How Do Children Develop Syntactic Representations from What They Hear?

Children learn language from what they hear. In dispute is what mechanisms they bring to this task. Clearly some of these mechanisms have evolved to support the human speech capacity but this leaves a wide field of possibilities open. The question I will address in my paper is whether we need to postulate an innate syntactic module that has evolved to make the learning of language structure possible. I will suggest that more general human social and cognitive capacities may be all that is needed to support the learning of syntactic structure. I start by briefly discussing precursors to language development that are developing in the first year of life: some of these are probably primate-wide skills, for instance, the capacity for distributional learning (e.g., [1]), others are probably in large part, human-specific, for instance the highly sophisticated socio-cognitive skills that one-year-olds already show (e.g., [2]). Next, I outline an approach to language development that involves the learning of constructional schemas, both specific and abstract. Children are thought to start out with concrete pieces of language and to gradually develop mor