This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., "le/les garcons lit/lisent" "the boy(s) read(s)") where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further…

Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Experimental evidence for syntactic structure at 18 months. Cognition, 89, B65-B73.] claim experimental substantiation of an argument from the poverty of the stimulus, in the sense of Pullum and Scholz [Linguist. Rev. 19 (2002) 9].…

Two experiments examined whether infants might use the prosody of sentences to organize and remember spoken information. Results suggest that infants better remember phonetic properties of words prosodically linked together within a single clause rather than a list, and words that are prosodically linked within a single clausal unit as opposed to…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

Five experiments examined 15- and 18-month olds' sensitivity to morphosyntactic dependencies. Results indicated that 18-month olds, but not 15-month olds, were sensitive to basic relationship between "is" and "-ing" and that 18-month-olds could track relationships between functor morphemes. Findings were consistent with hypothesis that 18-month…

Examined parental speech data demonstrating that linguistic input to children does not contain sufficient information to support unaided learning of the pronoun "one." Examined 18-month-olds' interpretation of sentences with a "one" substitution. Found that 18-month-olds have command of the syntax of "one." Because…

Syntactic knowledge is widely held to be partially innate, rather than learned. In a classic example, it is sometimes argued that children know the proper use of anaphoric "one," although that knowledge could not have been learned from experience. Lidz et al. [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't…

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

Presents evidence that the supposed paradox in which infants find abstract patterns in speech-like stimuli whereas even some preschoolers struggle to find abstract syntactic patterns within meaningful language is no paradox. Asserts that all research evidence shows that young children's syntactic constructions become abstract in a piecemeal…

Asserts that the posited paradox between infancy and toddlerhood language was not eliminated by Tomasello and Akhtar's appeal to infants' robust statistical learning abilities. Maintains that scrutiny of their studies supports the resolution that abstracting linguistic form is easy for infants and that toddlers find it difficult to integrate…