Structural Priming Depends on Semantic Similarity in 4 Year-Olds but not 5 Year Olds

construction grammar Evidence has been accumulating that young children’s grammars are based on particular lexical items, specifically verbs (Tomasello 2000). This means that if a child says “John kicked the ball, ” and later, “John threw the ball ” these sentences are not both produced using the transitive construction, but are each formed from autonomous item-based constructions. Item-based accounts emphasize gradual abstraction. This predicts that there should be a period during which children’s grammars are not based around individual items, but are not yet as abstract as adults’. Little to no evidence for this “partial abstraction ” phase currently exists. Demonstrating a phase of partial abstraction is the goal of the current study. Evidence for abstract grammar in adults is shown b