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(More customer reviews)"THE ORIGINS OF GRAMMAR presents a synthesis of work done by the authors, using ... the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, which can be used to assess lexical and syntactic knowledge in children as young as thirteen months of age. In addition to drawing together their ground-breaking empirical work, the authors use these results to describe a theory of language learning that emphasizes the role of multiple cues and forces in development. They show how infants shift their reliance on different aspects of linguistic input, moving from a bias to attend to prosodic information to a reliance on semantic information, and finally to a reliance on the syntax itself."
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How do children achieve adult grammatical competence? How do they inducesyntactical rules from the bewildering linguistic input that surrounds them? Themajor debates in language acquisition theory today focus not on whether there aresome sensitivities to syntactic information but rather which sensitivities areavailable to children and how they might be translated into the organizingprinciples that get syntactic learning off the ground.The Origins of Grammarpresents a synthesis of work done by the authors, who have pioneered one of the mostimportant methodological advances in language learning in the past decade: theintermodal preferential looking paradigm, which can be used to assess lexical andsyntactic knowledge in children as young as 13 months. In addition to drawingtogether their groundbreaking empirical work, the authors use these results todescribe a theory of language learning that emphasizes the role of multiple cues andforces in development. They show how infants shift their reliance on differentaspects of the linguistic input, moving from a bias to attend to prosodicinformation to a reliance on semantic information, and finally to a reliance on thesyntax itself.Viewing language acquisition as the product of a biased learner whotakes advantage of the information available from a variety of sources in his or herenvironment, The Origins of Grammar provides a new way of thinking about the processof language comprehension. The analysis borrows insights from theories about thedevelopment of mental models, models of early cognitive development and systemstheory, and is presented in a way that will be accessible to cognitive anddevelopmental psychologists.
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