Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia -- Contributors / William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia -- Acknowledgments / William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia -- Chapter 1 Child Language Acquisition: Introduction, Foundations, and Overview / William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia -- Chapter 2 On the Nature, Use, and Acquisition of Language / Noam Chomsky -- Chapter 3 Maturation and Growth of Grammar / Kenneth Wexler -- Chapter 4 Universal Grammar: The Strong Continuity Hypothesis in First Language Acquisition / Barbara Lust -- Chapter 5 The Acquisition of Syntactic Representations: A General Nativist Approach / William O'Grady -- Chapter 6 Creole Languages, the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, and Language Acquisition / Derek Bickerton -- Chapter 7 Functionalist Accounts of the Process of First Language Acquisition / Matthew Rispoli -- Chapter 8 Theories of Word Learning: Rationalist Alternatives to Associationism / Paul Bloom -- Chapter 9 The Role of Syntax in Verb Learning / Lila R. Gleitman and Jane Gillette -- Chapter 10 Child Phonology, Learnability, and Phonological Theory / B. Elan Dresner -- Chapter 11 The Development of Pragmatics: Learning to Use Language Appropriately / Anat Ninio and Catherine E. Snow -- Chapter 12 Methodology in the Study of Language Acquisition: A Modular Approach / Stephen Crain and Kenneth Wexler -- Chapter 13 How Do We Know What Children Know? / Barbara Lust , Suzanne Flynn , Claire Foley , and Yu-Chin Chien -- Chapter 14 The Childes System / Brian MacWhinney -- Chapter 15 Input and Language Acquisition / Virginia Valian -- Chapter 16 Modality Effects and Modularity in Language Acquisition: The Acquisition of American Sign Language / Diane Lillo-Martin -- Chapter 17 The Bilingual Child: Some Issues and Perspectives / Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie -- Chapter 18 Some Empirical and Theoretical Issues in Disordered Child Phonology / Daniel A. Dinnsen -- Chapter 19 Linguistic Perspectives on Specific Language Impairment Harald Clahsen / Harald Clahsen -- List of Abbreviations / William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia -- Author Index / William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia -- Subject Index / William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia.

What allows children to acquire language so effortlessly, with such speed, and with such amazing accuracy? Capitalizing on the most recent developments in linguistics and cognitive psychology, this volume sheds new light on the what, why, and how of the child's ability to acquire one or more languages. The "Handbook" is one of a kind in a number of respects. It includes state-of-the-art treatments of acquisition from a variety of theoretical viewpoints ranging from functionalist approaches and the implications of the creolization of languages for the study of acquisition to the relevance of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. It contains overviews of the acquisition of all components of linguistic structure, treats the acquisition of the sign languages of the deaf, and discusses the specific problems of bilingual acquisition. This handbook addresses the following questions: 'Is the capacity for language acquisition constant throughout the career of the language learner (that is, is it 'continuous') or does that capacity change in significant ways as the learner matures?' ; 'Is the language capacity a separate module of the mind or does it follow from general, 'all-purpose' cognitive capacities?'; 'What is innate in language acquisition and what is acquired on the basis of experience?'; 'What research/methodological issues arise in the study of child language acquisition?'; 'How might input from the language (or languages) of the environment, including visual/gestural input in the case of the sign languages of the deaf, affect the process and result of acquisition?'; and, 'How are the facts of non-normal acquisition to be explained?'

English

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