Carol Chomsky was perhaps best known for her book, "The Acquisition of Syntax in Children From 5 to 10" (M.I.T. Press), which was considered a landmark study in the field when it appeared in 1969.
Where earlier investigators had concluded that the acquisition of syntax — the grammatical structure of sentences — is complete by the time a child is 5, Professor Chomsky demonstrated that when it came to syntactically complex constructions, at least, acquisition is far from finished at that age.
The current finding that very young infants are able to extract non-adjacent grammatical dependencies from the auditory input is of great interest, as this ability is a fundamental prerequisite to the acquisition of complex syntax in every human language [27], [28].
Both in the visuo-spatial and in the language domain, the acquisition of non-rigid syntax, but not the acquisition of rigid syntax, activated Brodmann Area 44 of the left IFG.
Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in sixteen healthy native speakers of Italian, we measured brain activity for the acquisition of rigid and non-rigid syntax in the visuo-spatial domain.
This postulates that the procedural memory system is important for learning and the use of rule-governed aspects of grammar (syntax, morphology and phonology), and contrasts with a declarative learning system that is involved in acquisition of vocabulary and more general semantic knowledge.
He's done crucial research on language acquisition, and he offers an admirable account of syntax in his book, but it is unclear what he's talking about here.
Columbia University has created a knowledge-acquisition tool to allow users unfamiliar with the Arden Syntax to create Medical Logic Modules (MLMs) [ 30].
After acquisition, the presentation of new words violating the rule should elicit lexical (N400) and syntax-related ERP components (possibly an early negativity and a P600).
