What is Language Development?

• PART 1: THREE PSYCHOLOGIES: RATIONALIST, EMPIRICIST, AND PRAGMATIST ; 1.1 Rationalism ; 1.2 Empiricism ; 1.3 Pragmatism ; 1.4 Taking stock ; PART 2: SYNTACTIC NATIVISM: LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT WITHIN RATIONALISM ; 2.1 The 'psychological reality' of the syntactic level of representation: From phrase structures to X-bar grammar ; 2.2 The road to minimalism - transformational grammar ; 2.3 The Minimalist Programme ; 2.4 Assessement for the time being ; 2.5 The question of evidence: Experiments with young children ; 2.6 Evidence for syntactic modularity from atypical development: children with specific learning impairment ; 2.7 Taking stock ; PART 3: EMPIRICIST CONNECTIONISM AS A THEORY OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT ; 3.1 Do connectionist representations have 'casual roles'? Two connectionist models of production ; 3.2 Trying to replace competence with statistical regularity: The limits and uses of cue learning ; 3.3 Variables: In thought, language, and in connectionist modelling ; 3.4 The clear utility of associative models - and more on their overreaching ; 3.5 Connectionism and the conceptual-intentional systems ; 3.6 Some new moves in modelling production ; 3.7 Taking stock ; PART 4: THE PRAGMATIST APPROACH TO LANGUAGE ACQUISITION ; 4.1 Two functionalist grammars ; 4.2 Are functionalist theories better placed to explain acquisition than generativist ones? ; 4.3 Explaining development: cognitive-functionalist theory and data - past and present ; 4.4 Is semantic knowledge sufficient or only necessary? Semantic bootstrapping versus semantic assimilation ; 4.5 Does an evolutionary perspective reveal the strengths of the pragmatist approach? ; 4.6 Taking stock ; REFERENCES

...an important addition to the literature on first language acquisition, and could be very useful as a supplementary text in graduate seminars.