ABSTRACT
Syntax can be characterized as a system of rules that apply to a hierarchical arrangement of distributionally defined lexical and phrasal categories. Given this characterization, children must solve at least three potentially distinct problems in order to acquire the syntactic structure of their language. First, they must be able to locate words and phrases in the continuous stream of speech, a problem sometimes called segmentation (e.g., Gerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990; Gleitman & Wanner, 1982; Gleitman, Gleitman, Landau, & Wanner, 1988; Morgan, Meier, & Newport, 1987). Second, they must be able to distinguish among words and phrases of different types (e.g., noun, noun phrase, etc.), a problem sometimes called labeling (Gerken & McIntosh, 1993; Gerken et al., 1990). And third, children must discover the hierarchical arrangement of words and phrases; I refer to this as the structure problem.
