By Juan Uriagereka
Let me set aside some issues I will not deal with. First, I will have nothing to say about whether the methodology of the experiments discussed in this conference is sound. I am not a psycholinguist, others have already commented on this, and in any case I am more interested in discussing the syntactic consequences of the findings, assuming they are real. Second, I will not discuss specific works in any detail. I do have technical comments to mostly all of them, but these I believe would interest the authors more than a general audience; in any case our theories at this point are wide enough either for the experiments to adapt to my technicalities or, if the experiments are proven correct, for the syntactic theories to adapt to their lower-scale consequences.
Finally, although I will admit variation in technical implementation of theories, I will not admit giving up the central hypothesis of a system of principles and parameters that all of us in the conference, I think, assume uncontroversially. It is in light of this basic hypothesis that I want to evaluate developmental claims of the sort made here.