Children's First Word Combinations

“A child’s ability to combine two words is considered as marking the emergence of his.her productive syntax (Braine & Bowerman, 1976), and it is a crucial syntactic milestone used to stage verbal abilities in ASD, for example, in both the ADOS and the revised Autism Diagnosis Interview (Lord et al.,…”

“Following Braine (1976), we adopt the working hypothesis that the early learner’s grammatical representations are more limited in length (or: arity) than those of adults.”

“Braine, 1976; Kuczaj & Brannick, 1979; Kuczaj & Maratsos, 1983; Ninio, 1988; Tomasello, 1992; Lieven, Pine & Baldwin, 1997; Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998; Theakston, Lieven, Pine & Rowland, 2001). In the case ofAdam’swh-question acquisition, the data donot show the type of all or nothing approach such ‘big rules’ predi…”

“Let us assume as Braine (1976) does that regardless of the target language children learn mapping rules which relate semantic functions to 'positions in the surface structure' (p.”

“But they assume that the generalizations are based on categories such as Agent Phrase or Action Phrase (see, e.g., Bowerman 1973, 1976, Braine 1976, Braine & Hardy 1982, Brown 1973, Schlesinger 1971a, 1971b, 1977, 1982).”

“…(are) things gone) h. nog: paardje 8 (2;1.10, week 110) ('more' (you play) horsie) (13) English child language a. that: daddy there (Daniel 1;8) (from Braine 1976) b. that's: horsie running (Nina 2;0.3) (Suppes corpus) c. is∂: goes there (Adam 2;10 ) (Brown corpus) d. wanna: lady open it (Daniel…”

“(4) Some formal device, such as statistically reliable order (Braine, 1976; Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1984) must be used to relate symbol categories across combinations.”

“…utterances like: more juice, more car, more read, more hot, with more in first utterances seem to be the product of highly restricted limited-scope formulae containing a relational lexical item (more, off) and a positionally specified empty slot for its argument: more+X, X+off (Braine 1976).”

“Indeed, research shows that in young children, much of their language use is constrained to (parts of) utterances they have used before [15] or comes from a small set of patterns like: ‘Where is X’ and ‘Want more X’ [16].”

“It also contradicts the principles identified by Braine (1976), who claims firstly, that certain semantic relationships are consistently mapped by positional formulae, and secondly questions the assumption that syntactic categories (parts of speech) exist in the linguistic systems of young children.”

“Non-imperative "subjectless" sentences are common in the corpora of Bloom (1970), Braine (1976), Brown (1973), and Bowerman (1973), and more generally in the language of children up to approximately three years old (or, of MLTJ up to 2.75), whereas "objectless" sentences are not.”

“In a careful examination of children's early two-word utterances, Braine (1976) found that children initially use "positional associative patterns" and "limited scope formulae" to produce utterances.”

“Second, several studies claim that demonstratives are among the earliest and most frequent child words (Braine, 1976; Clark, 1978), but these claims are based on sparse data.”

“High-frequency slot-and-frame patterns (Braine, 1976) or frames (Mintz, 2003) can strongly constrain the nature of the slot-filler, e.”

“…criterion for inclusion in a category (e.g. Braine’s 1963 pivot grammar), of nativist approaches (e.g. Pinker, 1984; Valian, 1991), and of early semanticist approaches, which suggest a semantic criterion for inclusion under each relation (e.g. Brown, 1973; Braine, 1976; Schlesinger, 1995).”

“This was indeed one of the major criticisms of the pivot-grammar theory of language acquisition (Braine, 1976), which described grammatical knowledge of two-year-olds with a simplified grammar.”

“In turn, children’s earliest utterances also revolve around lexically highly specific pivot schemas and item-based constructions (Braine and Bowerman, 1976; Tomasello, 2000; Diessel, 2013a), which only gradually expand to more complex utterances.”

“Later, Braine (1976) revised his account, emphasizing the role of “groping patterns” that established links based not on lexical class, but semantic relations.”

“In the past, various investigators (such as Braine 1976; or Maratsos 1982,1988) have treated this matter in methodologically cautious fashion: if we have no clear positive evidence pointing to a category clearly organized in adultlike terms overall, we should describe the child as, basically, not…”

“…in which words appear to be unordered, this period is of short duration, with the majority of early word combinations adhering to a positional productive pattern, that is, semantic relations expressed using the same word ordering, even with novel vocabulary (Braine & Bowerman, 1976, p. 90).”

