Optimal Acquisition: Why Children’s Language Production Can Exceed Their Comprehension

This paper discusses a developmental paradox, namely that children’s performance in language production sometimes exceeds their performance in language comprehension. This yields a puzzle for most theories of language acquisition. If a child produces a linguistic form correctly, this is considered to be evidence that the child possesses the relevant grammatical knowledge. However, if the child possesses the relevant grammatical knowledge to produce a linguistic form correctly, then why is this child unable to interpret the same linguistic form correctly? Four potential explanations for such asymmetries between production and comprehension are discussed: task-based explanations, pragmatic explanations, interface explanations and grammatical explanations. In this paper, I will focus on asymmetries occurring with subject-object word order and pronominal reference, but note that many more asymmetries have been attested (Hendriks, 2014). In Sections 2 and 3, it is argued that task-based and pragmatic explanations of children’s errors in their comprehension of word order and pronouns fail to account for children’s correct production of word order and pronouns. Although under certain assumptions interface explanations may account for children’s correct production of pronouns, these explanations are argued in Section 4 not to be fine-grained enough to account for the full range of patterns observed in child language. This suggests that the cause for the asymmetries must lie in the grammar. This latter possibility is discussed in Section 5. Because this explanation requires a reconsideration of core properties of the grammar, Section 6 discusses the implications of production-comprehension asymmetries for linguistic theory.