AUTHOR=Goodluck Helen , Kazanina Nina 

TITLE=Fragments Along the Way: Minimalism as an Account of Some Stages in First Language Acquisition

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00584

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00584

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=We take up three instances in which the minimalist model of syntax offers an account of children’s linguistic behaviour: 
1)  Merge can explain the two-word utterance stage in child language production and the subsequent stage involving utterances of variable length.
2) Errors in production of complex questions include the production of a middle copy of a question word (along the lines of ‘What did you see what Jane ate?’). This can be accounted for in terms of the child’s overt marking of a phase.
3) Differential rates with definite pronouns according to the structure in which the pronoun is contained.
These phenomena all involve the combination of limited capacity production/comprehension systems with the syntactic component.