Children's Language Series – serie

This volume presents current research findings on vital issues in language development compiled by an international group of leading researchers. The data are drawn from studies of the acquisition of Swedish, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Italian, and English. Themes emphasized in all the chapters include the importance of the social context of acquisition, the existence of interconnections among various domains of language development, and the impossibility of understanding acquisition using a simple theory or a single methodological approach.

Each child is spoken to by genetic heritage and by the rich current set of interactional environments -- familial, local community, and broader cultural voices. Using past structures and paradigms of scholarship, scholars seek to understand what the child achieves in language and how. The tools available for this research are not static but evolve jointly through the sharing of information, and with each "brief moment in time" in efforts to look at children's languages "just as they are." Containing a wide range of contributions from developmental approaches to phonological ability, the lexicon, the grammar as well as conversation and sign language, this text details the interrelated research and theorizing discussed at a recent Budapest conference. The meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Languages was particularly rich in the diversity of scholars present, which is highly appropriate because such diversity is integral to an informed study of children's language.

This volume brings together the work of 32 scholars from 13 countries -- investigations of children learning 15 different languages, in some instances more than one at a time. The scope of this work -- as broad as it is -- only partially represents the research interests and approaches of the more than 350 scholars from 34 countries who contributed papers or posters to the Sixth International Congress for the Study of Child Language. This investigative power and diversity are, for the most part, focused on topics and issues of modern day child language research that have been under discussion for the last 30 years or so. Some even go beyond that in early diary studies and philosophers' speculations. While the issues are mainly familiar ones, the 17 chapters contribute to the advancement of child language study in several specific ways. They: * represent current theoretical frameworks, both bringing the insights of the theories to the interpretation of language development and testing tenets or implications of the theories with child language data;* contribute substantively to the crosslinguistic study of child language, reflecting both the linguistic diversity of the authors themselves and a recent major shift in the approach to child language study;* build on the now considerable body of knowledge about children's language, both adding to information about the basic systems of phonology, syntax, and semantics, and extending beyond to explore aspects of narrative and literacy development, language acquisition by bilingual and atypical children, and language processing; and* contain hints of new directions in child language study, such as increased attention to the impact of phonology on other language systems.Taken as a whole, this volume reflects the current strength of crosslinguistic research, the application and testing of new theoretical developments, a new legitimacy of language disorder data, and a new appeal to the descriptive possibilities of language processing models. In addition, there is a theme that runs through many of the chapters and points the way for important research in the future: the role of prosody in the acquisition of various language structures and systems.

First published in 1983. This series, Children’s Language, reflects the conviction that extensive work on entirely new fronts along with a great deal of reinterpretation of old-front data will be necessary before any persuasive and truly orderly account of language. For all volumes in the series there is a common scheme of operation with two tactics. First, to give authors sufficient planning time and freedom to arrive at a chapter-length account of their area of thinking which vividly shows both the progress and the problems in that area, with the author of each chapter free to find a workable proportion of new experimental contributions, review, and theory. The second tactic concerns the selection of topics for each volume. This is Volume 4. Structures about language and thought and children as employed in certain other fields may well be shaken and stimulated, particularly in education, sociology, anthropology, literature, and language remediation.

First published in 1985. In children’s language we are in search of the “ great bears,” the clear solid patterns that hold up after countless angles of view and after many, many lenses have been tried. In the first four volumes of this series, Children's Language, there has been coverage of alternative theories and methods in syntax, semantics, discourse, phonology, figurative language, second language learning, the transition to text processing, and story structures, among other topics. In order to present a lively account of development, the authors in the first four volumes were encouraged to each adopt a flexible format—one that best fit their own material rather than sticking to a standard review organization. Exactly the same approach has been taken by the authors of the present volume 5.

This series, Children’s Language, reflects the conviction that extensive work on entirely new fronts along with a great deal of reinterpretation of old-front data will be necessary before any persuasive and truly orderly account of language development can be assembled. None of the chapters are simply reviews, and none of the volumes are handbooks or reviews or introductory texts. Rather the volumes try to capture the excitement and complexity of thinking and research at the growing, advancing edges of this broad field of children’s language. In line with these goals for the Children’s Language series the present volume includes coverage of a fairly wide range of topics and subtopics. The authors for each chapter will weave their own story and we leave to them the introduction of their main plots and the major and minor characters in their scientific stories. This is volume 6.

Each child is spoken to by genetic heritage and by the rich current set of interactional environments -- familial, local community, and broader cultural voices. Using past structures and paradigms of scholarship, scholars seek to understand what the child achieves in language and how. The tools available for this research are not static but evolve jointly through the sharing of information, and with each "brief moment in time" in efforts to look at children's languages "just as they are." Containing a wide range of contributions from developmental approaches to phonological ability, the lexicon, the grammar as well as conversation and sign language, this text details the interrelated research and theorizing discussed at a recent Budapest conference. The meeting of the International Association for the Study of Child Languages was particularly rich in the diversity of scholars present, which is highly appropriate because such diversity is integral to an informed study of children's language.