Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.

中文翻译：

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词前婴儿的引导词序：日意跨语言研究

学习词序是婴儿在语言习得过程中最早取得的成就之一 [Brown, R. (1973)。第一语言：早期阶段，马萨诸塞州剑桥：哈佛大学出版社。]。已经提出了两种理论来解释这一事实。建构主义/词汇主义理论 [Tomasello, M. (2000)。幼儿有成人句法能力吗？Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] 认为词序是针对每个词项或结构单独学习的。生成主义理论 [Chomsky, N. (1995)。极简主义计划。马萨诸塞州剑桥：麻省理工学院出版社。]另一方面，声称词序是一种抽象和一般的属性，由独立于单个词的输入决定。在这里，我们展示了 8 个月大的日本和意大利婴儿在人工语法实验中具有相反的顺序偏好，反映他们各自母语的相反词序。这表明婴儿在词前具有某种词序表征，支持生成主义观点。我们提出了一种基于频率的自举机制来解释我们的结果，认为婴儿可以通过跟踪函子和内容词的顺序来构建这种表示，这些顺序是通过它们不同的频率分布来识别的。我们调查了以婴儿为导向的日语和意大利语语料库中的频率和词序模式，以支持这一说法。认为婴儿可以通过跟踪函子和内容词的顺序来构建这种表示，这些顺序是通过它们不同的频率分布来识别的。我们调查了以婴儿为导向的日语和意大利语语料库中的频率和词序模式，以支持这一说法。认为婴儿可以通过跟踪函子和内容词的顺序来构建这种表示，这些顺序是通过它们不同的频率分布来识别的。我们调查了以婴儿为导向的日语和意大利语语料库中的频率和词序模式，以支持这一说法。