Learning embedded verb placement in Norwegian: Evidence for early overgeneralization

Abstract

This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3–7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and two requiring a semantic-pragmatic generalization. We find that children overgeneralize the main clause word order to embedded clauses. However, this happens with different probabilities across all three clause types. We take this to mean that children overgeneralize and that they entertain both coarse and fine-grained hypotheses simultaneously. We also suggest that children make use of frequency information, both in making initial hypotheses and when retracting from overgeneralization.