How children constrain their argument structure constructions

We tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as Don't giggle me. The first is tha t children base their usage of verbs on membership in narrow-range semantic classes (Pinker 1989). The second is that children make use of indirect ne gative evidence in the form of alternative expressions that preempt tendenc ies to overgeneralize. Ninety-fix children (32 each at 2.5, 4.5, and 6/7 ye ars of age) were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb an d one as an intransitive verb. One verb was from a semantic class that can be used both transitively and intransitively while the other was from a fix ed transitivity class. Half of the children were given preempting alternati ves with bath verbs; for example, they heard a verb in a simple transitive construction (as in Ernie's meeking the car) and then they also heard it in a passive construction-which enabled them to answer the question 'What's h appening with the car?' with It's getting meeked (rather than! generalizing to the intransitive construction with It's meeking). We found empirical su pport for the constraining role of verb classes and of preemption, but only for children 4.5 years of age and older. Results are discussed in terms of a model of syntactic development in which children begin with lexically sp ecific linguistic constructions and only gradually learn to differentiate v erbs as lexical items from argument structure constructions as abstract lin guistic entities.