The Childrens Understanding of SVO Word Order Essay

The Childrens Understanding of SVO Word Order - Essay Example The first group is composed of French children who are 2 years of age and heard either high or low-frequency verb modeled in either SOV (subject-object-verb) or VSO (verb-subject-object) order. While the second group is likewise composed of French children who are 1 year older than the first group (3 years old) heard also either high or low-frequency verbs modeled in either SOV or VSO order. The said word orders were both ungrammatical. The experiment raises two fundamental questions such as 1) how do children perceive similarities between different lexical instantiations of related constructions and organize these into a network?; and 2) does a relative lack of similarity between related constructions affect the creation of a construction network? These said questions are addressed by the authors through replicating recent English weird word order production studies in French. To be specific, the authors intended to address five major questions: Primarily, the type of research being reviewed here is a causal research which appears to be the most appropriate to be done since the authors intend to find out the children’s understanding of SVO word order in French through hearing high or low-frequency verbs. Specifically, the authors used the randomized controlled trial. Again, the authors chose the most appropriate method since they intend to inject an intervention and measure the effect of that intervention. Moreover, the research method employed has always been the best one since this is the most well-recognized method that could lead the researchers to an objective answer to the current research questions (Foster 2001, p.21). More specifically, the authors used weird word order methodology (Akhtar 1999) through using verbs of different frequencies, to determine whether children's use of word order as a grammatical marker depends upon the frequency of the lexical items being ordered.