ABSTRACT
The study argues for a developmentally motivated view of language acquisition, and for multiple mechanisms to account for the passage from entry to exit in the process. Linguistic knowledge such as transitivity marking is not acquired in a single step, but involves partial and piecemeal knowledge en route from initial to endstate mastery. And there is no strict dichotomy between the principled, rule-bound knowledge of syntax and idiosyncratic knowledge of lexical particulars. Rather, children rely concurrently on a “confluence of cues”—prosodic, semantic, syntactic, and lexical—to bootstrap into, and move across, acquisition of linguistic structure. This view is consistent with the idea of “multiple bootstrapping” suggested by Shatz (1987), but the notion of multiple cues applies beyond initial entry into a system, taking into account subsequent reconstruals across the developmental path.
