Toward a Theory of Gradual Morphosyntactic Learning

We characterize the acquisition of tense and agreement as the result of Gradual Morphosyntactic Learning (GML), describing the psycholinguistic underpinnings of GML. We review empirical evidence from several longitudinal studies of typically developing children (Hadley et al., in press; Rispoli, Hadley & Holt, 2009; Rispoli et al., 2010), concluding that an abstract underlying grammatical system influences the acquisition of tense and agreement for most children under the age of three.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewedU of I OnlyPublisher reques