The Child as Linguist

(source: as mathematics)
...17-month-olds can use syntactic information to distinguish between a noun refering to a class of object and one functioning as a proper name. Thus when the infants heard 'a dax' they chose another doll similar to the one the experimenter had already named as 'a dax', whereas when they heard 'Dax' they chose the individual doll to whom the expeimenter had given the proper name 'Dax'. These data indicate that language is a problem per se for infants well before they are producing much language themselves. In other words infants make use of morphosyntactic subtleties within the linguistic system itself to work out meaning...Research indicates that 17-month-old infants whilst not yet producing sentences were aware of the significance of word order.
...shortly after the second birthday a child knows that only a transitive verb expresses the presence of a causal agent and that causal agency cannot be in an oblique argument position (the with clause). Further, the child understands that the with clause excludes a transitve reading. It is difficult to see how children so young could have learned such subtle linguistic distinctions solely on the basis of domain-general sensorimotor actions...the major thrust of Gleitman'argument is that,sighted or blind, children cannot rely on observational learning alone. Rather, the child must also bring to the language learning situation relatively sophisticated presuppositions about the structure of language itself. [if this is so then literacy aquisition could be facilitated by accessing these underlying abilities]. Children may use sentence-to-world mapping in trying to work out the semantic didtinctions between such closely related verbs as look/see, listen/hear, fall/drop,etc. The differences are rarely observable from from the extra-linguistic contexts in which they are used, but can be inferred from their intralinguistic contexts because of their different subcategorisation frames. Syntax functions like a 'mental zoom lens', fixing on just the interpretation among the many possible that the speaker is expressing.[the link between language and literacy implies that the aquisition of the latter can be facilitated by application of the foregoing principles ie., sentence-to-world mapping intimates visual/aural/oral/ correlates].See also: Visual memory - Intentional & Incidental Learning tasks.