Children’s Syntax: Insights from the Time Course of Acquisition

Abstract

Examining changes over time in a child’s syntactic repertoire provides insight into what exactly children are acquiring and how they acquire it. Case studies are presented to illustrate three general points: (i) children are highly conservative learners; (ii) change in the child’s syntax consistently takes the form of adding new structural options (rather than replacing old ones); and (iii) superficially unrelated syntactic forms may be systematically interconnected, in the sense that children acquire them as a set. Together these properties strongly suggest that the information being acquired is parametric, and that choices take the form of ‘subset’ parameters, where adopting the non-default value simply expands the set of 〈form, meaning〉 pairs permitted. One implementation, the Constructive Parameter Hypothesis, posits that non-default values add new structure-building operations; CPH is shown to make distinctive, testable predictions.