CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 89Language Development and DisordersChild and Animal Learning DevelopmentSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

What preschool children do and do not do with ungrammatical word orders

Open access
Abbot-Smith, Kirsten, Lieven, Elena, Tomasello, Michael·2001·Cognitive Development
DOI 10.1016/s0885-2014(01)00054-5
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/s0885-2014(01)00054-5

Cites

2 of 2 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Children follow an experimenter's ungrammatical word order for low-frequency and novel verbs, but correct the use of a high-frequency verb to the word order in which it has frequently been attested in the input.

    “Similar findings are observed in so-called weird-word order studies (e.g. Akhtar, 1999; Abbot-Smith, Lieven & Tomasello, 2001; Matthews, Lieven, Theakston & Tomasello, 2005, 2007), in which children follow an experimenter's ungrammatical word order for low-frequency and novel verbs (e.g. Fox bear rammed, Elmo the car gopping), but correct the use of a high-frequency verb to the word order in which”

    From The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition (2015) · cites this paper as Abbot-Smith, Lieven & Tomasello, 2001

    The Results (section 3.1) show that 2-year-olds followed the experimenter’s ungrammatical order with a novel verb more often than they corrected it, but corrected the familiar verb “jump” more often. The paper did not test low-frequency familiar verbs, and its Discussion (section 4) reports that 3-year-olds usually corrected the novel verb too. Thus the claim captures the younger children’s novel-versus-familiar contrast but states it too broadly. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 15

  1. Akhtar, N. (1999). Acquiring basic word order: evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic struc- ture. Journal of Child Language, 26, 339 -356.
  2. Akhtar, N., & Tomasello, M. (1997). Young children's productivity with word order and verb mor- phology. Developmental Psychology, 33 (6), 952 -965.
  3. Bavin, E., & Growcott, C. (1999). Infants of 24 -30 months understand verb frames. In: M. Perkins, & S. Howard (Eds.), New directions in language development and disorders. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishing/Plenum.
  4. Bavin, E., & Kidd, E. (2000). Learning new verbs: beyond the input. In: C. Davis, T. J. van Gelder, & R. Wales (Eds.), Cognitive science in Australia 2000: Proceedings of the 5th Australasian cog- nitive science conference. Adelaide.
  5. Bybee, J. (1995). Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10 (5), 424 -455.
  6. Childers, J., & Tomasello, M. (in press). The role of pronouns in young children's acquisition of the English transitive construction. Developmental Psychology.
  7. Elman, J. (1998). Generalisation, simple recurrent networks, and the emergence of structure. In: M. A. Gernsbacher, & S. Derry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th annual conference of the cognitive science society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  8. Goldberg, A. (1999). The emergence of the semantics of argument structure constructions. In: B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The emergence of language. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  9. Jaakkola, R., & Akhtar, N. (2000). Assessing children's knowledge word order with familiar and novel verbs. In: E. Clark (Ed.), The Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp. 33 -40). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
  10. Langacker, R. (2000). A dynamic usage-based model. In: M. Barlow, & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Usage- based models of language. Stanford: CSLI.
  11. Lieven, E., Pine, J., & Baldwin, G. (1997). Lexically based learning and early grammatical develop- ment. Journal of Child Language, 24, 187 -219.
  12. Mandler, J. (2000). Perceptual and conceptual processes in infancy. Journal of Cognition and Devel- opment, 1, 3 -36.
  13. Morris, W., Cottrell, G., & Elman, J. (2000). A connectionist simulation of the empirical acquisition of grammatical relations. In: S. Wermter, & R. Sun (Eds.), Hybrid neural systems. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
  14. Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings. Journal of Child Language, 17, 357 -374.
  15. Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., Dodson, K., & Rekau, L. (1997). Differential productivity I young child- ren's use of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373 -387.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M.
Affiliations
Max Planck Society (DE)
ORCID
Venue
Cognitive Development
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2001-04
Volume
16
Issue
2
Pages
679-692
ISSN
0885-2014 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/s0885-2014(01)00054-5
OpenAlex
W2020976578
Cited by
89
References
2
Citations by year
2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 2
FWCI
5.12
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Cognitive Development (publishedVersion)
  • Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) (publishedVersion)
  • Kent Academic Repository (University of Kent) (submittedVersion)
  • Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (submittedVersion)
  • MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Keywords
word order, preschool children, intransitive constructions, canonical word order, novel verbs, syntactic development, language acquisition, linguistic categories, pronoun usage

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review