Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0006-3290-2270

Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Reader 1

Michael Diercks

Reader 2

Toni Cook

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Abstract

This study investigated the use of the present progressive and present perfect syntactic constructions in the language of English-speaking children to determine which is used earlier and at a higher rate. The theory of Developmental Minimalist Syntax (DMS) (Diercks et al., 2023) predicts that derivationally earlier syntactic elements in Minimalist derivations are acquired earlier by children. Since the present progressive is earlier than the present perfect in Minimalist derivations, DMS hypothesizes that children use it in their speech before the present perfect. To investigate this hypothesis, I analyzed the speech of two English-speaking children, Adam and Sarah, from the Brown (1973) corpus on CHILDES. This corpus contained longitudinal data of Adam’s speech from ages 2;3 to 4;10 and Sarah’s speech from ages 2;3 to 5;1. Results indicate that both children demonstrate usage of the present progressive earlier and at a higher rate than the present perfect. Although the children do not use either construction at adult-like rates when compared to the frequencies of the constructions in a corpus of adult speech, they are affected by the use of these constructions in the input speech of their parents. These findings are consistent with the predictions of DMS and thus present implications for potential psycholinguistic motivations behind Minimalist syntactic modeling.

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