Abstract
The theory outlined in this chapter proposes that infants' earliest syntactic categories correspond to the language-universal, super ordinate binary distinction of content words vs. function words, and that these two categories can be derived by infants based on perceptual analysis of a constellation of acoustic/phonetic and phonological cues in the input. Furthermore, the theory predicts that this initial bifurcation facilitates or optimizes various important aspects of early language acquisition, including deriving refined grammatical categories, determining phrasal bracketing, segmenting words, and learning of word meanings. Data from cross-language studies of infant-directed speech, connectionist modeling, and infants' discrimination of the two categories support the function-word/content-word distinction. The chapter also explains experimental results suggesting that function words impact several aspects of language acquisition. It is proposed that high-frequency function words are stored in the emerging lexicon of preverbal infants; these stored function words have the primary role of assisting early language analysis.
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