Revisiting evidence for lexicalized word order in young children

One major controversy in the field of language development concerns the nature of children's early grammatical knowledge. This paper focuses on the early representation of word order. It questions the validity of the results obtained with the Weird Word Order methodology (Akhtar, 1999) in which children are presented with ungrammatical sentences. These results have previously been considered as major evidence for the constructivist, usage-based approach to word order development according to which young children initially encode word order as a verb-specific lexical property which only slowly develops into abstract knowledge at age 3 or 4 (e.g., Abbot-Smith et al., 2001, Matthews et al., 2005 and Matthews et al., 2007). The critical review presented here addresses various problems with the results and their interpretation. The discussion questions the relationship between theory and data as well as methodological issues related to the small number of observations and the discarding of data not missing at random. It is argued that the data not only fail to support the constructivist account, but they actually bring evidence for the alternative hypothesis according to which children, from early on, represent word order abstractly.

► The format of early representations of word order (lexical or abstract) is debated.
► Weird Word Order studies are thought to provide evidence for lexicalized representations.
► Our theoretical and methodological review reveals important inconsistencies in Weird Word Order studies.
► It is argued that results from these studies actually reveal evidence for early abstract representations of word order.