Learning to structure sentences through the acquisition of grammatical words: Introduction to the special issue on the role of grammatical words in young children’s syntactic development

Abstract

Until recently, grammatical words such as determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions have been considered marginal for the early stages of syntactic development. Lately the trend has turned, and recently some authors have been arguing for the opposite view, according to which grammatical words or functional words (FWs) have a central role in syntactic development. This special issue is devoted to the hypothesis that FWs bootstrap syntactic development in children. The first article, by Dye et al., sets the background with a thorough literature review. The second article, by Ninio, offers evidence that functional categories (FCs) may be the source of transfer and facilitation of major syntactic principles. The remainder of the special issue is devoted to five studies that offer an empiricist model of learning a vocabulary of FWs and its connection to syntactic structure. The major conclusion is that this interrelated complex system is not innate but learned from the linguistic input. Evidence comes from studies of development of several languages: French (Le Normand), German (Szagun et al.), English, Spanish and Bantu (Demuth); of development in typically and atypically developing child populations (Leonard); and of monolingual as well as bilingual development (Kedar). Each of the studies examines a different aspect of such a learning theory. The special issue provides important theoretical insights into the process of acquisition, and may contribute to various applied uses by serving as the basis for remedial teaching and intervention.