The Contribution of Chunks to Acquisition and Proficiency

Abstract

Young children are exposed to streams of speech in which they try to discern recurring bits and determine their meaning. These bits are not necessarily words, since the young child does not yet discern word boundaries (Peters, 1983). Rather, the bits that young children discern are of various lengths and often consist of several words. For example, it is known that meaning-bearing word sequences such as compounds and noun phrases like cup of tea are learned by young children as unanalysed wholes (Cruttenden, 1981). It thus appears that young children acquire semantic units consisting of two or more words holistically and realize only at a later stage that these units break down into a certain number of single words.