0. Introduction The status of functional categories in early child language has been a subject of debate for much of the last decade (Hyams 1986, Radford 1990, Platzack 1992, Rizzi 1993, Wexler 1994). In general, proponents of the ‘No Functional Categories’ position claim that production data from early child language clearly demonstrates that the differences between child language and adult la...

Does child-directed language differ from adult-directed language in ways that might facilitate word learning? Associative structure (the probability that a word appears with its free associates), contextual diversity, word repetitions and frequency were compared longitudinally across six language corpora, with four corpora of language directed at children aged 1.0 to 5.0, and two adult-directed...