First Language Acquisition

Children add more information to their utterances by packing more material into a single clause. They can specify roles, modify nouns with adjectives and verbs with added locatives and adverbs. They can add demonstratives (those) and quantifiers (many) to nouns, and make clearer what they are referring to. Young children’s early constructions tend to mirror parental usage, just as their lexical choices do. They follow preferred argument structure and place given information in the Agent slot of transitive verbs, and keep the Object slot of transitives and the Subject slot of intransitives for new information. They may omit given information at this stage and only later add the relevant pronoun subjects. In both questions and negations, they take time to master the use of auxiliary verbs and rely on fixed “frames” for some time as they learn the meaning of each wh- question word. Children also take time in learning how different perspectives can be marked within the clause, with choices of causative, location, or voice alternations. Here children must learn the options verb by verb.