The Transition from One-word to Multi-word Utterances.
The Transition from One-word to Multi-word Utterances.

A Case-study of an Italian Child

Summary/Abstract: Previous work has suggested that infants start producing multi-word utterances while they still produce single-word utterances, and they make generalizations about the order of constituents from early stages. This article describes the transition from one-word to multi-word utterances in an Italian child recorded every two weeks for 45 minutes from the age of 1;05 to the age of 2;05, and it examines specifically whether the child’s productions respect a head–complement generalization (in Italian, the generalization that heads precede complements). The analysis was conducted on files available in the Childes database. The study shows that one-word utterances are indeed not abandoned when the child learns to combine words, and the first two-word productions reflect adult utterances, whether or not these comply with the general ordering of heads and complements. These results are compatible with approaches that see first multi-word utterances as being syntactic, but they also show that the level of generalization is not fully compatible with predictions from experimental work on head-directionality (which predicts a wider generalization than the one observed in this child).

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