Computational complexity and the acquisition of the CP field in European Portuguese

This paper investigates the production of root wh-questions, clefts, topics and embedded declaratives by three children acquiring European Portuguese as L1 from 1;2.0 to 4;5.19. I argue that the emergence order of these constructions in the child's speech is explained by the complexity of the syntactic computation. After reviewing the accounts that this notion has received in the literature, I present a characterization of syntactic complexity couched in the minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2001).