Discriminating between constructivist and nativist positions: fillers as evidence of generalization

Abstract

In her note, Ann Peters distinguishes between two types of fillers: (1) premorphological, whose presence in the utterance is motivated by purely phonological considerations (the child attempts to produce an adult utterance at the prosodic level, or approximates the prevalent rhythmic pattern in the language); and (2) protomorphological, which function as place-holders for grammatical morphemes and eventually differentiate into various grammatical morphemes. I would like to suggest that there may also be a third type which sometimes appears when the child begins to generalize over a set of related words. Just as protomorphological fillers can provide valuable information about how children acquire function words, these ‘generalized’ fillers may offer insights into how children form categories of function words. I will illustrate this phenomenon with data from the Naomi corpus in the CHILDES database (Sachs, 1983).