Fragments Along the Way: Minimalism as an Account of Some Stages in First Language Acquisition
- Resource Type
- article
- Authors
- Helen Goodluck; Nina Kazanina
- Source
- Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 11 (2020)
- Subject
- first language acquisition
minimalism
performance mechanisms
merge
pronoun interpretation
questions
Psychology
BF1-990
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 1664-1078
We discuss two instances in which the minimalist model of syntax offers a potential account of children's linguistic behavior: the Merge analysis of phrase structure and the analysis of pronominal structures and other long distance dependencies. In each case, we need to understand the relationship between performance mechanisms (the mechanisms for language production and comprehension) and the syntax on which these mechanisms draw.