This book is part of an ongoing and exciting
scientific quest for uncovering the mechanisms that
guide the acquisition and use of language in the
human species. It focuses on a key mystery -
children's acquisition of syntax, which is a critical
component in all languages. The book investigates
when and how some core syntactic constituents become
accessible to the child, in particular, Functional
Categories - the grammatical categories that are
realized in language by a set of function words
(e.g., the, and) and verb inflections. A
comprehensive review on functional categories is
followed by new empirical findings, which reveal that
already around one year of age, infants incorporate
syntactic information regarding function words in
sentence processing. This grammatical sensitivity
demonstrates that content categories (e.g., nouns,
verbs) and functional categories are developing in
tandem during early periods in language acquisition.
The book provides new information about the
linguistic development of children and is thus
intended for both students and researchers in the
cognitive sciences, as well as for a general
audience, including health educators, parents, and
teachers.