Journal Articles

1. Childers, JB; Tomasello, M, The role of pronouns in young children's acquisition of the English transitive construction., Developmental psychology, vol. 37 no. 6 (November, 2001), pp. 739-748 [doi].
   (last updated on 2024/11/03)

   Abstract:
   Two studies investigating the linguistic representations underlying English-speaking 2 1/2-year-olds' production of transitive utterances are reported. The first study was a training study in which half the children heard utterances with full nouns as agent and patient, and half the children heard utterances with both pronouns (i.e., He's [verb]-ing it) and also full nouns. In subsequent testing, only children who had been trained with pronouns and nouns were able to produce a transitive utterance creatively with a nonce verb. The second study reported an analogous set of findings, but in comprehension. Together, the results of these 2 studies suggest that English-speaking children build many of their early linguistic constructions around certain specific lexical or morphological items and patterns, perhaps especially around particular pronoun configurations.