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Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which types of information leads to the induction of (lexical) categories, and to paradigm building. Regarding the acquisition of word order, it is shown how languages with fixed or variable word order profit from stable syntactic hyperschemas, but require a more detailed analyses of the form-function contingencies to identify the underlying, more specific semantic, syntactic and morphological patterns. At a theoretical level, it is shown how findings from acquisition and processing converge into new linguistic theories that aim to account for regular as well as irregular phenomena in language.

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein "to be" or werden "to become," and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently "sudden" acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms.

This study provides an account of the distributional information and the production rates in a particularly rich corpus of German child and adult language. Three structural domains are analysed: the parts-of-speech distribution for a coded corpus of circa one million words as well as the internal constituency of 300,000 noun phrases and almost 200,000 verb phrases. In all three domains, the distribution over time in the adult input is extremely homogenous. The child shows a steady approximation towards the adult distribution. It is argued that two notions of acquisition have to be distinguished: acquisition in terms of the availability of a given structure, for example in terms of first occurrence of a structure or according to various criteria of productivity, and acquisition in terms of full communicative competence, i.e., using structures in the way adults use them (cf. Slobin, 1991, 1997). The data presented here show that the child acquires not only the structural options of German but also highly conventionalised ways of encoding concepts. The amount of information about the structure and conventions of German that is available in the input has the potential of making innate stipulations unnecessary. Instead, the data support usage-based and probabilistic theories of language and language processing.

Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, [lsquo ]real[rsquo ] two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the acquisition of prosody, however, revealed that control of the phonetic parameters pitch, loudness, and duration is far from complete at such an early stage. In this study, we examine the interaction between the development of different types of syntactic structures and their prosodic organization. Data from a detailed production record of a monolingual German-learning boy is analysed both auditorily and acoustically with a focus on four different types of two-word utterances produced between 2;0 and 2;3. Two major findings are reported here. First, the different types of two-word utterances undergo individual trajectories of prosodic (re-)organization, in part depending on the time course in which they become productive. This suggests that different types of multiword utterances become prosodically fluent at different points in time. Second, the variability of prosodic features such as pauses and stress pattern is very high at the onset of combinatorial speech. Consequently, fluency or disfluency of individual examples should not be used as a reliable criterion for their syntactic status and we recommend caution when taking prosody as a cue for syntactic development.

Determined the degree to which a sample of one child's creative utterances related to utterances that the child previously produced. Utterances were intelligible, multi-word utterances produced by the child in a single hour of interaction with her mother. Results suggest the high degree of creativity in early English child language could be partially based upon entrenched schemas and a small number of simple operations to modify them. (Author/VWL)

Byline: Heike Behrens Abstract It was long considered to be impossible to learn grammar based on linguistic experience alone. In the past decade, however, advances in usage-based linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and developmental psychology changed the view on this matter. So-called usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition state that language can be learned from language use itself, by means of social skills like joint attention, and by means of powerful generalization mechanisms. This paper first summarizes the assumptions regarding the nature of linguistic representations and processing. Usage-based theories are nonmodular and nonreductionist, i.e., they emphasize the form-function relationships, and deal with all of language, not just selected levels of representations. Furthermore, storage and processing is considered to be analytic as well as holistic, such that there is a continuum between children's unanalyzed chunks and abstract units found in adult language. In the second part, the empirical evidence is reviewed. Children's linguistic competence is shown to be limited initially, and it is demonstrated how children can generalize knowledge based on direct and indirect positive evidence. It is argued that with these general learning mechanisms, the usage-based paradigm can be extended to multilingual language situations and to language acquisition under special circumstances. Article History: Date received: May 25, 2005 Date revision received: May 02, 2007

Comparison of German, Dutch and English suggests that verbs do not constitute a uniform class, but include a variety of subsets defined morphologically or semantically. Simplex verbs such as 'cover' and complex verbs such as 'uncover' or 'cover up' provide examples of differences in the manner and ease of acquisition. The three languages also differ in lexical diversity of the verbal subsets.

We discuss other recent studies on the acquisition of the German plural that do not support the dual-mechanism model. The attested overgeneralizations are not by default only, nor completely random, but predictable from subregularities based on the grammatical gender and the phonology of the noun. In addition, the dual-mechanism model creates a number of problems for acquisition (theory) rather than solving existing ones.