From First Words to Grammar: Individual Differences and Dissociable Mechanisms

Description

This book is the first comprehensive study of the passage from first words to grammar in a sample of children large enough to permit systematic analysis of individual differences in style and rate of development. The authors provide a large body of information about first words and early grammatical development in qualitative and quantitative patterns that are useful not only for researchers in the field, but for speech/language pathologists and early childhood educators interested in the assessment of early language. They also address one of the most controversial theoretical issues in modern linguistics and psycholinguistics: the problem of modularity, with individual differences suggesting that components of language can come apart in early stages, developing at different rates in different children. But these differences appear to cut across the supposed boundaries between grammatical and lexical development, suggesting that the same mechanisms are responsible for both. The results support a unified functionalist approach to language development, and have implications for the way we think about the structure and breakdown of language under normal and abnormal conditions.

"[The authors'] challenging and fruitful questioning and their innovation in methodologies will be much more valuable for the future of the field than most of the empty theoretical fabrications that are so common in developmental psycholinguistics." Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography "Their [the authors'] challenging and fruitful questioning and their innovation in methodologies will be much more valuable for the future of the field than most of the empty theoretical fabrications that are so common in developmental psycholinguistics." Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography "The major contribution certainly, is the enormous body of data and the intensity of the analysis. The eventual outcome is the elucidation of mechanisms for language learning that turn out to be complex and constantly changing, but in any case, not describable by the 'vertical' categories of syntax and semantics. The book is an important addition to the research literature on language acquisition..." Journal of the American Speech and Hearing Association