Chapter 2. To acquire a recursive grammar, children start with a recursive procedure (MERGE)

Abstract

Recursion is a central topic in language acquisition because it helps to inform an explanatorily adequate theory of the human language faculty. Some researchers (e.g., Roeper, 2011) have proposed that it is possible for children’s early grammars to include a transitory acquisition stage that is based on conjunction rather than the truly recursive operation of merge which characterizes mature grammars. A truth-value judgement task with an elicitation component was designed to elicit recursive genitive structures in both Mandarin and English. Our results indicate that child participants in both Mandarin and English understood recursive genitive structures and a substantial majority could also produce the target recursive genitive structures. These results provide compelling evidence that recursion emerges early in child language acquisition and that there is no need to propose a transitory stage that lacks a recursive procedure.