About this Project
We study how children’s language becomes complex during the preschool years. During the first three years of their lives, children learn to speak in short, simple phrases. In the following three years, their sentences quickly become longer and more elaborated, as they master a variety of grammatical forms and structures, and they develop the ability to nest phrases within phrases. This is known as syntactic recursion. Recursion is a fundamental tool for building linguistic complexity, and thought to be unique to human languages. Our project studies the moment in which recursive noun phrases appear in children’s language.
More Information:
Upcoming:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada SSHRC 435-2014-2000. Development of noun phrase complexity in children.
View: Project Summary
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
