Introduction

Abstract

There have been, and probably always will be, two rather different approaches to language acquisition, which I have referred to as the ‘observational’ and the ‘logical’ (Foster-Cohen, 1999), and which, while not being entirely separable in practice, help us understand some of the key debates in language acquisition studies. In the first approach, the aim is to observe children acquiring languages in a range of circumstances and to capture those observations in whatever form current technologies make possible (pencil and paper, video, audio, etc.). Many of these observations are based on data now housed in corpora such as the CHILDES database at Carnegie Mellon University, developed and maintained by Brian MacWhinney. The second approach starts from the premise that to understand how language is acquired, we must first understand exactly what is being acquired and then try to, as it were, fill in the gaps between the capacities of the novice (infant, child or adult) and the competent language user: given their destination, what must the learner both bring to the task and experience along the road to get there?