Double PP Constituent Ordering Preferences in English Early Child Language

What determines children's production of syntactic alternations? This study takes up this question with the double PP construction in English as the test case (e.g., write [PP1 on the paper] [PP2 with this new pen]). Leveraging data of spontaneous child-parent interactions, we investigate the roles of dependency length and parent input frequency, with the latter being operationalized as lexical frequency and contextual predictability. We found that when child and parent data was combined, all three factors turned out to have significant predictive power, with dependency length having the most pronounced role. Results from the developmental trajectory of DLM as well as logistic regression analysis suggest that child production of constituent ordering preferences starts becoming more parent-like after the age of 30 months.