“If we include these data on third person regular from the Appendix this gives us twelve morphemes for which we have sufficient data, and of these twelve, only third person irregular does not attain the criterion of 90% presence in obligatory contexts suggested by Cazden (1968) and Brown (1973).”

“Other theories consider the procedures whereby children learn syntax (e.g., Braine, 1976; Gleitman and Wanner, 1982; Maratsos & Chalkley, 1980; Pinker, 1984).”

“Hence, some researchers prefer a criterion of at least three to up to eight (Braine 1976) different forms in order to reduce the chance that the child has simply memorized two or three inflected forms without having analysed their morphological constituency.”

“Braine and Bowerman (1976) conceived of these frames as a pivot grammar in which children use so-called ‘pivot’ words and combine these with a range of other words to create lexical frames, such as more X.”

“Several theories have been proposed in the literatures regarding the mechanisms underlying infants’ initial learning of grammatical categories, e.g., semantic based theories [1,4,10], distributional based theories (e.g., [7,8]), and prosodic-phonological based theories ( e.g. [2,13,15] ).”

“Developing a theme of Bowerman's (1973), I argued (Braine 1976) that, on the phrase structure account, once a child has acquired one”

“…generalize itemspecific syntactic knowledge, or generate abstract syntactic schemas and constructions (e.g., Bloom et al. 1975; Bowerman 1973, 1982; Braine 1976; Brown 1973; Dabrowska 2000; Goldberg 1995, 1999; MacWhinney 1982; Morris et al. 2000; Pinker 1984, 1989; Schlesinger 1971; Tomasello…”

“The words constituting such combinations show little evidence of independent (Lieven et al., 1992) or creative (Braine, 1976) use.”

“3;3.20 Sarah 054 Braine (1976) refers to such apparently free word orders as groping patterns.”

“On the other hand, when a person or object being alluded to is of prime importance he/she/it is mentioned first (Daddy car, Book there) ( Braine, 1976 ).”

“Yet the individuality and uniqueness of mothers and children have also been documented (e.g., Bloom, 1970; Braine, 1976; Cazden, 1975; Ervin-Tripp, 1970; Gleason, 1973; Lewis and Freedle, 1973; Lord, 1975; Nelson, 1973).”

“For example, Braine (1976) found that the patterns of other + X, big + X, and two + X develop independently in children, and argues that it is inappropriate to ascribe to the children knowledge of the broad semantic relations category of modifier + noun.”

“…there is no evidence for either neutralization or the concept of subject; for example, 'there is no evidence for any uniform treatment of subjects of one place predicates ...' (Braine and Hardy 1982: 227) and 'there is little evidence for broad grammatical categories ...' (Braine 1976: 60).”

“It is suggested that children map form and function using two principles; semantic connectedness and positional patterning (see Bates & MacWhinney, 1987; Braine, 1976; MacWhinney, 1978, 1984).”

“…(including the so-called pivot-open combinations) are productive patterns consisting of predicates and their logical arguments (e.g., Gentner, 1978; MacWhinney, 1982; Ninio, 1988; Braine, 1976; Bloom, 1970; Bloom & Lahey, 1978; Deuchar & Quay, 2000; McCune-Nicolich, 1981; McCune & Vihman, 1999).”

“Secondly, the utterance is characterized by a consistent word order which reflects patterns heard in adult speech: the so-called positional associative pattern, see Braine (1976) .”

“The first word combinations tend to show regularities with respect to certain words, sometimes called ‘‘pivot’’ words (Braine, 1976; Tomasello, 2003).”

“These early multiword utterances are typically organized around a relational term, or ‘pivot word’ (Braine, 1976), such as a quantifier or verb, that is associated with an ‘open slot’ for certain types of lexical fillers (e.g.”

“This pattern of findings is consistent with prior research suggesting that in communication, requests emerge prior to comments (Bruner, 1981; Carpenter, Mastergeorge, & Coggins, 1983); requesting skills are also often targeted in intervention prior to commenting.”

“Although their utterances obey several syntactic rules [1], they are unable to apply these rules to a novel word (see [2] and [3]),”

“According to the classical idea of slot and frame patterns (Braine, 1976; Pine & Lieven, 1997), the early combinations of lexical units (i.”