Abstract for Virginia Valian, Stephanie Solt, and John Stewart's talk

Abstract categories or limited-scope formulae? The case of children's determiners
Virginia Valian, Stephanie Solt, and John Stewart (CUNY)
March 7, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

How abstract are children's early syntactic representations? We address this question by examining how often 21 English-speaking children used more than one determiner before a given noun (the overlap test) and obeyed all the syntactic restrictions for the placement of determiners (the distributional test) in their spontaneous speech. The children's ages ranged from 1;10 to 2;8, their MLUs from 1.53 to 4.38. Overlap was frequent and increased as opportunity for overlap increased: children used multiple determiners with over half of all nouns used at least twice with a determiner and with eighty percent of nouns used six or more times with a determiner. In addition, the number of determiner types in a child's repertoire affected overlap. Furthermore, children's performance was almost identical to their mothers'. Children also passed the distributional test; less than 1% of determiner uses were errors. Children represent syntactic categories abstractly as soon as combinatorial speech begins.