The Role of Functional Categories in First Language Acquisition: Uncovering Early Grammatical Knowledge in Children - Softcover

Kedar, Yarden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3836463873 ISBN 13: 9783836463874

Publisher: VDM Verlag, 2009

Synopsis

This book is part of an ongoing and exciting scientific quest for uncovering the mechanisms that guide the acquisition and use of language in the human species. It focuses on a key mystery ? children?s acquisition of syntax, which is a critical component in all languages. The book investigates when and how some core syntactic constituents become accessible to the child, in particular, Functional Categories ? the grammatical categories that are realized in language by a set of function words (e.g., the, and) and verb inflections. A comprehensive review on functional categories is followed by new empirical findings, which reveal that already around one year of age, infants incorporate syntactic information regarding function words in sentence processing. This grammatical sensitivity demonstrates that content categories (e.g., nouns, verbs) and functional categories are developing in tandem during early periods in language acquisition. The book provides new information about the linguistic development of children and is thus intended for both students and researchers in the cognitive sciences, as well as for a general audience, including health educators, parents, and teachers.

About this title

About the Author

Yarden Kedar was born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel. He received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University in 2007. He lives in Israel with his wife, Vered, and two daughters, Gaia and Talia, and works at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Edition details

• Publisher: VDM Verlag
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3836463873
• ISBN 13: 9783836463874
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144