This study examined abstract syntactic categorization in infants, using the case of grammatical gender. Ninety-six French-learning 14-, 17-, 20-, and 30-month-olds completed the study. In a preferential looking procedure infants were tested on their generalized knowledge of grammatical gender involving pseudonouns and gender-marking determiners.…

In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean length of utterances (MLU). A total of 312 speech samples…

Grammatical sentences were easier to imitate than ungrammatical ones only when function words were included in the sentence; with function words absent, there was no significant difference. (Authors)

Findings indicate that children who are learning language have available a sample of speech which is simpler, more redundant, and less confusing than normal adult speech. (Author)

Study offers some evidence which bears on the amount of influence of the environment upon linguistic capacity. (Author)