Course in First Language Acquisition

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-19-888246-6
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 292 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 475 g

This textbook introduces fundamental concepts and results in the theory of first language acquisition, bringing together linguistic phenomena on the one hand and learning and cognitive development on the other. Grammar and development are woven together through a range of case studies that provide students with the tools to think about (a) what is already understood about language acquisition; (b) what methods we use to identity children's grammatical knowledge; and (c) how to
approach problems in any area of grammatical acquisition.

Each of the book's five parts illustrates a foundational concept in the theory of language and its acquisition: the nature of learning in the biological world; categories in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax; hierarchical structure; grammatical dependencies; and the role of information processing systems in the theory of language acquisition. Designed with advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in mind, the book includes discussion questions and suggestions for
further reading at the end of each chapter.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lidz, Jeffrey

Knowlton, Tyler

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Part I. Foundations

- 1: Becoming linguistic

- 2: Learning and induction

- 3: Irradiated rats and dancing bees: Why all learning is problem-specific

- 4: The division of labor between input and innate structure

- 5: The poverty of the stimulus: Anaphoric one

- 6: Association or fast-mapping? The view from word learning

- Part II. Categories

- 7: Categories in phonetics and phonology

- 8: Syntactic categories I: Determiners and productivity

- 9: Syntactic categories II: Nouns and adjectives

- 10: Syntactic categories III: Verbs

- 11: Subcategories: Syntactic bootstrapping

- Part III. Hierarchical structure

- 12: Hierarchical structure I: Principle C

- 13: Hierarchical structure II: Quantifier scope

- 14: How to find syntax I: Semantic bootstrapping

- 15: How to find syntax II: Prosodic bootstrapping

- Part IV. Dependencies

- 16: Morphosyntactic dependencies

- 17: Syntactic dependencies I: Wh-movement

- 18: Syntactic dependencies II: Locality (islands)

- 19: Syntactic dependencies III: Raising and control

- Part V. Real-time processing considerations

- 20: Competence vs. performance I: Over-regularization and English past tense

- 21: Competence vs. performance II: Null subjects

- 22: Parsing and learning

- 23: Language and thought

Über Autor(innen)

Jeffrey Lidz is Professor and Chair in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He previously held positions at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, the CNRS Laboratoire des sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique in Paris, and Northwestern University, and he is a Fellow of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the co-editor, with William Snyder and Joe Pater, of The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (OUP, 2016; paperback 2019), and the editor of Sentence First, Arguments Afterward: Essays in Language and Learning (OUP, 2020).

Tyler Knowlton is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2021 and previously held a postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania's Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education (MindCORE). His work has been published in journals including Language Learning and Development, Cognitive Psychology, and Natural Language Semantics.