Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction to the two major contrasting theoretical approaches: generativist and constructivist. For each debate, the predictions of the competing accounts are closely and even-handedly evaluated against the empirical data. The result is an evidence-based review of the central issues in language acquisition research that will constitute a valuable resource for students, teachers, course-builders and researchers alike.
Author(s): Ben Ambridge, Elena V. M. Lieven
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 466
Cover
Summary
Title page
Contents
Figures
Tables
Boxes
Summary tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
1.1 The major theoretical approaches
1.2 The domains and debates
1.3 Methodologies
2 Speech perception, segmentation and production
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Characteristics of speech
2.3 Developing a phonemic inventory
2.4 Segmenting the speech stream into words, phrases and clauses
2.5 Speech production
2.6 Speech perception, segmentation and production: conclusion
3 Learning word meanings
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The constraints or ‘principles’ approach
3.3 The social-pragmatic approach
3.4 The associative learning approach
3.5 Syntactic bootstrapping
3.6 Conclusion: how do children learn the meanings of words?
4 Theoretical approaches to grammar acquisition
4.1 Generativist approaches
4.2 Constructivist approaches
4.3 Theoretical approaches to grammar acquisition: conclusion
5 Inflection
5.1 Introduction to inflection
5.2 Why do children fail to mark tense and agreement in obligatory contexts?
5.3 Are children less productive with morphology than adults?
5.4 Rules versus analogies in inflectional morphology (with special reference to the English past-tense debate)
5.5 Learning inflectional morphology: conclusion
6 Simple syntax
6.1 Identifying/constructing syntactic categories
6.2 Acquiring basic word order
6.3 The retreat from overgeneralization error
6.4 Simple syntax: conclusion
7 Movement and complex syntax
7.1 Non-canonical word orders (passives and questions)
7.2 Multiple-clause sentences
7.3 Movement and complex syntax: conclusion
8 Binding, quantification and control
8.1 Binding and coreference
8.2 Quantification
8.3 Control
8.4 Binding, quantification and control: conclusion
9 Related debates and conclusions
9.1 Related debates
9.2 Conclusions and future directions
Notes
References
Author index
Subject index
