Humans have an innate capacity to learn language. This is an undisputed fact. However, what this capacity actually consists of has yet to be worked out in full detail. The main reason for this is that language is an abstract capacity which manifests in thousands of languages that vary widely in… read more
In order to understand how children cope with the enormous variation in structures worldwide, developmental paths need to be studied in a sufficiently varied sample of languages. Because each study requires very large and expensive longitudinal corpora (about one million words, five to seven years… read more
The acquisition of ergative marking in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) seems challenging: the marker covers several functions but is rare in discourse because of NP ellipsis and syntactic constraints. Based on a longitudinal corpus of four children, we find that children master the ergative only… read more