Recent controversies in the study of language acquisition

Abstract

(from the chapter) reviews a small subset of topics within the study of language acquisition, with special focus on areas where there has been both recent progress and continuing debate; (begin) with a brief overview of the course of language development and the nature of adult input; (address) the problem of how children learn the meanings of words; (discuss) how they learn the syntactic categories that these words belong to; focus on more specific issues in syntactic, semantic, and morphological development; (review) a particular theory within the "principles and parameters" framework (of syntactic development), and (discuss) how children might recover from morphological and semantic overgeneralizations