ArticleLanguage learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development2017
The Development of Causal Structure without a Language Model.
Article in Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Whole-to-part development in language creation.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Article
- Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- The communicative importance of agent-backgrounding: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language.Cognition · 2020Article
- Young children spontaneously recreate core properties of language in a new modality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Across a diverse range of languages, children proceed through similar stages in their production of causal language: their initial verbs lack internal causal structure, followed by a period during which they produce causative overgeneralizations, indicating knowledge of a productive causative rule. We asked in this study whether a child not exposed to structured linguistic input could create linguistic devices for encoding causation and, if so, whether the emergence of this causal language would follow a trajectory similar to the one observed for children learning language from linguistic input. We show that the child in our study did develop causation-encoding morphology, but only after initially using verbs that lacked internal causal structure. These results suggest that the ability to encode causation linguistically can emerge in the absence of a language model, and that exposure to linguistic input is not the only factor guiding children from one stage to the next in their production of causal language.
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Registered trials
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