Acquisition of the Dutch NPI Hoeven ‘Need’: From Lexical Frames to Abstract Knowledge

This article aims to investigate how Dutch children may eventually converge on a targetlike distribution of hoeven ‘need,’ a modal verbal NPI (Negative Polarity Item), based on its appearance in the scope of merely some but not all of its possible licensers in the language input (i.e., the induction problem). Imitation performance was obtained from 106 monolingual Dutch children (2;09–5;10; mean = 4;04; SD = 8.5 months) using an elicited imitation task. Results suggest that before age 3, children only accept hoeven to appear with either the sentential negation niet ‘not’ or the negative quanti... Mehr ...