A thrower-button or a button-thrower? Children’s judgments of grammatical and ungrammatical compound nouns

This study looked at children's judgments of compound nouns. Forty-eight children, aged3;5 to 6;0, were asked to judge grammatical and ungrammatical compounds (such as WAGON-PULLER and *PULLER-WAGON) for their appropriateness in conveying particular meanings. Children at all ages judged grammatical compounds as acceptable, but only as they got older did they also reject most ungrammatical compounds as unacceptable. When children judged a form as unacceptable, they were asked to 'make it okay'. Their repairs were often themselves ungrammatical, though less so as they got older. The repairs tended to parallel the forms of spontaneous or elicited compounds from the same age levels. That is, children can detect ungrammatical compound forms as ungrammatical ('not okay') before they are able to repair them correctly. These data, we argue, provide further evidence that children's comprehension is ahead of their production. Children are typically able to comprehend complex words before they are able to produce them (see for example Clark and Hecht 1982; Clark and Berman 1984). This mirrors the more general case in which children's comprehension of language is ahead of or different from their production, whether in phonology, morphology, word formation, or syntax (Clark and Hecht 1983; Ingram 1974). The gap between comprehension and production appears to play a crucial role in the process of acquisition itself. Children first set up representations of words in memory for their own use in comprehension. These representations then serve as the targets for children's own productions. Evidence for this process comes from several sources. Children prefer to hear conventional adult forms over imitations of their own child forms (see for example Maccoby and Bee 1965; Smith 1973). They consistently identify adult forms correctly, even from unfamiliar speakers, while failing to identify forms recorded from their own speech (see for example Dodd 1975). And they consistently Linguistics 26 (1988), 3-19 0024-3949/88/0026-0003 $2.00 © Mouton de Gruyter 4 E. V. Clark and B. J. S. Barron correct their own speech to make it closer in form to the adult's (see for example Clark 1982; Clark and Andersen 1979; Käsermann and Foppa 1981). If children rely on adult-based representations for target word forms, they should show some preference for forms that match their representations over those that do not, even for those they themselves cannot yet produce. To test the hypothesis that children can recognize forms they cannot yet produce themselves, we asked threeto six-year-old children to judge the acceptability of several types of compound nouns in English. They were presented with the intended meaning of each compound (such as 'a kind of car you can go to the beach in') and asked to judge whether the compound noun produced by a puppet (for example beach-car) would be Okay' or not as a label. The child's goal was to help the puppet learn to say things properly. The compounds consisted of several types of correct forms together with several incorrect patterns based on the typical errors children make between ages three and six. If children have formed representations (for comprehension) for the compounds commonly found in adult speech, they should rely on those representations both in judging forms from unskilled speakers and in assessing their own productions. They should therefore be able to judge grammatical compounds as acceptable ('okay') more often than they do ungrammatical ones. And they should also be able to use these representations to reject ungrammatical compounds ('not okay'). But since production typically lags behind comprehension, when asked to repair forms judged to be 'not okay', younger children should offer ungrammatical repairs more often than older children. Their repairs, in other words, should coincide with forms they would produce spontaneously (Clark et al. 1986). The typical errors made in production fall into four main categories that were used as the compound types to be judged and repaired. Suppose children are asked to find a label for 'someone who pulls wagons'. First, they may simply combine the verb and noun bases in that order, with no affix, as in *PULL-WAGON with the structure *V-N. Second, they may add an affix, -er, to the verb base, but still combine the bases in the order verbbefore-noun, as in *PULLER-WAGON with the structure *V + er-N. Or third, still relying on the verb-before-noun order, they may add the affix to the wrong base, as in *PULL-WAGONER with the structure *V-N + er. The fourth type consists of noun-noun compounds with the head noun incorrectly ordered before its modifier, as in *CHAIR-DUCK, meaning 'a chair that ducks can sit on'. For ease of reference, we will label each ungrammatical type with the pertinent exemplar, in small caps. Some ungrammatical forms should be harder to detect as wrong than Judging compound nouns 5 others. Notice that the predicate or verb phrase in English, as in '(The man) pulled the wagon\ has the verb (pull, the head of the phrase) in initial position. If children accept this order as canonical for all constructions containing a verb or verb base, they may find it hard to judge compounds as ungrammatical if they contain verb-noun order, as in *PULL-WAGON or *PULLER-WAGON. Next, consider how the head of a grammatical compound like WAGON-PULLER is marked. The head noun, puller (derived from the verb pull) appears in the rightmost slot and is further marked as the head by the affix -er. That is, children can rely on two cues in identifying the head of a compound — the presence of the affix -er on the head, and the location of the head after the modifier (wagon). Given these cues, the rejection of some ungrammatical compounds may be easier than others, since they may contain conflicting cues to the head, with the affix on the wrong base but in the correct 'slot', as in *PULL-WAGONER, or on the wrong base and in the modifier slot, as in *WAGONER-PULL. The latter, of course, is compatible neither with predicate structure (V NP order) nor with compound structure (N-V + er) and so should be easy to detect as ungrammatical. The next easiest to detect might be *PULL-WAGONER compounds where there are two apparent heads — the verb base in initial position (as in a predicate phrase) and the noun base in final position with the nominal affix -er. But both slots cannot be filled by a head in either predicates or compounds, so the judgments should be 'not okay'. In the fourth ungrammatical type, *CHAIR-DUCK, where the two noun bases are given in the wrong order, with the head before the modifier, the erroneous order mirrors the order of the pertinent nouns in the intended meaning, 'a chair that ducks can sit on'. This might make it hard for children who have just heard the description to detect the order error. Errors of this type, though, are rare in spontaneous speech, so children may find these the easiest of all to detect. The pattern of judgments predicted in the detection of erroneous compound forms containing verb bases, from easiest to hardest, is as follows: