Developing knowledge of nonadjacent dependencies.

Characterizing the nature of linguistic representations and how they emerge during early development is a central goal in the cognitive science of language.One area in which this development plays out is in the acquisition of dependencies-relationships between co-occurring elements in a word, phrase or sentence.These dependencies often involve multiple levels of representation and abstraction, built up as infants gain experience with their native language.We used the Headturn Preference Procedure to systematically investigate the early acquisition of one such dependency, the agreement between a subject and verb in French, at six different ages between 14-24 months.Our results reveal a complex developmental trajectory which provides the first evidence that infants might indeed progress through distinct stages in the acquisition of this non-adjacent dependency.We discuss how changes in general cognition and representational knowledge (from reflecting surface statistics to higher-level morphological features) might account for our findings.These findings highlight the importance of studying language acquisition at close time intervals over a substantial age range.