Children's First Word Combinations

“…Vosse & Kempen, 2000), and language acquisition theories often emphasize the lexical nature of early syntax (Bates & Goodman, 2001; Bowerman, 1976; Braine, 1976; Lieven, Behrens, Speares, & Tomasello, 2003; Lieven, Pine, & Baldwin, 1997; Pine & Lieven, 1997; Theakston, Lieven, Pine, & Rowland,…”

“Evidence also suggests that children may first acquire frames for particular words and then later extend that information to classes of words (e.g., Braine, 1976; Brooks, Tomasello, Dodson, and Lewis, 1999; Lieven, Pine and Baldwin, 1997; Pine and Lieven, 1993; Rowland and Pine, 2000; Tomasello,…”

“Bowerman (1976) suggested that one of her two English-speaking children had many such item-specific constructions, MacWhinney (1978) suggested the same for at least some of his Hungarian-speaking children, and Braine (1976) found many item-specific patterns in the spontaneous speech of several children learning a numb…”

“There have been extensive studies of childrenÕs early syntactic development (e.g., Bloom, 1970; Braine, 1976; Brown & Fraser, 1964; Brown & Hanlon, 1970).”

“It has been known for many years that much of English-speaking children's early language can be analyzed in terms of specific linguistic items and phrases with open slots (e.g., Braine, 1976; Clark, 1974; Ewing, 1982; MacWhinney, 1978).”

“Verb islands and other item-based constructions Early work in developmental psycholinguistics, such as that of Braine (1976) and Bowerman (1976), found many highly concrete, highly local, item-based patterns in corpora of many di€erent children learning many di€erent languages.”

“…conservatively produce syntactic patterns on a verb-byverb basis (Akhtar and Tomasello 1997; Baker 1979; Bates and MacWhinney 1987; Bowerman 1982; Braine 1976; Brooks and Tomasello 1999; Gropen et al. 1989; Ingram and Thompson 1996; Lieven et al. 1997; MacWhinney 1982; Olguin and Tomasello 1993;…”

“systems have been proposed to account for children's multiword expressions (e.g., Bloom & Lahey 1978; Braine 1976; Brown 1973).”

“…show the prototypical ‘pivot look’ characteristic of the early multi-word speech of many children speaking the world’s languages (Brown, 1973; Braine, 1976), with copula frames (There’s the W, That’s —, Where’s —?) phrases which are probably whole utterances in the adult corpus as well…”

“There are also dramatic cross-language contrasts in the word orders that predominate in first word combinations, and in the degree to which word order regularities are observed at all (Bates, 1976; Braine, 1976 ).”

“The ages at which the children began producing two-word combinations on our videotapes ranged from 18 to 26.5 months, an age span that falls within the range typically reported for the onset of two-word speech (cf. Bloom & Capatides, 1987; Bowerman, 1973; Braine, 1976).”

“as proposed by Braine (1976). These findings suggest that the development of an adultlike”

“” The word order syntax test was similar to the syntax items used in Experiment 1 and was based on a study by Caramazza and Zurif (1976). Some sentences were semantically constrained in that semantics yields only one sensible construal.”

“That is to say, such phrases may provide the child with templates, which, although initially unanalysed, have the potential for further subsequent analysis and conversion into lexically-based patterns (Braine, 1976).”

“The standard definitions are those of Braine in his classic (1976) monograph and of Pine and Lieven (1993, pp.”

“Typically developing toddlers begin to put words together in utterances like " more juice " , " hurt nose " and " daddy car " (Braine 1976).”

“These verb island constructions often have open nominal slots, as in the classic pivot constructions with which many children begin language (Braine, 1976).”

“For example, Brown (1973), Bowerman (1973), Braine (1976) , and Slobin (1985) all suggested that early child language was organized around conceptual categories (e.g., action, actor) which serve as an entry point into syntax.”

“In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of investigators speculated that word order should be easier than case and agreement for children to learn as a syntactic device because canonical ordering is so fundamental to so many sensory-motor and cognitive activities (Braine, 1976; Bruner, 1975; McNeill, 1966; Pinker, 1981).”

“Children’s first word combinations typically have a frame-and-slot schematic form, relying an adult verbs or “pivots” such as kiss or gone (Braine, 1976).”

“This hypothesis is compatible —as the innatelinking-rule hypothesis of course is not — with earlier proposals by Bowerman (1973), Braine (1976), Brown (1973), and Schlesinger (1971) that children do not know anything about subjects and objects in the beginning but first crack into syntax by learning how to position wo…”

“…input, the child was starting to abstract over them to form a more general category of wh-auxiliary sequences but that this process was not complete as indicated by his production of some sequences in both correct and non-inverted order (an example of what Braine, 1976, called ‘groping patterns’).”

