Chapter 6: Learning the Structure of Sentences

6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge

• Compositionality
• Box 6.1: Stages of syntactic development
• Basic properties of syntactic structure
• Language at Large 6.1: Constituent structure and poetic effect
• Box 6.2: Rules versus constructions
• Box 6.3: Varieties of structural complexity
• 6.1 Questions to Contemplate

6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories

• How do children know about grammatical categories?
• Is distributional evidence powerful enough?
• Researchers at Work 6.1: The usefulness of frequent frames in Spanish and English
• 6.2 Questions to Contemplate

6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?

• Do children understand structure in the same way as adults?
• Looking for evidence of abstract knowledge
• Children as cautious learners of syntax
• Learning when to generalize
• Box 6.4: Quirky verb alternations
• Box 6.5: Syntax and the immature brain
• 6.3 Questions to Contemplate

6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning

• Relating phrases over long distances
• Are children guided by innate syntactic constraints?
• Box 6.6: Specific language impairment and complex syntax
• Learning mechanisms
• Method 6.1: the CHILDES database
• 6.4 Questions to Contemplate

6.5 What Do Children Do with Input?

• Language at Large 6.2: Language universals, alien tongues, and learnability
• Children’s learning as the source of language change
• Filtering out noise
• Filling the knowledge gaps
• Method 6.2: What can we learn from computer simulations of syntactic learning?
• 6.5 Questions to Contemplate
• Digging Deeper: Domain-general and domain-specific theories of language learning

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