Language Acquisition

Every normal child acquires a language in just a few years. By four or five, children have effectively become adults in their abilities to produce and understand endlessly many sentences in a variety of conversational contexts. There are two alternative accounts of the course of children's language development. These different perspectives can be traced back to the NATURE VERSUS NURTURE debate about how knowledge is acquired in any cognitive domain. One perspective dates back to Plato’s dialogue “The Meno”. In this dialogue, the protagonist, Socrates, demonstrates to Meno, an Aristocrat in Ancient Greece, that a young slave knows more about geometry than he could have learned from experience. By extension, PLATO’S PROBLEM refers to any gap between experience and knowledge. How children fill in the gap in the case of language continues to be the subject of much controversy in cognitive science. Any model of language acquisition must address three factors, inter alia:

[1]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[2]  J. Hayes.  Cognition and the development of language , 1970 .

[3]  R. Jansen,et al.  LANGUAGE ACQUISITION , 1977, The Medical journal of Australia.

[4]  Michael Don Palmer,et al.  Reflections on language , 1977 .

[5]  H. Gleitman,et al.  Mother, Id rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style , 1977 .

[6]  Charles Read,et al.  Why Short Subjects Are Harder to Find Than Long Ones. Technical Report No. 527. Revised. , 1979 .

[7]  Jerry A. Fodor,et al.  Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science , 1981 .

[8]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  Lectures on Government and Binding , 1981 .

[9]  Eric Wanner,et al.  Language acquisition: the state of the art , 1982 .

[10]  Steven Pinker,et al.  Language learnability and language development , 1985 .

[11]  L L Travis,et al.  Limits on negative information in language input , 1989, Journal of Child Language.

[12]  R. Thornton,et al.  Adventures in long-distance moving: The acquisition of complex Wh-questions , 1990 .

[13]  S. Crain.  Language acquisition in the absence of experience , 1991, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[14]  G. Marcus.  Negative evidence in language acquisition , 1993, Cognition.

[15]  S. Pinker.  The Language Instinct , 1994 .

[16]  L. Curtin,et al.  Everybody knows , 2022, Grenzverletzungen in psychoanalytischen Institutionen.

[17]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[18]  Ianthi Maria Tsimpli,et al.  The mind of a savant: Language learning and modularity. , 1997 .

[19]  Rosalind Thornton,et al.  Investigations in universal grammar: A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics , 1998 .

[20]  Diane C. Lillo-Martin,et al.  An introduction to linguistic theory and language acquisition , 1999 .

[21]  Peter M. Vishton,et al.  Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. , 1999, Science.

[22]  Gary F Marcus,et al.  Language acquisition in the absence of explicit negative evidence: can simple recurrent networks obviate the need for domain-specific learning devices? , 1999, Cognition.

[23]  Dana McDaniel,et al.  Methods for assessing children's syntax , 2000 .

[24]  Mark C. Baker.  The Atoms of Language , 1987 .

[25]  M. Tomasello.  First Steps toward a Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition , 2001 .

[26]  Paul M. Pietroski,et al.  Nature, Nurture And Universal Grammar , 2001 .

[27]  R. D. Rosa.  What's Within. Nativism Reconsidered , 2002 .

[28]  Stephen Crain,et al.  The continuity assumption , 2002 .

[29]  Maria Teresa Guasti,et al.  Language acquisition : the growth of grammar , 2002 .

[30]  Stephen Crain,et al.  Why language acquisition is a snap , 2002 .

[31]  Stephen Crain,et al.  AN ASYMMETRIC UNIVERSAL IN CHILD LANGUAGE 1 , 2003 .

[32]  Adele E. Goldberg.  Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[33]  Charles D. Yang.  Universal Grammar, statistics or both? , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[34]  Julian M. Pine,et al.  Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. , 2004 .

[35]  Paul M. Pietroski,et al.  Brass tacks in linguistic theory : innate grammatical principles , 2005 .

[36]  Stephen Crain,et al.  Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics , 2006 .

[37]  A. Goldberg.  Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language , 2006 .

[38]  Stephen Crain,et al.  The Interpretation of Disjunction in Universal Grammar , 2008, Language and speech.

[39]  S. Crain,et al.  The case of the missing generalizations , 2009 .