Introduction: the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology

This Special Issue has its origins in a workshop that took place at the 1996 Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, held in Istanbul, Turkey. Two of the editors, Shirai and Weist, organized the workshop, and the other editor, Slobin, was the discussant. The guiding question of that session is also the focus of this issue: ’The emergence of tense-aspect morphology: is it driven by input or universal predisposition?’ The articles published here were solicited by a call for papers that received wide international response, resulting in the mix of conference and post-conference papers that follows.