9. Abstract linguistic representations and innateness: The development of determiners

This paper uses the syntactic category of determiner to address the issue of innateness in language acquisition. Reviewing data from infants and toddlers, I propose that categories are innate and that children show continuity in category acquisition. As development proceeds, children learn the individual words in each category in the target language and the specific syntactic properties of those words, but they do not construct the categories themselves.