This work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. Written by four researchers in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and cognitive science, it sheds light on the problems of learnability and language, and their implications for key t…
"Children often mispronounce words when learning their first language. Is it because they cannot perceive the differences that adults make or is it because they can't produce the sounds involved? Neither hypothesis is sufficient on its own to explain the facts. On the basis of d…
Building on the established strengths of the first edition, the 2nd edition of this introduction to the study of children's language has now been updated and includes some basic theory content, more exercises and summaries at the end of each unit.
Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) This groundbreaking study of how children acquire language and the effects on language change over the generations draws on a wide range of examples. The book covers specific syntactic universals and the nature of syntactic change.…
"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, inflectiona…
