Theory of Development in Language Acquisition

In this chapter, we begin to refine a paradigm for the study of language acquisition which addresses the apparent paradox: evidence points to both continuous universal grammatical knowledge and development of language over time. We contrast our paradigm, “Grammatical Mapping,” to other models existent in the literature, briefly reviewing empirical data from studies supporting them. We argue that these data are in fact consistent with a paradigm of Grammatical Mapping and converge with results from our study of relativization across English, French, and Tulu. These results refute simple versions of both neural-based and construction-based approaches to the acquisition of relativization.