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Predicting the order of acquisition of three-word constructions by the complexity of their dependency structure

It was hypothesized that the complexity of the dependency structure of different 3- and 4-word constructions predicts the order of their acquisition. Analysis of an English-speaking child's first 102 sentence types of more than 2 words strongly supported this prediction: the earliest sentences rarely involved constructions in which members of a dependency pair were not immediately adjacent to each other. The findings suggest that dependency theory could provide a viable alternative to phrase-structure grammars as a framework for the study of language acquisition.