ABSTRACT
Language acquisition studies have traditionally focused on such questions as how children go about acquiring certain syntactic structures, or certain semantic (sub)systems, or the system of phonological contrasts in the language they are learning. The evidence on which such studies are based comes from the developing sophistication of utterances children produce. But before a child can produce anything language-like she must have in mind some linguistic target, however rudimentary. In other words, she must have perceived certain pieces of the language she has heard around her since birth which seem relevant to her to try to reproduce.
