Modeling the Dative Alternation in English Early Child Language

How do children develop syntactic ordering preferences, and what affects their syntactic choices? This study probes these questions with the English dative alternation as the test case. We built the largest-to-date dataset of the dative alternation that contains utterances produced by children and their parents, and subjected it to growth curve modeling and logistic regression analysis. Our results demonstrate: (1) the double object structure emerges slightly earlier than the prepositional object structure in child speech; (2) the production level of the double object structure is consistently higher and reaches maximum production growth at a later stage along children’s developmental trajectory; (3) length, givenness, nominal type, and structural persistence are among the most predictive factors of the ordering preferences in both child and parent production, revealing no pronounced difference in their effects dependent on the speaker role or children’s age; (4) children’s ordering preferences start becoming more parent-like as early as 18–24 months.