Twenty-five-month-old children do not have a grammatical category of verb

This study investigated experimentally the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Twenty-two to 25-month-old boys and girls were, in the context of playing a game over a several week period, exposed to eight novel verbs modeled with experimentally controlled argument structures and verb inflections. The question was whether, when, and in what ways the children would become productive with these verbs in their spontaneous speech, going beyond the particular linguistic forms they had heard. In terms of verb-argument structure, the results showed that children most often followed the surface structure of the model, regardless of the argument they were trying to express. Thus, when children had heard an argument expressed for a verb, they almost always marked that argument correctly in their own utterances; when they had not heard an argument expressed for a particular verb, their correct marking dropped to chance levels. The children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use the newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving noun-like uses and the appending of locatives. Results are discussed in terms of Tomasello's (1992) Verb Island hypothesis. © 1993 Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Tomasello Psychology & Neuroscience