Edited by Michael Tomasello and Elizabeth Bates Blackwell 2001 FROM THE BACK COVER Research on child language is an interdisciplinary enterprise, uniting the efforts of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, educators, neuroscientists, and communication scientists. In selecting representative readings from this broad and fast-moving field, the editors of this collection have emphasized recent papers that illustrate the contribution of child language research to developmental cognitive science. Although the authors of these papers represent a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives, there is a deliberate bias in favor of an interactive, rather than nativist, approach. Essential works on the major milestones of language development are provided, followed by tutorials that stress the neural substrates of language development, pieces on computational models of language learning, and on genetic contributions to developmental language disorders. Some papers have been updated or specially commissioned for this collection. The volume avoids jargon and is designed to be accessible to upper level students across a range of disciplines. Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His previous publications include Primate Cognition (I997), 7he New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure (1998) and The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (I999). Elizabeth Bates is Professor of Psychology and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, where she also directs the Center for Research in Language and the Project in Cognitive and Neural Development. She is a visiting scholar on a regular basis at the National Research Council Institute of Psychology in Rome. She has authored or co-authored more than I10 papers and nine books, including most recently, Rethinking lnnateness (I996). CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii General Introduction 1 Part I: Introduction to Speech Perception 13 1. Finding and Remembering Words: Some Beginnings by English-Learning Infants 19 Peter W. Jusczyk 2. Listening to Speech in the 1st Year of Life 26 Janet F. Werker and Renee N. Desjardins 3. Language Discrimination by Human Newborns and by Cotton-Top Tamarin Monkeys 34 Franck Ramus, Marc D. Hauser, Cory Miller, Dylan Morris, and Jacques Mehler 4. Infant Artificial Language Learning and Language Acquisition 42 R.L. Gomez and L.A. Gerken 5. Rapid Gains in Speed of Verbal Processing by Infants in the 2nd Year 49 Anne Fernald, John R Pinto, Daniel Swingley, Amy Weinberg, and Gerald W. McRoberts Part II: Introduction to Word Learning 57 6. Young Children's Appreciation of the Mental Impact of Their Communicative Signals 62 Helen I. Shwe and Ellen M. Markman 7. Lexical Development in English and Italian 76 Maria Cristina Caselli, P Casadio, and E. Bates 8. Perceiving Intentions and Learning Words in the Second Year of Life 111 Michael Tomasello 9. Evidence Against a Dedicated System for Word Learning in Children 129 Lori Markson and Paul Bloom 10. On the Inseparability of Grammar and the Lexicon: Evidence from Acquisition 134 Elizabeth Bates and Judith C. Goodman Part III: Introduction to Grammatical Development 163 11. The Item-Based Nature of Children's Early Syntactic Development 169 Michael Tomasello 12. Acquiring Basic Word Order: Evidence for Data-Driven Learning of Syntactic Structure 187 Nameera Akhtar 13. The Acquisition of Plural Marking in English and German Revisited: Schemata Versus Rules 203 Klaus-Michael Kopcke 14. An Exploration into Children's Use of Passives 227 Nancy Budwig 15. Acquisition of Complementation 248 Lois Bloom, Matthew Rispoli, Barbara Gartner, and Jeremie Hafitz 16. Form/Function Relations: How Do Children Find Out What They Are? 267 Dan I. Slobin Part IV: Brains, Genes, and Computation in Language Development 291 17. Connectionism and Language Acquisition 295 Jeffrey L. Elman 18. Neural Correlates of Early Language Learning 307 Barbara Clancy and Barbara Finlay 19. Development Itself Is the Key to Understanding Developmental Disorders 331 Annette Karmiloff-Smith Index 351 EXCERPT FROM GENERAL INTRODUCTION All animal species with complex social lives have complex systems of communication. Arguably the most complex and distinctive of these are the 6,000 human languages of the world, each of which comprises tens of thousands of meaningful elements that may be used in combination to create innumerably many communicative messages. The fact that there are so many different languages in the world, each with its own distinctive set of linguistic conventions, means that no particular linguistic elements are biologically given to the species - the way they are biologically given in honey bee dance communication, for example. Instead, each human child must learn the specific linguistic conventions used by the people around her. Children are biologically prepared for this prodigious task, of course, but it still takes many years of active and continuous learning to become a competent speaker of a natural language. This is a longer period of learning with more things to be learned - by many orders of magnitude - than is required of any other species on the planet. At first glance, the way children learn a language seems straightforward. They observe what other persons are doing with language, and they "do the same thing." But anyone who has attempted to learn a foreign language knows that this general description obscures many difficulties. (One might just as well say that to become a champion tennis player one has simply to watch champion tennis players and do what they do.) Among the most important of these are three major types of problems that face a language learner. * Problems of speech perception and production. Simply hearing clearly the different sounds speakers are producing, and then segmenting these into words and other meaningful units, is a very difficult task - and then reproducing those sounds competently is another difficult task on top of this. * Problems of communication and meaning. Having segmented an identifiable unit of speech, it is still far from straightforward to comprehend precisely how a speaker of an unknown language uses that linguistic unit to direct the attention or behavior of other persons communicatively (i.e., what does the unit mean?). * Problems of grammar and creativity. Mastering the use of many different sound units and their conventional meanings is still not enough, however, because much of the language a person hears and produces every day is novel, and so it must be interpreted or constructed creatively out of, or on analogy with, known units. Attempting to discover how children solve these three acquisition problems has resulted in the wide variety of different theoretical approaches and research paradigms that currently constitute the field of study known as developmental psycholinguistics. For this introductory volume of "essential" readings we have chosen to focus on what we consider to be the "most essential" psycholinguistic processes at work in child language acquisition, namely, those involved in solving our three basic acquisition problems. There are many important aspects of language development that we might have included as well but could not due to limitations of space. Among these are: bilingualism; child-directed speech; the acquisition of sign language; individual differences; babbling and phonological development; discourse, conversational, and narrative skills; literacy skills; and many others. Nevertheless, in our view, the papers in the current volume should provide the empirical and theoretical foundation that interested students will need in order to explore these other areas of research on their own. In the remainder of this introduction we provide some general background for each of our three major problems, and also introduce some perspectives from allied fields. At the beginning of the appropriate sections in the volume, we provide further details on the particular theoretical and empirical issues involved in the collected papers. 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