Exploring Children's Acquisition of Verb Phrase Structure from the Perspective of the Bidirectional Growth Model
This paper investigates the growth of Verb Phrase(VP)in children from a cross-linguistic perspective within the Bidirectional Growth Model(BGM).After an in-depth analysis of three Mandarin-speaking children's longitudinal data at the one-word stage,we find that the nouns and verbs produced at the one-word stage should be treated as the object and the verb of VP structures respectively.When children at the two-word stage were able to produce sentences consisting of nouns and verbs,VO structures emerged earlier and were used more frequently than SV structures.These facts show that the object and the verb are the elements emerging earlier than the subject in VP structures,exhibiting a gradual bottom-up order of acquisition.A similar bottom-up order of acquisition in VP structures was also detected in the longitudinal data of an English-speaking child in CHILDES,indicating that the bottom-up order of acquisition of the VP holds cross-linguistically.The above finding is not only predicted by BGM,but also consistent with the bottom-up direction of structural building of VP structures under the Minimalist Program.