Abstract
``We holded the baby rabbits'': A Journey into Language Acquisition by Children
``The acquisition of language is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform.''
Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933)
Every aspect of language is extremely complex, yet very young children - before the age of 5 - already know most of the intricate system we have been calling ``the grammar of language.'' Before they can add 2+2, children are conjoining sentences, asking questions, selecting appropriate pronouns, negating sentences, forming relative clauses, and using syntactic, phonological, morphological and semantic rules of grammar.
The seminar will give you a tour of the various stages of language acquisition by children.
References
Chapman, Robin (2000) Children's Language Learning: An Interactionist Perspective Journal of Child Psychiatry, 41 (1), 33-54.
McDonald, Janet (1997) Language Acquisition: The Acquistion of Linguistic Structure in the Normal and Special Population Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 215-41.
MacWhinney, Brian (1998) Models of Emergence of Language Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 199-227.
Pinker, S. (1999) Language Acquisition, in Gleitman, Liberman and Osherson (Eds.) An invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Edition Volume 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. (1999) The Language Instinct. New York: Penguin Publishers.