A Course in First Language Acquisition

This textbook introduces fundamental concepts and results in the theory of first language acquisition, bringing together linguistic phenomena on the one hand and learning and cognitive development on the other. Grammar and development are woven together through a range of case studies that provide students with the tools to think about (a) what is already understood about language acquisition; (b) what methods we use to identity children's grammatical knowledge; and (c) how to approach problems in any area of grammatical acquisition. Each of the book's five parts illustrates a foundational concept in the theory of language and its acquisition: the nature of learning in the biological world; categories in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax; hierarchical structure; grammatical dependencies; and the role of information processing systems in the theory of language acquisition. Designed with advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in mind, the book includes discussion questions and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.

1 - Becoming linguistic
2 - Learning and induction
3 - Irradiated rats and dancing bees: Why all learning is problem-specific
4 - The division of labor between input and innate structure
5 - The poverty of the stimulus: Anaphoric one
6 - Association or fast mapping?: The view from word learning
7 - Categories in phonetics and phonology
8 - Syntactic categories I: Determiners and productivity
9 - Syntactic categories II: Nouns and adjectives
10 - Syntactic categories III: Verbs
11 - Subcategories: Syntactic bootstrapping
12 - Hierarchical structure I: Principle C
13 - Hierarchical structure II: Quantifier scope
14 - How to find syntax: Semantic bootstrapping
15 - How to find syntax: Prosodic bootstrapping
16 - Morphosyntactic dependencies
17 - Syntactic dependencies: Wh-movement
18 - Syntactic dependencies: Locality (wh-islands)
19 - Syntactic dependencies: Raising and control
20 - Competence versus performance: Over-regularization and English past tense
21 - Competence versus performance: Null subjects
22 - Parsing and learning
23 - Language and thought

Jeffrey Lidz is Professor and Chair in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He previously held positions at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, the CNRS Laboratoire des sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique in Paris, and Northwestern University, and he is a Fellow of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the co-editor, with William Snyder and Joe Pater, of The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (OUP, 2016; paperback 2019), and the editor of Sentence First, Arguments Afterward: Essays in Language and Learning (OUP, 2020). Tyler Knowlton is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2021 and previously held a postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania's Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education (MindCORE). His work has been published in journals including Language Learning and Development, Cognitive Psychology, and Natural Language Semantics.