Syntactic movement is central to mainstream generative theories of syntax (Chomsky, 1957; 1981; 1995; 2001). Under this view, sentences contain words that have moved and words that have not. Children only ever hear words in their moved positions so it is unclear how they could determine the ways these constituents must be merged and moved from their input. Learners may be able to solve this puzzle because movement in natural languages is constrained in principled ways (Ross, 1967; Travis, 1948; Emonds, 1976; Rizzi, 1990; Chomsky, 1995; Chomsky, 2001). These constraints narrow the hypothesis space for learners by limiting the possible permutations of words and phrases in sentences and creating meaningful patterns across sentences of different types. This dissertation investigates how movement constraints might help learners acquire syntactic structure from their input. Previous research has shown that learners are sensitive to the distributional patterns in their input and that properties of natural languages lead to better learning of artificial grammars (e.g. Thompson and Newport, 2007). Experiment 1 asks whether movement constraints lead to be better learning of word order by comparing the learning of a grammar that obeyed these constraints to one that didn't. The distributional cues were identical at the phrase level for both grammars but differed at the sentence level. Learners exposed to the constrained grammar were significantly better at detecting word order violations than the controls, but their learning of phrase structure did not differ significantly, suggesting that these constraints lead to better learning because of the cues they create. In order for constituents to move, there must be an order in which they are initially merged. However, children rarely hear sentences that are transparent to this order (Newport, 1975; Cameron- Faulkner et al., 2003). Experiment 2 manipulated learners' exposure to strings that could be generated without movement in the constrained grammar. Learners exposed to the restricted corpora were just as good at detecting word order violations as learners exposed to unrestricted corpora. I argue that learning was successful because movement constraints create patterns in the input and that these patterns point learners to the right syntactic structure. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]