Language Acquisition

I'm Cindy Fisher in the psychology department at the university of Illinois, and I study language acquisition in children between about one and five years old. We do a lot of projects on sentence interpretation but one of the questions that interests me most is how very young children begin to assign meaning to words and sentences; how they integrate, what they know about the world, their concepts of objects and events; with what they know about sentences their concepts of nouns and verbs; and, how they're combined into sentences. And, one of the questions that interests me most is how it could be possible for simple that abstract aspects of the structure of sentences; the syntax of sentences; how the nouns and verbs are combined could begin to affect how children interpret sentences even before they've really learned that much about how the grammar of their language works. How could the structure of sentences be intrinsically meaningful to very young children...I'm helping to push them in the direction of correct interpretations and new learning about the grammar.