German-speaking children’s productivity with syntactic constructions and case morphology: Local cues act locally

Abstract

It has been proposed that children acquiring case-marking languages might be quicker to acquire certain constructions than children acquiring word order languages, because the cues involved in grammatical morphology are more ‘local’, whereas word order is an inherently distributed cue (Slobin, 1982). In the current studies using nonce nouns and verbs, we establish that German-speaking children are not productive with passive and active transitive sentence-level constructions at an earlier age than English-speaking children; the majority of children learning both languages are not productive until after their third birthdays. In contrast, in the second and third studies reported here, the majority of German-speaking children were productive with nominative and accusative case marking inside NPs before their third birthdays - and these are of course the very same case markers centrally involved in passive and active transitive constructions. We conclude from these results that, whereas for some functions mastering local cues is all that is required, and this is fairly simple, in other cases, such as the case marking involved in sentence-level syntactic constructions, the mastery of local cues is only one part of the process of forming complex analogical relationships among utterances.