Word Classes in First Language Acquisition

Abstract

Word classes are the building blocks of language constituting a precondition for productive language use and grammar development. How can infants generalize word classes? This has been one of the most burning questions in language acquisition research. Theories range from the assumption of abstract innate word classes to bottom-up approaches explaining word-class generation fully by statistical learning. There is, however, general agreement across theories that children have to extract information about the word classes of their langu Show more