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Why Do Children Overcome Grammatical Errors

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How children overcome grammatical errors when acquiring their mothertongue is an issue addressed by many researchers. The term negative evidence refers to information about the structures that are not allowed in a language, which comes in either indirect or direct form. The former includes all ill-formed utterances that don't usually occur in spoken language: no native speaker of any language would utter an ungrammatical sentence. On the other hand, a parental behaviour that informs the child of what is not grammatical is considered direct negative evidence: the caretaker intervenes to explicitly correct the child's errors. (Marcus 1993:58) In 1970, Brown & Hanlon conducted a study based on conversational exchanges between three infants and their parents: the adults reacted to the children’s utterances with …show more content…

The researchers focused on the fact that an adult reformulation provided the child with immediate information on their error, contrasting directly with the erroneous utterance. (2003:640) Chouinard & Clark argue whether only explicit disapproval can be regarded as negative evidence. In fact, on some occasions parents don't correct the child directly, in order to maintain the natural flow of conversation. So other kinds of direct negative evidence are taken into consideration: expansion, repeats, recasts and requests for clarification. (2003:639) As we can see, here recasts are treated as direct negative evidence. The main focus is, however, on reformulations. The intent of this study was to demonstrate the following claims: negative evidece is available in reformulations. negative evidence is provided for all kinds of error (syntactic, phonological, morphological and lexical) and in different languages. Younger children are exposed to more reformulations. Children take negative evidence it into account and adopt it.

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