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The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.

The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, and have particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Donders Institute, the CLS and the MPI.

 
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New book on functional categories in learner language

Research on the spontaneous processes of both children learning their mother tongue and adults learning a second language has shown that early learner languages are based on lexical structures. At some point in acquisition this lexical-semantic system is given up in favor of a target-like functional category system. MPI researcher Christine Dimroth and Peter Jordens (VU Amsterdam) have just published a book on functional categories in learner language in November, 2009.

New book on functional categories in learner language

Dec 29, 2009

Initially, learner utterances can be accounted for in terms of a language system that is relatively simple. Utterance structure is determined by a grammar which consists of lexical structures that are constrained by, for example, semantic principles such as 'Agent first' and a pragmatic principle such as 'Topic first'.

At some point in acquisition this lexical-semantic system is given up in favour of a target-like system with morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness, topicality, the determiner system, etc. Insights into how this process evolves may also provide an answer to the question of why it takes place. Within this functional perspective on language acquisition, research focuses on questions such as the following.

  • What is the driving force behind the process that causes learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a morpho-syntactic functional category system?

  • What is the added value of morpho-syntactic properties of inflection, word-order variation, definiteness and agreement?

  • Why is it that in cases of specific language impairment it is mainly morpho-syntactic properties of the target language that are affected?

Functional Categories in Learner Language, Christine Dimroth & Peter Jordens. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 2009. 347pp.

Last checked 2010-03-03 by Myrna Tinbergen

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