According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as "Is the boy who smoking is crazy?" because they have innate knowledge of "structure dependence" and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…