First Language Acquisition

The Essential Readings

Edited byBarbara C. Lust

andClaire Foley

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1Barbara C. Lust and Claire Foley

Parti Theory of Language Acquisition 13

1 Knowledge of Language as a Focus of Inquiry 15Noam Chomsky

2 A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior 25Noam Chomsky

3 The Semiotic or Symbolic Function 56Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder

4 Language and Learning 64The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky

5 Comparative Linguistics and Language Acquisition 98Hermine Sinclair[-deZwart]

Part II The Nature-Nurture Controversies 101

6 Language in the Context of Growth and Maturation 103Eric H. Lenneberg

7 Language and the Brain 109Norman Geschwind

8 The Bisected Brain 123Michael S. Gazzaniga

vi Contents

9 The Linguistic Development of Genie 126Susan Curtiss, Victoria Fromkin, Stephen Krashen,David Rigler, and Marilyn Rigler

10 Derivational Complexity and Order of Acquisition in Child SpeechRoger Brown and Camille Hanlon

11 Talking to Children: A Search for UniversalsCharles A. Ferguson

12 Learning by InstinctJames L. Gould and Peter Marler

13 Language and ExperienceBarbara Landau and Lila R. Gleitman

14 The Semantic Bootstrapping HypothesisSteven Pinker

15 Implications for the Semantic Bootstrapping HypothesisSteven Pinker

16 Language Acquisition and Cognitive Development 239Hermine Sinclair-deZwart

17 Cognitive Prerequisites for the Development of Grammar 240Dan I. Slobin

Part III Areas of Language Knowledge 251

18 The Child's Learning of English Morphology 253Jean Berko [Gleason]

19 The Order of Acquisition 274Roger Brown

20 Speech Perception in Infants 279Peter D. Eimas, Einar R. Siqueland, Peter Jusczyk, and James Vigorito

21 The Sound Laws of Child Language and their Place inGeneral Phonology 285Roman Jakobson

22 Universal Tendencies in the Child's Acquisition of Phonology 294N. V. Smith

23 The Acquisition of Phonetic Representation 307David Stampe

24 The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior 316K. S. Lashley

Contents vii

25 The Study of Adam, Eve, and Sarah 335Roger Brown

26 Syntactic Regularities in the Speech of Children 344E. S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi[-Klima]

27 The Reduction Transformation and Constraints on Sentence Length 367Lois Bloom

28 The Young Word Maker: A Case Study of Innovation in theChild's Lexicon 396Eve V. Clark

29 Strategies for Communicating 423Eve V. Clark

Index 432