First Language Acquisition: Method, Description and ExplanationThis major textbook, setting new standards of clarity and comprehensiveness, will be welcomed by all serious students of first language acquisition. Written from a linguistic perspective, it provides detailed accounts of the development of children's receptive and productive abilities in all the core areas of language - phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. With a critical acuity drawn from long experience, and without attempting to offer a survey of all the huge mass of child language literature, David Ingram directs students to the fundamental studies and sets these in broad perspective. Students are thereby introduced to the history of the field and the current state of our knowledge in respect of three main themes: method, description and explanation. Whilst the descriptive facts that are currently available on first language acquisition are central to the book, its emphasis on methodology and explanation gives it a particular distinction. The various ways in which research is conducted is discussed in detail, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, leading to new perspectives on key theoretical issues. First Language Acquisition provides advanced undergraduate and graduate students alike with a cogent and closely analysed exposition of how children acquire language in real time. Equally importantly, readers will have acquired the fundamental knowledge and skill not only to interpret primary literature but also to approach their own research with sophistication. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Foundations | 5 |
The history of child language studies | 7 |
22 The period of large sample studies 19261957 | 11 |
23 The period of longitudinal language sampling 1957 to present | 21 |
Further reading | 30 |
Stages of language acquisition | 32 |
32 Some proposals on stages of acquisition | 38 |
65 The onset of phonemic perception and production | 178 |
66 The linguistic environment | 219 |
Further reading | 231 |
The period of the first word combinations | 234 |
an overview studies | 236 |
73 The grammatical analysis of early word combinations | 261 |
74 Current theoretical approaches | 302 |
75 The methodology of grammatical analyses of children | 332 |
33 Descriptive vs explanatory stage | 54 |
Further reading | 57 |
Explanation and language acquisition | 59 |
42 Child Language vs Language Acquisition | 60 |
43 A theory of acquisition | 63 |
44 Theoretical assumptions about language acquisition | 69 |
45 Sources of variation among children | 77 |
Further reading | 80 |
Milestones | 81 |
The period of prelinguistic development | 83 |
52 Infant speech perception | 84 |
53 Infant speech production | 96 |
54 Early cognitive development | 115 |
55 The linguistic environment | 127 |
Further reading | 137 |
The period of singleword utterances | 139 |
62 Early word comprehension and production | 140 |
63 The explanation of early word meaning | 155 |
64 Pragmatic and grammatical development | 160 |
Further reading | 337 |
The period of simple sentences phonological and semantic acquisition | 340 |
82 The phonological acquisition of single morphemes | 341 |
83 The further development of word meaning | 394 |
Further reading | 432 |
The period of simple sentences the acquisition of grammatical morphemes | 435 |
a descriptive overview | 439 |
93 The acquisition of Aux in English questions | 454 |
94 Other aspects of English grammatical acquisition | 465 |
95 Crosslinguistic morphological acquisition | 493 |
96 The explanation of morphological acquisition | 499 |
97 Linguistic input and grammatical acquisition | 506 |
Further reading | 513 |
Concluding remarks | 516 |
519 | |
Author index | 549 |
560 | |
Common terms and phrases
ability acquired adult language allomorphs analysis appear behavior Bloom Bowerman Braine Brown c-command Chapter Child Language Chomsky claim cognitive complex comprehension consonants constructionist contrasts diary studies discussed early word English evidence example frequent fricatives function Gleitman grammatical morphemes imitation Ingram initial Jakobson Journal of Child Kuczaj language acquisition language samples lexical look MacWhinney Maratsos maturationist meaning months morphemes mother multiword utterances nasal noun object occur onset order of acquisition overextensions pairs passives patterns performance factors period of single-word phemes phonetic phonological phonological acquisition phrase structure rules Piaget Pinker positional productive possible predictions presented principle pronominal pronouns proposed prototype theory Quiché reference relative clauses restricted rule semantic relations sentences sequence Shvachkin single-word utterances sounds speech perception stage structure subjects syntactic categories Table Universal Grammar verb vocabulary vocalizations vowels wh-questions word combinations
References to this book
How Languages are Learned Patsy M. Lightbown,Nina Spada,Nina Margaret Spada No preview available - 1999 |