Learning word order: early beginnings

Abstract

By 7-8 months of age, infants already have a rudimentary but abstract representation of word order, specifically of the relative order of functors and content words in their native language. Moreover, by 8-17 months of age infants are sensitive to all characteristics that universally distinguish between functors and content words, namely their differing prosodic, statistical, distributional, and functional properties.The acquisition of grammar is thus intimately intertwined with lexical acquisition, supporting a model of language growth in which the different levels of language develop synergistically, bootstrapping learning interactively.