The Origins of Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension (Language Speech and Communication)

The authors of The Origins of Grammar have pioneered one of the mostimportant methodological advances in language learning in the past decade: theintermodal preferential looking paradigm, which can be used to assess lexical andsyntactic knowledge in children as young as thirteen months. They describe a theoryof language learning that emphasizes the role of multiple cues and forces indevelopment. They further show how infants shift their reliance on different aspectsof the linguistic input, moving from a bias to attend to prosodic information to areliance on semantic information, and finally to a reliance on the syntaxitself.