Parsing and learning

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on the development of children’s ability to parse sentences in real time, and its effects on language learning. Properties of adult sentence processing—being incremental, predictive, and statistical—are discussed alongside experiments demonstrating that child parsing is characterized by the same properties. An additional property of child sentence processing is also introduced: It is ballistic, in the sense that children show difficulty revising parsing decisions once they have been made. The consequences of the child’s developing parser for language acquisition are then considered. In particular, sometimes what the child perceives to be the grammatical structure of a sentence may not be the intended grammatical structure. Consequences for theorists are also discussed, namely that it is important to understand not just the input (the data available) but also the intake to the learning mechanism (the input as it is processed by children).

Key findings

• ▸Children's sentence parsing is incremental, predictive, and statistical, similar to adults
• ▸Child sentence processing is ballistic, making it difficult for them to revise parsing decisions
• ▸The developing parser affects language acquisition, potentially leading to incorrect grammatical structure perceptions

Keywords

Identifiers

DOI

10.1093/9780191991349.003.0022

Journal

A Course in First Language Acquisition

Year

2026