The transition to grammar in a bilingual child

Recent work on the transition into grammar in children acquiring English has pointed up the role of rote-learned "positional patterns," arguing that both nativist approaches based on Universal Grammar and constructivist approaches assuming semantic underpinnings are unnecessary or inadequate to account for the data. A close analysis of the first four months of word combinations recorded for an Estonian-English learning child suggests that meaning-based generativity must play a role in this important transition, in that mixed language utterances, sequence reversals and errors revealing early attempts at analysis provide clear evidence that distributional learning alone cannot provide a sufficient characterization of the origins of grammatical development. It is proposed, instead, that relational word use in the single word period may have provided "model learning" for syntax in a child with bilingual input and a relatively late start on word combinations.