Is the goal of language acquisition research to account for children’s behavior (their productions and performance on tests of comprehension) or their knowledge? A first step in either goal is to establish facts about children’s linguistic behavior at the beginning of combinatorial speech. Recent work in our laboratory investigates children’s productions between roughly 15 and 22 months and suggests a combination of structured and less-structured utterances in which structured utterances come to dominate. A rich body of research from our and other laboratories demonstrates knowledge of syntactic categories, structures, and constraints between 22-30 months, along with considerable variability from child to child. Research on “created” languages like Nicaraguan Sign Language suggests language can develop in the absence of structured input. How do children do it; what is the mechanism? What is the best characterization of the input to children? How much variability is there in acquisition? What is the characterization of the end state of acquisition? Are LLMs intended to characterize knowledge? In answering those and other questions, I will distinguish between the notion of poverty of the stimulus and the notion of noisy and incomplete input and present data on children’s early syntactic behavior.

 

References

Valian, V.  (2024). Variability in production is the rule, not the exception, at the onset of multi-word speech.  Language Learning and Development, 20(1), 76-78.

Xu, Q., Chodorow, M., & Valian, V. (2023). How infants' utterances grow: A probabilistic account of early language development. Cognition, 230, 105275.

Pozzan, L. & Valian, V.  (2017).  Asking questions in child English: Evidence for early abstract representations.  Language Acquisition, 24(3), 209-233. 

Valian, V.  (2013).  Determiners:  An empirical argument for innateness.  In M. Sanz, I. Laka, & M. Tanenhaus.  (Eds.). Language down the garden path:  The cognitive and biological basis for linguistic structure (Chapter 14, pp 272-279).  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Bencini, G. M., & Valian, V. V. (2008). Abstract sentence representations in 3-year-olds: Evidence from language production and comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(1), 97-113