Thomas Herbst - Constructions Collocations Patterns

We know that there are significant correlations with many aspects of CDS and childrens language development. Parents who elaborate on the childs focus of attention have children with larger vocabularies (Kidd et al. 2007).

CDS is a genre with a number of well-established characteristics: utterances tend to have exaggerated prosody, to be shorter than those addressed to adults, to concentrate on the here-and-now and to have a relatively high proportion of questions and imperatives all of which makes perfect sense from the point of view of communicating with a two-year-old. In a study of 12 English-speaking childrens development between 2;03;0, Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven and Tomasello (2003) found that only 18% of CDS utterances were in canonical SVO word order, while 32% were questions and 15% were copulas. The authors then analysed the first 13 words of each utterance in these categories and defined a frame whenever the same word or string of words occurred at the beginning of utterances more than 4 times. They found that 77% of copula utterances were accounted for by just 8 frames and 67% of questions by 20 frames. Of course this is not surprising: it is explained by the fact that English has only a limited range of wh -words and auxiliaries, and that inversion applies only to the copula and auxiliaries in English (unlike German, where main verbs can be inverted). However it means that children are hearing a very great deal of repetition at the beginnings of utterances and that this might aid them in extracting frames with slots. Indeed the study found that 45% of the mothers utterances began with one of 17 words and that 52 core frames (frames used by more than half the mothers) accounted for 51% of all utterances. Examples of frames are A X, Its a X , What do X ?, Are you X ?, Lets X .

However compared to many other languages, English has more rigid word order and very impoverished morphology. This could mean that it is easier for children to extract slot and frame patterns from what they hear in English input than it would be in other languages. In a study using methods very similar to Abbot-Smith and Lieven (2009) analysed English, German and Russian CDS for the presence of frames at the beginnings of utterances. They found differences deriving from the typological differences between the languages: the absence of the copula in the present tense in Russian and of determiners meant that the Russian data had a higher proportion of shorter frames than English or German; and the presence of OVS word order and main verb inversion in German reduced the overall number of frames per mother. At the same time, the level of repetitiveness at the beginnings of utterances, as measured by the proportion of utterances accounted for by frames, was high for all three languages over 70%. Again, this almost certainly reflects a common approach to interaction with two-year-olds in these groups of mothers.

A rather different approach to the potential of frames in CDS to assist language learning was pioneered by number of different categories. Thus das was used as a pronoun if it was followed by a verb or an adverb, but was used as a determiner if it was followed by a noun or a pronoun. A second possibility suggested by Mintz (2003) is that languages with more flexible word order than English might give better categorisation accuracy if the analysis was based on morphemes rather than words. This latter is an important point: many languages of the world have far more elaborate morphology than the Indo-European or East-Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, which have been the main focus of study to date. For instance, Chintang, until recently, an undocumented, polysynthetic, Tibeto-Burman language of Eastern Nepal, has around 2000 verbal inflections. Children learning this language are more likely to extract morphological frames than word-based frames (Stoll et al. 2012).