On the Relation between Input Frequency and Acquisition Patterns from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

"Parameter setting approaches may be criticized for a number of reasons. One of them concerns the apparent optionality in acquisition stages. It has been observed for many grammatical domains, e.g. subject pronouns, finite inflection, copula verbs, and determiners, that children pass through variation stages. For instance, in one and the same recording session a child may produce bare and determined nouns under similar syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic conditions"