Some theorists posit the existence of a ‘core’ grammar that virtually all native speakers acquire, and a ‘peripheral’ grammar that many do not. We investigated the viability of such a categorical distinction in the Dutch language. We first consulted linguists’ intuitions as to the ‘core’ or ‘peripheral’ status of a wide range of grammatical structures. We then tested a selection of core- and peripheral-rated structures on naïve participants with varying levels of literacy experience, using grammaticality judgement as a proxy for receptive knowledge. Overall, participants demonstrated better knowledge of ‘core’ structures than ‘peripheral’ structures, but the considerable variability within these categories was strongly suggestive of a continuum rather than a categorical distinction between them. We also hypothesised that individual differences in the knowledge of core and peripheral structures would reflect participants’ literacy experience. This was supported only by a small trend in our data. The results fit best with the notion that more frequent syntactic structures are mastered by more people than infrequent ones and challenge the received sense of a categorical core-periphery distinction.

一些理论家认为，实际上所有母语人士都拥有“核心”语法，而许多人却没有。我们调查了这种荷兰语分类区分的可行性。我们首先咨询了语言学家关于各种语法结构的“核心”或“外围”状态的直觉。然后，我们使用语法判断作为接受知识的代表，对具有不同水平读写经验的初学者进行了一系列核心和外围评级结构的测试。总体而言，参与者表现出比“外围”结构更好的“核心”结构知识，但是这些类别中的巨大差异强烈暗示着它们是连续体，而不是它们之间的绝对区别。我们还假设，核心和外围结构知识的个体差异将反映参与者的识字经验。这仅受我们数据中的小趋势支持。该结果最符合这样一种观念，即更多的人掌握了更频繁的句法结构，而不是很少的人掌握了这种句法结构，并且挑战了人们对分类核心-外围区别的认识。