Child Language Acquisition
Contrasting Theoretical Approaches

An evidence-based review of the central issues in language acquisition research.

Ben Ambridge (Author), Elena V. M. Lieven (Author)

9780521745239, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 March 2011

466 pages, 44 b/w illus. 12 tables
22.4 x 15 x 2.3 cm, 0.73 kg

'An ambitious, comprehensive and remarkably up-to-date adventure in adjudicating between nativist and constructivist approaches to human language acquisition. There's still room left for disagreement, especially on matters of interpretation, but graduate students and newcomers to the field of language acquisition who want to know the lay of the land would do well to start here.' Gary Marcus, New York University and author of The Birth of the Mind and Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind

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.

1. Introduction
2. Speech perception, segmentation and production
3. Learning word meaning
4. Theoretical approaches to grammar acquisition
5. Inflection
6. Simple syntax
7. Movement and complex syntax
8. Binding, quantification and control
9. Related debates and conclusions.

Subject Areas: Child & developmental psychology [JMC], Psycholinguistics [CFD]