Abstract：
There is substantial evidence that children\'s apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as \"She play tennis\" and \"Mummy eating\" is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such errors? In this study, we test the assumption that children\'s ability to recover from error is related to their developing sensitivity to longer-range dependencies. We use a pre-registered corpus analysis to explore the predictive value of different cues with regards to children\'s verb-marking errors and observe a developmental pattern consistent with this account. We look at context-independent cues (the identity of the specific verb being used) and at the relative value of context-dependent cues (the identity of the specific subject+verb sequence being used). We find that the only consistent effect across a group of 2- to 3-year-olds and a group of 3- to 4-year-olds is the relative frequency of unmarked forms of specific subject+verb sequences being used. The relative frequency of unmarked forms of the verb alone is predictive only in the younger age group. This is consistent with an account in which children recover from making errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to context, at first the immediately preceding lexical contexts (e.g., the subject that precedes the verb) and eventually more distant grammatical markers (e.g., the fronted auxiliary that precedes the subject in questions). RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We provide a corpus analysis investigating input effects on young children\'s verb-marking errors (e.g., Mummy go) across development (between 2 and 4 years of age). We find evidence that these apparent errors of omission are in fact input-driven errors of commission that persist into the third year of life. We compare the relative effect on error rates of context-independent (e.g., verb) and context-dependent (e.g., subject+verb sequence) cues across developmental time. Our findings support the proposal that children recover from making verb-marking errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to preceding context.
摘要：
有大量证据表明，儿童在话语中明显遗漏了语法语素，例如“她打网球”和“妈咪吃”实际上是委托错误，其中在输入中遇到的上下文许可的未标记形式以上下文盲的方式再现。那么孩子们如何停止犯这样的错误呢？在这项研究中，我们测试了这样一个假设，即儿童从错误中恢复的能力与他们对更远距离依赖关系的敏感性有关。我们使用预先注册的语料库分析来探索不同线索对儿童动词标记错误的预测价值，并观察与此帐户一致的发展模式。我们查看上下文无关的线索（所使用的特定动词的身份）和上下文相关线索的相对值（所使用的特定主语+动词序列的身份）。我们发现，在一组2至3岁的孩子和一组3至4岁的孩子中，唯一一致的效果是使用未标记形式的特定主语动词序列的相对频率。仅在较年轻的年龄组中，动词的未标记形式的相对频率才可以预测。这与一个帐户一致，在该帐户中，儿童通过对上下文变得越来越敏感而从错误中恢复，首先是前面的词汇上下文(例如，动词前面的主语)和最终更遥远的语法标记(例如，在问题中位于主题前面的辅助)。研究重点：我们提供了一个语料库分析，调查输入对幼儿动词标记错误的影响(例如，木乃伊去）跨越发展（2至4岁之间）。我们发现有证据表明，这些明显的遗漏错误实际上是输入驱动的委托错误，持续到生命的第三年。我们比较了与上下文无关的错误率的相对影响(例如，动词)和上下文相关(例如，主语+动词序列)跨发展时间的线索。我们的发现支持以下建议：儿童通过对先前的上下文变得越来越敏感，从而从动词标记错误中恢复过来。
