Edited by Caroline F. Rowland, Anna L. Theakston, Ben Ambridge and Katherine E. Twomey
In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c)… read more
This chapter focuses on the question of how children learn form–meaning mappings in the development of multiword utterances (i.e. the meaning associated with a specific sentence produced in a specific context). Following a theoretical overview, we examine the relationship between the input… read more
We compared the acquisition of symmetrical and asymmetrical Differential Object Marking (DOM) within Estonian, which employs symmetrical DOM (alternation between overtly case-marked objects) with asymmetrical subsystems (alternation between marked and unmarked objects) for imperatives,… read more
Around the age of nine months, children start to communicate by using first words and gestures, during interactions with caregivers. The question remains as to how older preschool children utilise the gestures they observe into their own gestural representations of previously unseen objects. Two… read more
