Città, G.
Doctoral School in Cognitive Science - University of Messina
The aim of this work is to investigate the role of linguistic inputs and the frequency of use of verbs in the process of production of child first multi-word expressions (21-24 months of age). Through the computational analysis of fragments of linguistic corpora, extracted from the CHILDES database, we analyzed two key factors: (a) the set of individual linguistic inputs, the Child Directed Speech (CDS), that is the language environment within which the child lives and the crucial element affecting progressively the age of acquisition, the rhythm of growth, the size of the vocabulary and the formation of abstract categories of language; (b) the frequency with which verbs occur in the CDS. The analysis revealed that, in the flow of the CDS, the frequency of use of verbs, in specific contexts and in specific positions within the sentence, is an element of primary influence. It increases the production of simple and rudimentary composition of words that have verbs in salient position. Furthermore, the analysis that we conducted discriminates the use of the individual morphological variants of the verb in the construction of propositions and shows that the child's patterns of use are partially different from the patterns of use in the CDS. A comparison between the frequency of use of morphological variants of a sample verb (to look) at high frequency, both in the child speech and in the CDS, shows that, despite using more frequently the morphological variant most commonly used by adults in the CDS, children use it in a different way: within the sentence, they use it in different positions.