Elmo's Sister's Ball: The Problem of Acquiring Nominal Recursion

Recursion is the ability to iterate syntactic constituents inside constituents. Experimental and corpus literature indicates that comprehending recursive structures is difficult for children. Since recursion is a fundamental property of language, the result of the application of core minimal tools (merge, label, and select), why does it present an acquisition challenge? We propose that while Merge itself is universal, its application is …