Productivity in acquisition of grammar

[Alcock, Katie]

Sorry for mass cross-posting - thought I might get more replies this way

I'm just looking at some spontaneous speech data from a few 2 and 3 year
olds. I am wondering what criteria people would use for productive use of a
particular grammatical construction.  Would it be:

a) use of that construction with more than one root morpheme/ main word e.g.
productive use of past tense would be saying walked AND finished, for
example

or b) use of the same root morpheme with more than one construction e.g.
productive use of past tense being saying walk AND walked?

or c) use of the construction in a variety of circumstances
correctly/contrastively? e.g. I finished milk  but Daddy drive work.

Or would you say more than two uses, and in how many utterances?  I have 100
to 200 utterances from each of about 4 or 5 children (but many of the
utterances are just Yes or No or Mama).  The slight problem is that they are
in two previously undescribed languages so I don't know what the norm for
each construction should be!

thanks

Katie Alcock
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