Productivity in acquisition of grammar

[Shanley Allen]

Hi Katie,

I've done similar work in Inuktitut, and used your (a) and (b) as
indicators as well some other things.  The most obvious indicator of
productivity is overregularization (e.g. runned, falled), but this doesn't
occur very often.  You can look at my indicators of productivity in the
second chapter of my book (Allen, S. 1996. Aspects of Argument Structure
Acquisition in Inuktitut. Amsterdam: Benjamins), or pretty much the same
ones appear in my JCL article (Allen, S. & Crago, M. 1996. The acquisition
of the passive in Inuktitut. Journal of Child Language. - the title isn't
exact and I forget the volume and page numbers).

Work by Julian Pine, Elena Lieven, Mike Tomasello among others indicates
that your (c) would not be a good measure of productivity.  Children may
well learn individual verbs in fixed forms at early ages, acquiring one
tense for each verb, for instance, and so may not be productively applying
morphology even though they are producing forms with the correct
morphemes. You need evidence from one verb with or without the morpheme to
tease this apart.  This research also shows why your criterion (b) is
weaker than (a).

Good luck, and don't hesitate to write with further questions.

Best,
Shanley Allen.


On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Alcock, Katie wrote:

> 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
>