Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently-encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word sequences that are infrequent and thus unfamiliar to them than for those that are frequent. In this study, we investigate whether children's knowledge of multiword sequences can explain a phenomenon that has long represented a key theoretical fault line in the study of language development: errors of subject-auxiliary non-inversion in question production (e.g., “why we can't go outside?*”). In doing so we consider a type of error that has been ignored in discussion of multiword sequences to date. Previous work has focused on errors of omission – an absence of accurate productions for infrequent phrases. However, if children make use of dedicated representations for frequent sequences of words in their productions, we might also expect to see errors of commission – the appearance of frequent phrases in children's speech even when such phrases are not appropriate. Through a series of corpus analyses, we provide the first evidence that the global input frequency of multiword sequences (e.g., “she is going” as it appears in declarative utterances) is a valuable predictor of their errorful appearance (e.g., the uninverted question “what she is going to do?*”) in naturalistic speech. This finding, we argue, constitutes powerful evidence that multiword sequences can be represented as linguistic units in their own right.

中文翻译：

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多词单元导致儿童自发产生的委托错误：“什么语料库数据可以告诉我们？*”

过去十年的心理语言学研究表明，儿童的语言知识包括对经常遇到的多词序列的专门表示。这方面的重要证据来自对儿童生产的研究：一再证明，对于不经常出现的单词序列，他们不熟悉的单词序列比那些频繁出现的单词序列的孩子的言语错误率更高。在这项研究中，我们调查儿童对多词序列的了解是否可以解释长期以来一直代表语言发展研究中一个关键理论断层的现象：问题产生中的主语辅助不倒置错误（例如，“为什么我们可以不出去？*”）。在这样做时，我们考虑了一种迄今为止在讨论多字序列时被忽略的错误。以前的工作主要集中在遗漏错误上——不经常出现的短语缺乏准确的产生。然而，如果孩子们在他们的作品中对频繁出现的单词序列使用专门的表示，我们也可能会看到委托错误——即使这些短语不合适，孩子们的演讲中也会出现频繁的短语。通过一系列语料库分析，我们提供了第一个证据，表明多词序列的全局输入频率（例如，“她正在走”，因为它出现在陈述性话语中）是其错误出现的有价值的预测指标（例如，未倒转的问题“她要做什么？*”）在自然主义的演讲中。我们认为，这一发现构成了强有力的证据，即多词序列可以独立地表示为语言单位。