Linguistica

As illustrated in the study by Amy Weinberg, the science of linguistics has proven that the language acquisition of children is genetically structured and cannot be reversed. There is an order togrammar that is being developed since birth. In the article entitled “Structure Dependence in Grammar Formation” Stephen Crain and Mineharu Nakayama delve into the foundational development of suchgrammar structure as they conduct three experiments to explain why and how language is structure dependent even amongst children who, at times, seem to articulate incoherent sentences. While the first twoexperiments aim to prove the claim of structure-dependent operation, experiment 3 focuses on the development autonomy of syntax. The seemingly incoherent sentences explored in the study are explainedas an underdeveloped two-part movement transformation, subject/auxiliary inversion, of copying and deleting between the relative and main clauses of a sentence. The errors in the subject/auxiliaryinversion did not imply a lack of grammatical knowledge, but rather, performance inadequacy factors due to the difficulty of processing advanced sentences. In basic terms, the three experiments confirmChomsky’s theory of universal grammar as an innate, biological ability.
Experiment 1 is designed to prove the hypothesis that “In yes/no questions, the leftmost verbal element of a declarative (is,can etc.) has been moved to the front of the sentence” (p 525 Structure dependence in Grammar Formation). It was set up so as to elicit yes/no questions from children in order to distinguish betweenthree errors the children may have been vulnerable to. The three errors are as such: Type I errors are ‘prefix errors’ which are essentially the repetition of auxiliary verbs in both the main andrelative clause; Type II errors are ‘restarting errors’ which is when “a well-formed fragment of a question [is followed by] a second question” (p 530 Structure Dependence in Grammar Formation); Type III...