Object-iniital languages

[dkp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU]

Just once, in watching my child (Josh) acquire language, did I hear him produce
an object initial sentence: "Pepsi want Josh"...he was probably 2.5 years
old (roughly...I could dig up my notes if anyone really cares...he's 17 now)...since
he was with either myself or my husband all the time, this is probably the
only word order violation of such magnitude that he produced outloud...probably
supporting your hypothesis that that this stuff is very rare and disappears
quickly once the mistake is realized.

Dianne Patterson, Ph.D.
University of Arizona

>-- Original Message --
>Date:         Mon, 28 Oct 2002 19:11:06 -0500
>Reply-To: Brian MacWhinney <macw at CMU.EDU>
>From: Brian MacWhinney <macw at CMU.EDU>
>Subject: Re: Object-iniital languages
>To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU
>
>
>Dear ?sten,
>
>  I have never seen a sentence like "Ich krank bin" in any of the German
>child corpora in CHILDES.  I agree with you that it is difficult in general
>to find German child language sentences that cannot be matched to some adult
>word order, if one allows for omissions, which are typically possible even
>for adults, although at a lower frequency.  What we see mostly in German
>child language are lots of SV units, and a distinctly smaller number of
VS,
>OV and VO units.  Full combinations into SVO or SOV are absent at first
and
>rare for quite awhile.
>  However, arguments based on the child's productions, although empirically
>well grounded, may be making a fundamental error.  After all, the child
is
>spending a lot of time listening to sentences before speaking and it is
>likely that she/he picks up a fuller word order in comprehension before
it
>is demonstrated in production.  This pushes the issue back a few more months
>and makes it harder to verify exactly what the child is doing.
>  Is the child picking up a set of templates, elaborating item-based
>patterns, or selecting values on parameters?  The fact that there are so
>few
>cases of what one could honestly call a word order error in early production
>suggests that this earlier comprehension-based tuning works out pretty well.
>Thus it is likely that the distinction between SVO and SOV in German is
>already in place by the time of the first utterances.  But does this mean
>that the child has discovered the "basic word order".  I don't see why one
>would argue that.  Rather, simply that the child is doing a good job of
>controlling the two major options and their secondary realizations first
>in
>comprehension and then in production.
>
>--Brian