Understanding Child Language Acquisition

Caroline Rowland is Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on how children acquire language, with a particular interest in grammar and in assessing how the child’s environment promotes and shapes language growth. She is a series editor for the Trends in Language Acquisition (TiLAR) book series and an associate editor for the Journal of Child Language.

"This book manages to achieve both breadth and depth in introducing the reader to all the major challenges that children face in learning language: sound, meaning, structure and conversational coordination as well as what can go wrong. It is engagingly written in a lucid and accessible style but without sacrificing complexity. This is an indispensable and unique introduction to this most fascinating and fundamental aspect of human development, both for the serious lay reader and for students and their teachers."Elena Lieven, University of Manchester, UK "Rowland’s book has a unique take on children’s language development. She takes the reader on a scientific journey on what makes language and language learning special. Students will profit from the many examples, summaries, and suggestions for further readings."Heike Behrens, Editor, Journal of Child Language"Rowland has written an engaging and thoughtful introduction to debates and data across the breadth of language acquisition."Virginia Valian, Hunter College, CUNY, USA

• Chapter 1: Introduction to language acquisitionChapter 2: Learning the sounds of the languageChapter 3: Learning wordsChapter 4: Learning morphologyChapter 5: Learning syntaxChapter 6: Learning to communicateChapter 7: Learning more than one language - multilingualismChapter 8: Explaining individual differencesChapter 9: The search for language universalsIndex