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Children’s acquisition of word order depends on syntactic/semantic role: Evidence from adjective-noun order

Based on research on children’s verb production, Usage-Based theorists have argued that children learn grammatical abstractions in the preschool years. The fact that, in English verb clauses, word order determines semantic/syntactic roles leaves open the possibility that children are learning not just syntactic frames, but the relationship between order and semantic/syntactic roles. To clarify the nature of children’s abstract knowledge, we taught novel adjectives to English-speaking children (2 to 4 years), both prenominally and postnominally. Unlike verbs, adjective position in a sentence does not change the semantic/syntactic role of the adjective. Children showed sensitivity to the canonical order, but even four-year-olds frequently used novel adjectives postnominally. We argue that a strong motivation for ordering words grammatically is when order determines semantic/syntactic roles.