The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition
University of Liverpool · Australian National University
Abstract
This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses. (i) There exist different types of frequency effect, from effects at the level of concrete lexical strings to effects at the level of abstract cues to thematic-role assignment, as well as effects of both token and type, and absolute and relative, frequency.…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 55.15
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 233
Authors
4Topics & keywords
- Utterance
- Frequency
- Language acquisition
- Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive psychology
- Second-language acquisition
- Mathematics
- Quality Education