Rethinking the syntactic burst in young children.

International audienceA testing procedure is proposed to re-evaluate the syntactic burst in children over age two. The experimentation is based on the children's capacities in perception, memory, association and cognition, and does not presuppose any specific innate grammatical capacities. The procedure is tested using the large Manchester corpus in the CHILDES database. The results showed that young children grammatical capabilities (before age three) could be the results of simple mechanisms and that complex linguistic mastery does not need to be available so early in the course of lan-guage development