of how adjectives pattern.  

• Procedures used to test category assignment 

• What expressions another expression can precede and follow 
• Use of the single-word or single-expression "substitutability" test 
• Multiple-appearance test: a category should show up in all its existing syntactic variations in each location where it is allowed 
• Subcategories method: the main method used here is the restriction of different words to different subclasses (e.g., the restriction of a to singular Ns.)  
• Specific category criteria