8 - Basic syntactic categories in early language development

Summary

The syntactic system of human language consists of different levels of units such as clauses, phrases, and grammatical categories. Grammatical categories are part of the system in all syntactic models as these units are the building blocks for larger syntactic units. Phrases and sentences are defined in terms of grammatical categories (rather than individual words) so that an infinite number of utterances can be represented. Children must acquire grammatical categories in order to develop a complete syntactic system. Grammatical categories have therefore received continuous focus in language acquisition research (e.g. Bloom 1970; Brown, 1973; Radford, 1990). One key question has been how children break into the system of syntactic categories. In this chapter I will discuss several models addressing this question. I will then focus on our model which suggests that speech input contains sufficient acoustical and phonological cues to support the division of words into two initial broad categories – content words and function words – and that these two categories serve as the entry point to the syntactic system for the learner. I will present our empirical work on input speech as well as on learners' processing of these two categories. I will argue that acquisition of this initial distinction plays an important role not only for syntactic acquisition, but also for other aspects of language development including word segmentation and the initial mapping of word meaning.