The early acquisition of verb constructions in Albanian: Evidence from children's verb use in naturalistic and experimental contexts

One of the wonders of human development is children's symbolic capacity to generate language that goes beyond the input received. The present study examines this developmental process with special focus on language typological factors. A first study examines 2-and 3-year-old Albanian-speaking children's ability to acquire transitive and intransitive constructions in an experimental context. A second study compares the children's ability to productively use novel verbs in an experimental setting with their ability to use verb constructions in naturalistic contexts.;Thirty 2- and 3-year-old Albanian-speaking children divided into two age cohorts were trained and then tested using an elicited production task based on the novel verb paradigm. In contrast to much prior research on English-speaking children, results revealed that most Albanian-speaking children were able to productively use familiar and novel verbs in both transitive and intransitive constructions, regardless of age and whether they heard the novel verbs modeled in verb constructions tested.;Given that age was not linked to the children's ability to productively use verb constructions in the experimental study, a follow up study compared the natural verb usage of three children who showed productivity in the experiments with three who did not when interacting with their caregivers. A comparative analysis of the relation between children's use of familiar verbs in natural contexts and their use of novel verbs in experimental contexts indicated a relationship between children's use of verb constructions in the two settings.;Findings reveal that Albanian-speaking children are precocious in their productivity with transitive and intransitive verb constructions. It is argued that languages with explicit markings for agent-patient relations facilitate an earlier onset of productivity than word-order languages like English. Additionally, results suggest that children's capacity to diversely use familiar verbs affects the developmental process of acquiring new verbs including those used in novel verb experiments. Discussion focuses on the importance of using concurrent experimental and naturalistic data to construct a more comprehensive view of the process by which children acquire verb constructions and also considers the implications of the cross-linguistic findings for developmental theories of language acquisition.