Child Language Acquisition: Contrasting Theoretical Approaches

by Ben Ambridge , Elena V. M. Lieven

• ISBN13: 9780521745239
• ISBN10: 0521745233
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 Biography

Ben Ambridge is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Liverpool. He has published numerous articles on child language acquisition with a particular focus on the acquisition of syntax and morphology and the retreat from overgeneralization error. Elena V. M. Lieven is a Professor and Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and the Director of the Max Planck Child Study Centre, University of Manchester. She is best known for her work on naturalistic corpus data, and is a former editor of the Journal of Child Language.

Table of Contents

List of figures	p. vii
List of tables	p. x
List of boxes	p. xi
List of summary tables	p. xii
Preface	p. xiii
Acknowledgements	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
The major theoretical approaches	p. 1
The domains and debates	p. 4
Methodologies	p. 6
Speech perception, segmentation and production	p. 13
Introduction	p. 13
Characteristics of speech	p. 14
Developing a phonemic inventory	p. 18
Segmenting the speech stream into words, phrases and clauses	p. 31
Speech production	p. 47
Speech perception, segmentation and production: conclusion	p. 57
Learning word meanings	p. 61
Introduction	p. 61
The constraints or 'principles' approach	p. 62
The social-pragmatic approach	p. 70
The associative learning approach	p. 83
Syntactic bootstrapping	p. 89
Conclusion: how do children learn the meanings of words?	p. 100
Theoretical approaches to grammar acquisition	p. 103
Generativist approaches	p. 103
Constructivist approaches	p. 123
Theoretical approaches to grammar acquisition: conclusion	p. 136
Inflection	p. 137
Introduction to inflection	p. 137
Why do children fail to mark tense and agreement in obligatory contexts?	p. 144
Are children less productive with morphology than adults?	p. 157
Rules versus analogies in inflectional morphology (with special reference to the English past-tense debate)	p. 169
Learning inflectional morphology: conclusion	p. 187
Simple syntax	p. 191
Identifying/constructing syntactic categories	p. 192
Acquiring basic word order	p. 209
The retreat from overgeneralization error	p. 242
Simple syntax: conclusion	p. 265
Movement and complex syntax	p. 269
Non-canonical word orders (passives and questions)	p. 269
Multiple-clause sentences	p. 289
Movement and complex syntax: conclusion	p. 312
Binding, quantification and control	p. 314
Binding and coreference	p. 315
Quantification	p. 335
Control	p. 346
Binding, quantification and control: conclusion	p. 357
Related debates and conclusions	p. 359
Related debates	p. 359
Conclusions and future directions	p. 369
Notes	p. 377
References	p. 387
Author index	p. 427
Subject index	p. 432
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