ENG 161: Language and Mind - The Acquisition of Grammatical Rules

Lecturer: Christos Christopoulos

• University of Cyprus
• Date: March 13, 2025

Today's Agenda

1. How do children learn grammatical rules?
2. Under-application of grammatical rules
3. Over-application of grammatical rules
4. Take-aways

How Do Children Learn Grammatical Rules?

Learning Abstract Categories and Rules

• Children acquire speech sounds and segment speech streams to extract phonemes and morphemes.
• Building lexical entries by attaching meaning to these forms.
• Acquisition of grammatical rules involves manipulating morphemes to build structures.
• Grammatical rules are based on abstract categories (e.g., noun, verb).
• Children must figure out abstract categories before understanding grammatical rules.

Experiment: Valian (1986)

• Analyzed speech of 2-2.5-year-old children to understand use of syntactic categories.
• Objective criteria for knowing a category, e.g., correct use of determiners.
• Children showed knowledge of syntactic categories by age 2.5.

Nativist-Leaning Approaches

• Syntax categories considered as innate in nativist theories (e.g., Principles and Parameters).
• Children have an innate inventory of grammatical categories.
• Task is to match words to known categories based on exposure.

Empiricist-Leaning Approaches

• Constructivist theories argue against innate grammatical knowledge.
• Use general cognitive skills to group words into categories from input.

Transformation Rules

• Transformations relate different sentence types, e.g., declarative vs. interrogative.
• Children must learn rule applicability for transformations like yes/no question formation.
• Experiments show children learn through exposure, but some innate principles (e.g., Structure-Dependence) may guide learning.

Under-Application of Grammatical Rules

• Common errors: using bare stem forms instead of inflected forms (e.g., "Rover lick my face").
• Some errors reflect default parameter settings (e.g., Null-Subject Parameter ON in early stages).
• Errors resemble features from other languages (e.g., Chinese, Greek) due to default settings.

Over-Application of Grammatical Rules

• Children over-apply regular rules, producing errors like "*Lara doed it," "*mans," etc.
• U-shaped learning pattern: correct use followed by errors, then correct use again.
• Theory by Marcus et al. (1992): Regular forms involve applying grammatical rules; irregular forms are memorized in the lexicon.

Explaining the U-Shaped Curve

• Stage A: Children do not apply inflection rules.
• Stage B: Start memorizing plurals/past forms.
• Stage C: Apply rules to both regular and irregular forms, leading to errors.
• Stage D: Correct application of rules, distinguishing between regular and irregular.
• Over-regularization errors linked to low frequency forms due to delayed memorization.

Take-Aways

• Learning grammatical rules involves understanding categories, likely innately present.
• Transformations challenge purely empiricist views; innate principles might play a role.
• Under-application errors relate to default parameter settings in language acquisition.
• Over-application follows a U-shaped curve, explained by memorization and subsequent rule application.

Supplementary Reading

• Crain & Nakayama (1987) on structure dependence in grammar formation.
• Valian (1986) on syntactic categories in children's speech.