LANGUAGE AND THE LEARNINGCURVE: A NEW THEORY OF SYN-TACTIC DEVELOPMENT. Anat Ninio.Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.pp. 206. Price: £26.00, US $59.50. ISBN9780199299829.

How do children acquire the syntax oftheir native language? One popularview is that children are born withsome knowledge of syntax and thatacquisition consists largely of linkingthese abstract rules to the particularlanguage that the child is learning (e.g.Pinker, 1989). The opposite view is thatchildren form abstract syntactic con-structions by abstracting across utter-ances in the input that instantiate them(e.g. Tomasello, 2003). Ninio rejectsboth these accounts, instead arguingthat ‘children learn a lexicalist syntax,in which the syntactic structureof the sentence is projected from thelexicon’ (p. 6) and ‘do not form abstractrules or schemas’ (p. 4). In this reviewI will argue—on the one hand—thatthis account fails to address certainfindings that are more easily explainedby a construction-based account and—on the other—that the two accountsmay be more similar than Niniosuggests.

Ninio’s account is as follows: Theadult grammar (Chapters 1 and 3)consists of the syntactic operation‘Merge’ and a lexicon in which eachentry (e.g. see) is annotated for its se-mantic relations (e.g. seer, thing seen)and its syntactic valency (e.g. _see_).Speakers construct sentences by re-cursively applying the Merge opera-tion to pairs of words in accordancewith these valency requirements (e.g.saw and it merge to form one con-stituent, the and man to form another,and these resultant constituents mergeto form the sentence).

Children’s two-word combinations(e.g. saw it) are Merge couples of thisform. Producing a sentence using avalency-based frame (e.g. VO) is likeany other cognitive skill: Practice fa-

cilitates future performance. Thus,when the cumulative number of verbsin a particular construction is plottedover time, a power-law speed-upfunction is seen (Chapter 2). Childrendo not generalize a verb’s valencyframe to semantically similar verbs(Chapters 3 and 4): The age at which achild will use a particular verb in aparticular construction is predicted bythe overall number of verbs—not by thenumber of semantically similar verbs—that she has previously used in thisconstruction.

One problem for Ninio’s accountconcerns the origin of the ‘Merge’ op-eration. The central claim of this ac-count is that ‘children do not formabstract rules’ (p. 4), but what is a ‘verygeneral principle’ (p .31) that cancombine items as diverse as the1manand saw1it if not an abstract rule?Furthermore, Ninio assumes that‘children deduce the principles ofMerge/Dependency from sentencesadults say to them’. It is difficult to seehow learning the ‘principle’ that gen-erates (for example) V1O combina-tions such as saw it is different from anaccount under which children abstractfrom their input a VO schema (e.g.Tomasello, 2003), a claim that Ninioexplicitly rejects. Furthermore, the factthat children say the man as opposed toman the is not—as Ninio claims—evi-dence for Merge; children could havesimply acquired the phrase as a wholefrom the input.

The main problem with Ninio’s ac-count, however, lies with her rejectionof construction semantics. Construc-tion grammars posit the independentexistence of constructions because theyseem to be associated with meaningsabove and beyond the words that in-stantiate them. For example, Goldberg(1995) argues that part of the meaningof He sneezed the napkin off the tablecomes from the caused-motion mean-ing of the construction. Ninio’s lex-icalist account would have to posit alexical entry for a caused-motion sense

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of sneeze with three arguments, whichis both implausible and circular.

Ninio herself recognizes that chil-dren’s semantically based over-generalizations (e.g. They [grapes] justcough me—presumably on semanticanalogy with causative sentences suchas The man broke the stick; Bowerman,1988) are potentially problematic forher theory. However, such errors aredismissed as ‘a late phenomenon’, theproduct of a semantically based gen-eralization process that ‘does not servechildren in the acquisition of the basicsyntax of their language’ (p. 103). Al-though such errors may be rare inproduction until later in development,evidence from preferential-lookingstudies suggests that children areaware of the semantics associated withparticular argument structure con-structions from as young as age 2 (e.g.Kidd, Bavin, & Rhodes, 2001).

Despite these differences, Ninio’s ac-count and accounts that assume thatchildren are learning constructions inthe form of semantics–syntax pairings(e.g. Tomasello, 2003) may be, in manyrespects, less different than Ninio as-sumes. In Chapter 2, Ninio shows thatfamiliarity with a construction (e.g.SVO) facilitates subsequent performancewith this construction (hence an accel-erating learning curve). Ninio takes thisas evidence against Tomasello’s (1992)verb-island hypothesis, under whichchildren’s earliest utterances are pro-duced using independent slot-and-frame schemas (e.g. Cut X, Draw X) untilaround age 2–6. However these data arecompatible with more recent formula-tions of this hypothesis, under whichchildren begin to link islands early indevelopment to form weak schemas thatstrengthen as development proceeds(e.g. Tomasello & Abbot Smith, 2002).

In several places (e.g. pp. 35, 86),Ninio contrasts the view that sentenceswith novel items (especially verbs) areproduced using abstract constructionswith her own, under which they areproduced on analogy with stored items.

However, one way of conceptualizingthe ‘constructions’ posited by authorssuch as Tomasello (2003), Goldberg(1995), or Bybee and Hopper (2001) is asemergent generalizations over storedinstances of the pattern. It is not clearthat there is any conceptual differencebetween saying that speakers produceSVO utterances with novel verbs (1) onanalogy with verbs that have been at-tested in the SVO pattern (Ninio) or (2)using an SVO construction that hasbeen formed by analogizing across dif-ferent instances of this pattern in theinput (‘abstraction’ accounts).

In the end, although many researcherswill not agree with Ninio’s conclusions,this account makes an important con-tribution to the literature by emphasizingthe need for constructivist theories to bemore explicit about the representationsthat they assume (are ‘constructions’simply a shorthand for analogies acrossstored exemplars?) and how these re-presentations develop (what does itmean to say that early constructions arepartially lexically specific and partiallyabstract?). In conclusion, Ninio’s accountforces the reader to examine his or herown (perhaps implicit) views on thenature of syntax and its acquisition, andis therefore required reading for all re-searchers working in this area.

REFERENCES

Bybee, J., & Hopper, P. (2001). Frequency andthe emergence of linguistic structure. Am-sterdam: John Benjamins.

Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: Aconstruction grammar approach to argumentstructure. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Kidd, E., Bavin, E. L., & Rhodes, B. (2001).Two-year olds’ knowledge ofverbs and argument structure. In M.Almgren (Ed.), Research on child languageacquisition. Somerville, MA: CascadillaPress.

Naigles, L., Fowler, A., & Helm, A. (1992).Developmental shifts in the constructionof verb meanings. Cognitive Development,7, 403–427.

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Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition:The acquisition of argument structure. Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tomasello, M. (1992). First verbs: A casestudy of early grammatical development.New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a lan-guage: A usage-based theory of languageacquisition. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Ben AmbridgeDepartment of Psychology, University of

Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

DOI: 10.1002/icd.589

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