By Michael Tomasello
Presented by Megan “KK” Anderson and
John “B-cakes” Korba
 Tomasello
argues that grammatical
constructions are lexically and
semantically restricted in early language
learning.
 This differs from generativist views, like
Chomsky’s:
“Irrespective of questions of maturation, order of
presentation, or selective availability of evidence, the
result of language acquisition is as if it were
instantaneous: In particular, intermediate states attained
do not change the principles available for interpretation of
data at later states in a way that affects the state
attained.”
 Developmental
psychologist, not a linguist
 Verbs are important because they lead to the
development of complex sentences
 Attempts to show that verbs are important
organizing elements early on
 Book does not attempt to resolve the
problem

Or even the Cognitive v. Generative debate
 Early
vocabularies often show a
preponderance of object labels
 New research shows that nonnominals may
be just as frequent

Especially in languages like Japanese and Korean
 Describes
child’s language in it’s own terms
 Four negative assumptions
 Travis
(T) is Tomasello’s daughter.
 Wife recorded mornings and he recorded
afternoons
 Interpreted meaning through context of learning
and of use
 Includes relational words (more, bye-bye)
 Designated same types of sentences

Put hat on these feet = put that in the box
Presence, absence, and recurrence of objects (where, find)
 Presence, absence, and recurrence of activities (help, stop)
 Exchange and possession of objects (thanks, here-go)
 Location of objects (up, down)
 Movement of objects (bring, take)
 State of objects (open, close)

Learned opposites almost simultaneously
 Often one word utterances; objects came next

 Some
verbs classified as Activity actually
Change of State for adults
 Activity verbs describe widely different
actions, with no common semantic feature
among them (unlike change of state verbs)
 Actor acting on object vs. Actor simply acting
 Actor more likely to be expressed in verbs
which did not take objects.
 Sentence
4




without verbs
types:
Object-object constructions (“Mommy sock”,
“Book table”)
Possessive constructions (“Mommy’s sock”)
Locative constructions (“Books on table”, “Bugs
here”)
Attributive constructions (“Flowers pretty”,
“Little kitty”)
 Possessive
and plurals early
 Possessive - first intonation, then –s
 Plurals, before 18 months lexically restricted
(chips, never chip)
 Probably tied to concept “Two ____s”, which
she learned at 17 months
 Didn’t have 100% performance-irregular
forms; overgeneralization

Foots, sheeps, describing her face: “Two ears,
two eyes, but just one no” (nose)
 First
past tense at 15 month, stuck
 Past tense learned, seem to be lexically
restricted
 66% of past tense used were strong/irregular
 17 months, uses present progressive in –ing,
also lexically restricted

By 19 months, seemed to have generalized -ing
and began to use it regularly
 Change
of state verbs tended to be in past
tense
 Activity verbs tended to be in present tense

(aspect!)
 Cognitive
linguistics
 Symbolic integration


T combines two words early on
GONE RAISIN: Raisin Raisin
 Tomasello
argues these constructions are
pre-grammatical. T understands the
concepts, but does not know how to
manipulate syntax to express the
relationships.
 After
18 months T begins using three-word
constructions


Daddy driving keys (Agent-Action-Instrument)
Mostly likely the result of combining previous
constructions she had

Little stickers up here! Previous constructions: Little
_____ (object). Up here ______ (object).
 She
maintains structure in three-wordsentences from previous two-word
constructions
 Similar findings in Dutch, which Tomasello
argues is proof of generality of symbolic
integration
 Ninio’s
(1998) hypothesis: Children do not
have a class of verbs until verbs have
appeared in the argument slots of other
verbs (same is true for nouns)

Early on, T showed class of nouns (common and
proper), but no verbs
 Inconsistent



verbal morphology
Often did not use past tense when necessary,
because she did not have morphology
66% of T’s past tense verbs were irregular, may
have inhibited development of verbal class
Verbs did not operate as a coherent class, rather
as individual islands of organization
 The
development of marking grammatical
relationships varies by verb
 Opposing theory: systematic marking of
grammatical relationships

Difficult to establish, due to the different
pragmatic situations in which each verb is used
might account for different constructions
 Pragmatic
determines some, but not all of
the reasons she used certain constructions
with certain verbs
 No instances of inanimate Actors/Agents
until 20 months
 Tomasello
argues that “at the earliest stages
of word combination, children may mimic
adult syntactic devices such as word order
and grammatical morphology without
understanding their productive functions.”
 Words and syntax learned pragmatically
 Same skills used to learn other social and
cultural skills used in learning language
 “Uniqueness of product does not imply
uniqueness of process” (Bates et al. 1991)
 Russian
has more verb morphology than
English, so interesting to see if the same
trends were noticable
 CHILDES Database


http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/
Subject: Varvara, Russian, studied between 18 –
28 months
 Mother/Father
A
lot of naming things (Nominative)
 Mostly two word constructions
 Varvara used verbs, mostly in present tense
 3rd person sg, even for herself and
interlocutor
 Does use some personal pronouns (‘you’
accusative singular) and possessive
‘grandfather’s)
 Made some mistakes with verbal morphology
 Grandmother
 Fewer
instances of verbs among same
number of utterances
 Did use first and second singular
 Generalizing verbal paradigm
 Mother
 Uses
more verbs in correct persons/tenses
 More present tense
 Some verbs overlap in use of past and
present tense
 Begins to use 3 word constructions (Actor –
Action – Object/Location/Instrument)
 Mother
 Increase
in verbal lexicon
 Able to hold conversations
 Made mistakes: 3pl for 3sg (mother corrects
her)
By 28 months


No mistakes in verbal morphology
Varied range of verbs and usage
 Russian
has verbal morphology
 Nevertheless, verbs are lexically restricted
until generalization begins
 Stoll (2005) – aspect not acquired
simultaneously either in Russian


Aktionsart perfectives acquired sooner than
‘Natural’ perfectives
May have to do with regularity
Bates, E. et. al. Biobehavioral foundations of
language development. Hinsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
 CHILDES Database. Carnegie Mellon University.
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu.
 Ninio, A. 1988. On formal grammatical
categories in early child language. Categories
and Processes in Language Acquisition. Levy et.
al, eds. Hinsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 11-30.
 Tomasello, M. 1992. First Verbs. Cambridge U
Press. 383pp.
 Stoll, S. 2005. Beginning and End in the
Acquisition of the Perfective aspect in Russian.
Journal of Child Language 32, 805-825.
