ABSTRACT
H ow do children develop complex linguistic systems that necessarily involve multiple concurrent developments in semantic, syntactic, and cognitive realms? Research is often of necessity restricted to examining developments within one realm or another (e.g., syntactic, semantic, or cognitive),2
or within a small set of linguistic structures within a given domain (e.g., tense or inectional elements, active vs. passive sentences, word meaning, development of one word (more, big) or a few related words (e.g., more and less; more and -er; all, every, some). We do not often get many glimpses of real-language data that allow us to see how the acquisition of multiple sets of constructs interact over time. Bowerman’s work has provided some of the most valuable insights into such interaction, showing how distinct structures inuence each other when they begin to “bump up against each other’s territories” (Bowerman, 1978, p. 391; Bowerman, 1982). Her ground-breaking work on late-emerging errors in a number of realms (e.g., spatial and temporal terms, causative verbs, Figure-Ground expressions, and verb-argument structure) has provided countless new insights into the ways in which the child goes about constructing a grammar that encompasses a wide range of substructures. That work has provided some of the impetus behind much current theorizing on language development positing that children establish systems on the basis of networks in interaction, or dynamical systems. These theories suggest that the more children learn, the more their knowledge in one realm will begin to inuence their knowledge in another (Elman, 1998; Gershkoff-Stowe & Thelen, 2004; Smith, 1999). The purpose of this chapter is to examine closely another wide range of structures in order to gauge the extent to which their acquisition hinges on such interaction between structures, and on interaction between syntactic, semantic, and cognitive factors. The data are interpreted as indicating that such interactions occur at multiple levels throughout the development of the forms in question.
