Full Description
This textbook introduces fundamental concepts and results in the theory of first language acquisition, bringing together linguistic phenomena on the one hand and learning and cognitive development on the other. Grammar and development are woven together through a range of case studies that provide students with the tools to think about (a) what is already understood about language acquisition; (b) what methods we use to identity children's grammatical knowledge; and (c) how to approach problems in any area of grammatical acquisition.
Each of the book's five parts illustrates a foundational concept in the theory of language and its acquisition: the nature of learning in the biological world; categories in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax; hierarchical structure; grammatical dependencies; and the role of information processing systems in the theory of language acquisition. Designed with advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in mind, the book includes discussion questions and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.
Contents
Part I. Foundations 1: Becoming linguistic 2: Learning and induction 3: Irradiated rats and dancing bees: Why all learning is problem-specific 4: The division of labor between input and innate structure 5: The poverty of the stimulus: Anaphoric one 6: Association or fast-mapping? The view from word learning Part II. Categories 7: Categories in phonetics and phonology 8: Syntactic categories I: Determiners and productivity 9: Syntactic categories II: Nouns and adjectives 10: Syntactic categories III: Verbs 11: Subcategories: Syntactic bootstrapping Part III. Hierarchical structure 12: Hierarchical structure I: Principle C 13: Hierarchical structure II: Quantifier scope 14: How to find syntax I: Semantic bootstrapping 15: How to find syntax II: Prosodic bootstrapping Part IV. Dependencies 16: Morphosyntactic dependencies 17: Syntactic dependencies I: Wh-movement 18: Syntactic dependencies II: Locality (islands) 19: Syntactic dependencies III: Raising and control Part V. Real-time processing considerations 20: Competence vs. performance I: Over-regularization and English past tense 21: Competence vs. performance II: Null subjects 22: Parsing and learning 23: Language and thought
