Rushen Shi
Université du Québec à Montréal

Grammatical Acquisition in the First Years of Life

How do children begin language acquisition? According to certain classic views, preverbal and early verbal infants lack grammatical knowledge. In this talk I will discuss empirical findings from my lab showing that infants start acquiring aspects of the grammar from the first year of life, and that they demonstrate sophisticated syntactic representations during the second year of life. I will show that infants use prosody and functional elements to break into language.