Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 09/2011 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | Infancia y Aprendizaje |
Issue number | 3 |
Volume | 34 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Pages (from-to) | 281-296 |
Publication Status | Published |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
In this article we outline the constructivist (or usage-based) approach to children's language development. We argue that linguistic abstractions emerge from the interaction between children's desire to communicate, their intention-reading skills and a distributional analysis of the input. We illustrate our approach by discussing: the development of constituency; inflectional marking; utterance level constructions; more complex syntax in the form of complement-clause structures and relative clauses. We also address explanations for some systematic errors made by English-speaking children that have been much discussed in the literature: optional infinitive errors, accusative for nominative errors and wh-inversion errors. We conclude with some outstanding issues for this approach.