The Role of Functional Categories in First Language Acquisition

This book is part of an ongoing and excitingscientific quest for uncovering the mechanisms thatguide the acquisition and use of language in thehuman species. It focuses on a key mystery -children's acquisition of syntax which is a criticalcomponent in all languages. The book investigateswhen and how some core syntactic constituents becomeaccessible to the child in particular FunctionalCategories - the grammatical categories that arerealized in language by a set of function words(e.g. the and) and verb inflections. Acomprehensive review on functional categories isfollowed by new empirical findings which reveal thatalready around one year of age infants incorporatesyntactic information regarding function words insentence processing. This grammatical sensitivitydemonstrates that content categories (e.g. nounsverbs) and functional categories are developing intandem during early periods in language acquisition.The book provides new information about thelinguistic development of children and is thusintended for both students and researchers in thecognitive sciences as well as for a generalaudience including health educators parents andteachers.