Abstract
This thesis explores to which extent distributional analysis of the input can account for a child’s language acquisition process. Such an examination is important for the nature-nurture debate in the linguistic field (whether there is innate knowledge specific to language) because most non-nativist theories recognize domain-general pattern finding skill as a driving force of language development. Therefore, a non-nativist theory will be supported when the input makes good predictions of a specific child’s language development, but it should also be ready to explain the mismatches between adult’s speech and child’s speech. The spoken data of a Mandarin-speaking boy (collected weekly from age 1;11.9 to 2;5.28) and his mother are chosen as the research material. Three kinds of methods are used to evaluate the similarity of their speech: (i) comparing the child’s syntactic development of individual verbs with the adult’s speech by counting construction frequencies; (ii) searching for frequent items neighboring verbs in the child’s speech, and seeing if the items are reliable cues for verbs’ appearance in the input; (iii) searching for frequently dropped items when the child imitated the adult’s speech. The results show that distributional analysis can only account for part of the child’s language development process, and two major discrepancies between child’s speech and adult’s speech are found: (i) most functional items are lagged in the child’s part despite their high frequencies in the input; and (ii) the boy’s general “preference” of realizing objects but not subjects is not predicted by the input. The findings of this study suggest that non-nativist theories should not solely rely on frequency counts to account for language development. Besides frequency counts, these theories should take distributional variety and functional variety in the input into consideration, and make a measure of “variety” to make testable predictions. Also, these theories should be able to account for the coexistence of abstract syntactic knowledge (e.g. argument structure) and item-specific phenomena in early stages of language development.