“Observations of this kind first became introduced with Braine’s concepts of limited scope formulae (Braine 1976), and are also known as slot and frame patterns (Pine and Lieven 1997; Lieven et al. 1997; Pine, Lieven and Rowland 1998).”

“They suggested that high frequency lexical items used in fixed sentence positions provide an organizational focus for children’s developing knowledge of argument structure (see also Braine, 1976 ; Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997).”

“Tomasello, 2003). Schematization relies on systematic variation within a consistent frame to create a more abstract schema (Childers & Tomasello, 2001; Theakston, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003; Tomasello, Akhtar, Dodson, & Rekau, 1997), and evidence for the use of such schemas has been found in the naturalistic speech of…”

“’ After that they begin to use ‘pivot words ’ (Braine, 1963, 1976), such as ‘my’ or ‘off, ’ as in ‘my doll, ’ ‘my nose, ’ ‘my shoe, ’ or boot off, light off, or water off.”

“As MacWhinney (1975, 1978, 1982, 1987) and Braine (1971, 1976, 1987) have noted, the child appears to be guided by two principles in deciding what to correlate with what.”

“Bellugi & Brown 1964, Braine 1976), Finnish (Bowerman 1973), German (Stern & Stern 1928), Japanese (Sanches 1968), Korean (Park 1970), Modern Hebrew (Braine 1976), Italian (Bates 1976), Samoan (Kernan 1969), or Swedish (Lange & Larsson 1973). So deictic words appear early and frequently, in both one- and two-word utte…”

“However, as Martin Braine was the first to report (Braine 1976), there are striking differences across languages in the linguistic forms that 2-year-olds use to convey these meanings.”

“…concepts that 1–2-year-olds try to express are remarkably similar from one language to another (negation, possession, location, disappearance, etc. (Braine, 1976), but that variations in the forms used by very young children to express these concepts are strikingly different from one language to…”

“Only later - perhaps by age three or four — do children come to understand word order in the same way that adults do (e.g. Bowerman, 1973; Braine, 1976; Maratsos, 1983).”

“One type of theories focuses on the use of semantic cues for assigning words to initial grammatical categories (e.g., Braine, 1976; Pinker, 1984).”

“Braine, 1976; MacWhinney, 1982). Recent work has provided strong support for this position by presenting evidence suggesting initial lexical specificity in domains such as argument structure in English (Tomasello, 1992, 2000), subject–verb agreement in Brazilian Portuguese (Rubino & Pine, 1998), and question formation…”

“…consistency, generally consisting of a nominal and action words or modi ers (Bloom, 1970), this may be due to the infant’s word order preferences (Braine, 1976; Tomasello, 1992), or to constraints imposed by semantics or communicative intent (Sachs, 1976), rather than knowledge of grammatical…”

“Braine: This subdirectory contains a short set of early utterances reported in Braine (1976).”

“through, all wet ( Braine 1976, p.9 ), are examples of this limited kind of productivity.”

“The second hypothesis, a formal one, would predict that to is acquired as children come to recognize the distributional regularity of to in adult speech (e.g., as Braine, 1976; and Maratsos & Chalkley, 1980, have argued for other linguistic forms in child data).”

“As in some of the earlier proposals such as Braine (1976), usage-based theories propose that expressions in early child language are dominated by concrete expressions or item-based constructions limited to lexically specific patterns (e.”

“It is only over the course of learning an increasingly sophisticated and interrelated lexicon that grammatical structures become encoded in terms of their abstract syntactic form (e.g., Akhtar, 1999; Braine, 1976; Lieven, Pine, & Baldwin, 1997; Tomasello, 2003).”

“The ages at which the sighted children began producing two-word combinations on our videotapes ranged from 18 to 22.5 months, an age span that falls within the range typically reported for the onset of two-word speech (cf. Bloom & Capatides, 1987; Bowerman, 1973; Braine, 1976).”

“…German, and English, CDS is lexically restricted and patterned in a way that could in principle help account in part for empirical findings of initial lexically based performance in child grammatical acquisition (particularly of English e.g., Braine, 1976; D a˛ browska & Lieven, 2005; Peters, 1983).”

“At both ages, these measures of language are characterized by substantial variation, and these individual differences appear to be valid indexes of later linguistic or cognitive functioning (Bates et al., 1988; Bates, O'Connell , & Shore, 1987; Braine, 1976; Slobin, 1982).”

“It is easy to see that mastery of short subpropositional constituents would facilitate this matching for multi-word sentences; it is worth noting, therefore, that there is plenty of evidence for their existence in children’s early word combinations (e.g., Braine, 1976 ).”

“Naturalistic data analysis is recognised as one of the primary tools in the investigation of children’s language acquisition and has played a key role in the formation and evaluation of all major theoretical frameworks (e.g. Braine, 1976; Pinker, 1984; Radford, 1990; Valian, 1986).”