Evidence for the role of frequency in the acquisition of lexicalization patterns of chinese-english bilingual children

Children have been shown to acquire path satellite constructions early in development across a number of different languages. One possible explanation is that children start to form concepts of path of motion before they even begin to speak. It is also possible that path satellites are highly frequent in parents' language to children. To explore the role of frequency, we examined how path, manner, and resultative satellite constructions were used by Chinese-English bilingual children and adults. By looking at bilingual children, we can dissociate how the children's linguistic knowledge and age factor in their acquisition. Four Chinese-English bilingual children between the ages of 1;9 and 3;3 were videotaped in free-play sessions in both English and Chinese. It was found that the adults used motion + path constructions more often than any other kind of verb complexes and the children encoded motion + path earlier, too. In Chinese, the children heard more resultatives than manner constructions whereas the reverse was true in English. The children's production of these constructions followed the frequency in the input. The adults' use of lexicalization patterns was not uniform with the children's age and/or linguistic level. We conclude that researchers must look at how adults use lexicalization patterns with their children in order to understand children's acquisition of these patterns.