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

Kedar, Yarden

ISBN 10: 3836463873 / ISBN 13: 9783836463874

Published by VDM Verlag, 2009

In. Seller Inventory # ria9783836463874_new

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 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.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Role of Functional Categories in First ...
Publisher: VDM Verlag
Publication Date: 2009
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: New