Factors that Influence Children’s Acquisition of Adjective-Noun Order

Usage-Based theoreticians have argued that children make the biggest strides in learning to use many adult-like grammatical rules in the preschool years. This argument is based on how children use novel verbs in verb clauses: many Englishspeaking 2-year olds are willing to use novel verbs in ungrammatical order; by 4, few children are willing to use novel verbs in a non-SVO order. In verb clauses, the word order determines the semantic/syntactic role (e.g., subject). By focusing on verbs, researchers have failed to take into account that children might also be learning how meaning and semantic/syntactic function are related. To test this interpretation, we taught novel adjectives to 35 monolingual English-speaking children between 2 and 4 years old, either in a prenominal or postnominal position. Results showed that, while children were more likely to reverse the order of novel postnominal adjectives, even 4-year olds used the new adjectives in the order they were modeled more than half the time. These results suggest that during the preschool years, children are learning to map word order onto semantic/syntactic function.