The Acquisition of Jamaican Creole: A Research Project

This article describes a research project aimed at filling the gap in syntactic research on language acquisition, in the area of creole languages. For too long acquisitionists have ignored the domain of creole languages, and as such the time is ripe for the present research. The purpose of this paper is to present an outline of the research project entitled ‘The Acquisition of Jamaican Creole Syntax: A corpus -based study of early parameter setting', funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant 100015_131793/1. The goal of this project is to provide an extensive descriptive analysis of early production in the development of grammatical representations of children acquiring Jamaican Creole (JC). In addition, not only will this project contribute to scientific knowledge, but it may be applicable to well needed developments in early childhood education and language remediation in Jamaica and its diaspora. Additionally, the present project will provide an accessible database for further study of the Jamaican language