A Constructivist Account of Child Language Acquisition

Abstract

This chapter outlines a constructivist account of the process of language acquisition. It summarizes the constructivist account of development, and the current state of the empirical evidence, for each of four particularly well-studied domains: the acquisition of (1) determiners, (2) inflectional morphology (3) basic word order, and (4) more advanced constructions (datives, locatives, passives, questions, and relative-/complement-clause constructions). The chapter concludes that whatever the domain of acquisition, the constructivist account holds that children start out with rote-learned holophrases (e.g., I'm eating it; I'm hitting it; I'm kicking it) across which they abstract to acquire lexically specific slot-and-frame schemas/patterns (e.g., I'm [X]ing it). The findings summarized in this chapter are sufficient to lead us to conclude that some form of constructivist, input-based account is the only realistic candidate for a viable theory of language acquisition.

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