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Where does grammar come from? How does it develop in children? Developmental psycholinguists who set out to answer these questions quickly find themselves impaled upon the horns of a dilemma, caught up in a modern variant of the ancient war between empiricists and nativists. Indeed, some of the fiercest battles in this war have been waged in the field of child language. Many reasonable individuals in this field have argued for a middle ground, but such a compromise has proven elusive thus far, in part because the middle ground is difficult to define. So let us begin with some definitions. The core of this debate is about epistemology, a branch of philosophy that we can define as “The study of knowledge, its form and source, and the process by which it comes to be. ” Within this framework, empiricism can be defined as “The belief that knowledge originates in the environment and comes into the mind/brain through the

The term “aphasia ” refers to acute or chronic impairment of language, an acquired condition that is most often associated with damage to the left side of the brain, usually due to trauma or stroke. We have known about the link between left-hemisphere damage and language loss for more than a century (Goodglass, 1993). For almost as long, we have also known that the lesion/symptom correlations observed in adults do not appear to hold for very young children (Basser, 1962; Lenneberg, 1967). In fact, in the absence of other complications, infants with congenital damage to one side of the brain (left or right) usually go on to acquire language abilities that are well within the normal range (Eisele & Aram, 1995; Feldman, Holland, & Janosky, 1992; Vargha-Khadem, Isaacs, & Muter,

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In a Principles and Parameters syntax framework sentences are derived by two operations, merger and movement. Merger takes two categories as input (e.g., V and NP) and merges them into a single, higher-order category (e.g., VP). There are, however, constraints on the categories that can be merged successfully. Consider the following pairs: 1a. [NP The girl] sneezed 1b. *[NP The girl] sneezed [NP the boy] 2a. [NP The girl] defeated [NP the boy] 2b. *[NP The girl] defeated 3a. [NP The girl] gave [NP the prize] [PP to [NP the boy]] 3b. *[NP The girl] gave [NP the prize] The (a) examples above are well-formed sentences; the (b) versions, containing the same verbs but different structures following the verbs, are ill-formed. Thus, not all verbs can fit into all sentence structures. How, then, does a theory of syntax account for these facts? Borrowing from 1 logic, we can say that sentences are composed of a verb (i.e., predicate) and a set of arguments.

This paper uses the notion of control from programming languages to look at the organization of mental code

Melissa Bowerman was my teacher and mentor during my doctoral studies. If I remember correctly, I formally enrolled in three courses that she taught, and there probably were independent study enrollments to cover the time she devoted to my dissertation project. Most important, however, were the many occasions on which she devoted time to substantive conversations with me about the many questions and observations I wanted to discuss with her regarding children’s language acquisition. In retrospect, I am deeply impressed by her ability to convey respect for what surely were naïve and poorly formed contributions on my part. I recall a formative discussion in which I shared with her my hope that my studies of normative language acquisition would provide benchmarks to help identify children who deviate from the expected course of acquisition. My recollection is that she was somewhat horrified that I had such an unrealistic expectation. She helped me apprehend that it is the nature of the questions asked of the available literature that determine the nature of the answers to be discovered. Simply put,

This chapter reviews findings from research on normal language acquisition, learnability theory, developmental and acquired language disorders, and language acquisition after the critical period that indicate that the ability to acquire language is the result of innate brain mechanisms. It is possible that infants ' brains are predisposed to perceive categorically stimuli such as phonemes, words, syntactic categories, and phrases, and this predisposition allows children to acquire language rapidly and with few errors. Stromswold, Language acquisition 3 1.0 Overview Because the ability to learn a language is a uniquely human ability, language acquisition is an important topic in cognitive neuroscience. Perhaps the most fundamental question about language and language acquisition is the extent to which the ability to learn language is the result of innate mechanisms or predispositions (henceforth referred to as innate abilities). Innate abilities often share certain characteristics. If an