Three case-studies, using longitudinal records of children's spontaneous speech, illustrate what happens when a child's syntax changes. The first, examining acquisition of English verb-particle constructions, shows a near-total absence of commission errors. The second, examining acquisition of prepositional questions in English or Spanish, shows that children (i) may go as long as 9 months producing both direct-object questions and declaratives with prepositional phrases, before first attempting a prepositional question; and (ii) at some point, abrubtly begin producing prepositional questions that are correctly formed for the target language. The third case study shows that in children acquiring English, the onset of verb-particle constructions occurs almost exactly when that child begins using novel noun-noun compounds. After a discussion of the implications for the nature of syntactic knowledge, and for the mechanisms by which it is acquired, two examples are presented of as-yet untested acquisitional predictions of parametric proposals in the syntax literature.

中文翻译：

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获取语​​法的参数化方法

三个案例研究，使用儿童自发言语的纵向记录，说明当孩子的句法改变时会发生什么。第一个，检查英语动词-助词结构的习得，显示几乎完全没有佣金错误。第二，检查英语或西班牙语介词问题的习得，表明儿童 (i) 在第一次尝试介词问题之前，可能需要长达 9 个月的时间来制作直接宾语问题和带有介词短语的陈述句；(ii) 在某个时候，突然开始产生针对目标语言正确形成的介词问题。第三个案例研究表明，在学习英语的孩子中，动词-助词结构的开始几乎恰好发生在孩子开始使用新的名词-名词复合词的时候。