Der Erwerb der Nominalphrasensyntax : Attribution und Schematisierung als syntaktische Verfahren zur Konstruktion objektbezogener Referenz

The study investigates the question of which patterns are used by early language learners in the acquisition of noun phrases and all its modifying complements. A panel study corpus of more than 30.000 noun phrases uttered by three girls over the course of several years was established to understand the mechanisms of noun phrases acquisition. The corpus was generated from natural spontaneous speech transcripts which is essential in order to generate genuine and hence unbiased data.
The results suggest that all three children, though unknown of each other, follow a similar pattern in filling in grammatical slots such as determiners, adjectives, relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and the noun, over the course of their early years: From left to right. After using single nouns for many months in the early beginning, often combined with pointing gestures, children soon start combining those nouns with determiner-like fillers, then ‘real’ determiners such as der, die, das and ein, eine, einer, and soon after followed by adjectives. This basic NP pattern consisting of determiner + adjective + noun (e. g. die kleine Katze) is soon thereafter followed by postnominal complements like relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and adverbs (e. g. die Katze dort). However, adjectives are the most prominent and frequent complement and seem to have their own acquisition pattern.