A number of learning strategies have been proposed in the literature either to supplement or to replace strict innatist approaches to language acquisition. One class of strategies involves simple analogical processes based on set phrases that have been rote learnt by the child. The statistical properties of the input are considered to be of crucial importance for this process. Another class utilises the child's knowledge of the semantic/conceptual structure of everyday situations, which can be matched against input utterances. For this strategy the help of linking rules between semantic and syntactic structures is required.The present paper investigates the interaction of the two kinds of strategy in acquiring argument structures. A statistical analysis of utterances containing verbs is carried out in naturalistic longitudinal child language data. It is found that a) simple analogical processes operate from the earliest stages of language acquisition; b) syntax-semantics linking rules can be (mis)constructed on the basis of analogy; c) the learner's grammatically relevant semantic categories do not necessarily match those of the adult grammar; and d) linking rules are applied in novel ways only if their relevance is supported by a formal analogical association established at an earlier stage. In general, evidence for the discovery of the correspondences between semantic structure and syntactic structure appears later than evidence for simple formal analogy. Accordingly, linking rules seem to have a lesser role at the early stages of the acquisition of grammar.
To download this paper, please return to Proceedings of the 1998 Postgraduate Conference