Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Uriel Cohen Priva ... - University of York

A statistical model of grammatical choices in children’s
productions of dative sentences
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Uriel Cohen Priva, Scott Grimm,
Sander Lestrade ∗ , Gorkem Ozbek, Tyler Schnoebelen, Susannah Kirby ∗∗ ,
Misha Becker ∗∗ , Vivienne Fong and Joan Bresnan
Stanford University, Nijmegen University ∗ , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ∗∗
{mcdm, urielc, sgrimm, gorkem, tylers, vivienne, bresnan}@stanford.edu
s.Lestrade@let.ru.nl, suki@metalab.unc.edu, mbecker@email.unc.edu
The driving forces behind variation in the dative construction have stood as a puzzle both from the
point of view of child language acquisition and in the theoretical syntactic literature addressing adult production.
One line of thought attributes these choices to lexical meaning differences among dative verbs
((Gropen et al., 1989) for children; (Green, 1971) for adults) or to constructional differences in meaning
that constrain verb choice (Goldberg, 1995). But studies of actual usage are increasingly showing that
the mapping between meanings and construction choice is much more flexible than these earlier studies
allowed (Snyder, 2003; Bresnan & Nikitina, 2003). Additionally, usage studies point to the important
role of properties such as end weight and pronominality in determining construction choice for adults
(Thompson, 1990; Collins, 1995; Wasow, 2002; Bresnan & Hay, 2006).
Given the determinative role of verb meanings in previous theories of child acquisition of dative
structures (Pinker, 1989), an important question is whether the same usage factors of end-weight and
pronominality that affect the meaning-to-syntax mappings for adults also influence variation in child
dative construction choice. Recently, statistical models of grammatical choices in adults’ syntactic productions
have given rise to the possibility of predicting variation based on factors well-known to influence
production (e.g., animacy) (Arnold et al., 2000; Szmrecsanyi, 2005; Becker, 2006; Bresnan & Hay,
2006). Building upon the work of (Bresnan et al., 2005) which analyzes dative alternation in adult speech
by means of logistic regression techniques, this paper develops a comparable analysis for the dative alternation
in child speech. Our findings demonstrate that the same modeling techniques are predictive for
the children’s production data; however, the preponderant factors differ across models.
We based our study on data from a subset of the Child Language Data Exchange System (MacWhinney,
2000). Seven children from this database were selected based on the amount of data available, both
the total utterances and those containing dative constructions. The data was annotated for a variety of
factors known to influence adults’ production of datives, namely: animacy, length, pronominality, givenness
and persistence. Further, age and mean length utterance (MLU) were coded as approximate measures
of developmental progress. These factors were then used in a logistic regression model (Baayen,
2006), which is well-suited to characterize binary classification tasks. This model evaluated each factor’s
strength as a predictor of the dative construction being realized as NP PP rather than NP NP.
The resultant model is valuable in itself as demonstrating the multi-variable nature of children’s language
production. Lengths of the theme and the recipient as well as the pronominality of the theme were
found to be significant predictors. Another factor which was found to be significant, persistence, measures
whether a previous dative construction influences the construction under consideration. In contrast,
age and MLU were not predictive factors, consistent with the general findings in language acquisition
(Clark, 2003). In addition, comparison with the model of (Bresnan et al., 2005) yields interesting distinc-

tions which may characterize the difference between child and adult grammars. In particular, length and
pronominality behave similarly across models, revealing a significant end-weight effect among children.
However, animacy, which is a strong predictor in the adult model, was not found to be significant for
children, although a full comparison would require further study. Given the size of the corpus, our results
are promising rather than definitive; yet the resulting model assesses on empirical grounds the predictive
power of linguistically motivated factors to account for syntactic variation, demonstrating that the application
of robust statistical modeling techniques can yield insight into the factors at play in children’s
speech production.
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