Behavioral Acquisition Methods With Infants

Abstract This chapter reviews key findings in the domain of infant syntax, covering both the methods used to explore infant syntax and the discoveries linguists have made concerning the growth of syntactic knowledge. We first explore children’s initial steps in acquiring the syntactic categories of their language, how children use distributional evidence to build these categories and how these distributional properties are used in making syntactic and semantic inferences. Second, we examine children’s early phrase structure representations, focusing on hierarchical structure, the canonical order of subjects, verbs and objects, and the emergence of language-specific properties of clauses, such as the licensing of null subjects. Finally, we turn to infants’ acquisition of grammatical dependencies, exploring when and how infants detect dependencies that hold across non-adjacent morphemes in particular syntactic environments, dependencies that involve movement and dependencies that involve binding. This review provides a clear summary of both the prospects and challenges for examining syntax in infancy. While infant research must face the challenge that infants are limited in their behavioral repertoire, at the same time, studying infant syntax represents the frontier of our knowledge about the emergence of grammar. Gaining a richer understanding of infants’ sensitivities and their ability to make inferences from distributional observations to syntactic representations may ultimately help us to better understand how the language faculty allows us to acquire whatever language we are exposed to.