Syntactic Development

Anat Ninio's important new book places the syntactic learning process under close scrutiny. The focus of the book is on the characteristics of linguistic input and the resultant output, which, she shows, do not necessarily follow the orderly uniform processes assumed by some versions of formalistic linguistic theory.
Unique to this book is its reliance on very large English corpora of parental speech and child utterances, revealing surprising new facts about the input and output of syntactic development. Drawing on linguistic theory (the Minimalist Program, grammaticalization), Complexity Theory (Self-Organizing Criticality) and quantitative linguistics (corpus linguistics, Zipf curves), it analyzes the input and output languages both theoretically and empirically, building on the contribution of the different source theories in a detailed and explicit manner.

This book presents a highly novel perspective on the acquisition of syntax, one which will be required reading for those in the field of developmental psychology and psycholinguistics.

Anat Ninio graduated from Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a Ph.D. in Psychology for which she studied under the supervision of Professor Daniel Kahneman. She spent a year of post-doctoral studies with Professor Jerome Bruner at Oxford, studying early language development. Anat Nino has been on the faculty of the Hebrew University since 1970 where she now holds a professorship, she has spent sabbatical years as a Visiting Scholar or Visiting Professor at Duke University, the New School for Social Research in New York, New York University, the University of Quebec, Montreal, Harvard University, and Macquarie University. She has served as the Chair of the Graduate Developmental Program, and as the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Hebrew University. Anat Nino is an Associate of Behavioural and Brain Sciences and a member of the Unesco Institute for Education Exchange Network on Functional Literacy in Industrialized Countries.