The Development of Binding

This special issue is devoted to the development of binding -- an area of linguistic theory that has received extensive experimental attention in acquisition research. The rich experimental and theoretical detail of the articles presented provides results containing many important properties of grammatical development. The results of all the papers confirm the following propositions:

* Children know the principles of binding theory.

* Children accept a local c-commanding referent for a pronoun, but they won't violate Principle B.

* More generally, children's grammars are UG-constrained.

* Children's grammars provide evidence for modularity.

Beyond these general conclusions, there are important results in all of the articles. The development of binding theory has been studied for less than a decade, but the editors feel the results to date are striking and auger well for the future of experimental research in the development of binding theory and the experimental study of language acquisition.