Abstract
Authors: Zoey Liu (University of Florida) , Haiyin Yang (University of Florida) , Jarrod Cruz (University of Florida) , Stefanie Wulff (University of Florida)
This study investigates syntactic ordering preferences in child and parent speech in English, using the dative alternation as the test case. To that end, we present the largest-to-date dataset of the dative construction containing 38,780 utterances (child: 8,066; parent: 30,714). We show that: (1) children's production of the dative structure starts as early as 12-18 months, with the production of the double object structure preceding that of the prepositional object structure; (2) there is a relatively consistent preference for the double object structure along children's developmental trajectory; (3) overall, children's production of the dative alternation does not reach parent levels until around 54-60 months; (3) from logistic regression analysis, there is a significant effect for the length, givenness, and nominal type of the theme, respectively, and that their effects are robust starting at an early age of the children.
Keywords: the English dative alternation, constituent ordering preferences, child language development
How to Cite: Liu, Z. , Yang, H. , Cruz, J. & Wulff, S. (2024) “Modeling the Dative Alternation in English Early Child Language”, Society for Computation in Linguistics. 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.2224