Parsing and learning

Abstract This chapter focuses on the development of children’s ability to parse sentences in real time, and its effects on language learning. Properties of adult sentence processing—being incremental, predictive, and statistical—are discussed alongside experiments demonstrating that child parsing is characterized by the same properties. An additional property of child sentence processing is also introduced: It is ballistic, in the sense that children show difficulty revising parsing decisions once they have been made. The consequences of the child’s developing parser for language acquisition are then considered. In particular, sometimes what the child perceives to be the grammatical structure of a sentence may not be the intended grammatical structure. Consequences for theorists are also discussed, namely that it is important to understand not just the input (the data available) but also the intake to the learning mechanism (the input as it is processed by children).