Children quickly acquire basic grammatical facts about their native language. Does this
early syntactic knowledge involve knowledge of words or rules? According to lexical …

In his paper “Do young children have adult syntactic competence?” Tomasello (Cognition 74
(2000) 209) interprets young children's conservatism in language production as evidence …

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language
acquisition [Brown, R.(1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard …

During language acquisition, children must learn how to classify words into the appropriate
grammatical category, such as noun or verb. Adults must also assign words to grammatical …

Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping.
The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial …

Can infants use the syntactic context of an unknown word to infer that it is a verb, and thus
refers to an action? Twenty-three-month-old French infants watching a moving object were …

Abstract Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a
finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they …

When learning a new language, grammar—although difficult—is very important, as
grammatical rules determine the relations between the words in a sentence. There is …

This study examines 16‐month‐olds' understanding of word order and inflectional properties
of familiar nouns and verbs. Infants preferred grammatical sentences over ungrammatical …

Recent studies indicate that young English-speaking children do not have a general
understanding of the significance of SVO order in reversible sentences; that is, they seem to …