Research into child language development is being conducted more extensively, by more people, and in more countries throughout the world than at any point in the past. We now know more than we ever did before about the linguistic, cognitive, neurobio­ logical, and social capacities that children bring to their language learning task, as well as the ways in which these capacities interact with a whole range of factors present in the child's environment throughout the learning process, not least the particular character­ istics of the language or languages to which the child is exposed. Far from inducing a sense of complacency, this new knowledge seems instead to create an even stronger impetus to know more. This is partly because of the new and unforeseen questions it raises and partly because of competition between different theories to provide the best explanation of the phenomenon, and which in turn engender different methods of enquiry. This volume addresses many of the key issues which are currently exercising the minds of child language researchers, and which are likely to motivate research for some years to come. The chapters included here-all previously unpublished-present a great deal of new data and address a range of theoretical issues from a variety of perspectives.

Table of Contents:
1. Theories of Language Learning and Children with Specific Language Impairment.- 2. The Relevance of Recent Research on SLI to Our Understanding of Normal Language Development.- 3. Time Parsing, Normal Language Acquisition, and Language-Related Developmental Disorders.- 4. How Optional is “Optional” in the Extended Optional Infinitive Stage?.- 5. Derivational Morphology in SLI Children: Structure and Semantics of Hebrew Nouns.- 6. Speech Monitoring in Retarded Children: Evidence for Metalinguistic Competencies.- 7. Gesture Use by Two Children with Tracheostomy: Getting Ready to Use Words.- 8. Three Hypotheses on Early Grammatical Development.- 9. Could a Chomskyan Child Learn Polish? The Logical Argument for Language Learning.- 10. On the Acquisition of Pronominal Reference in Child—Greek.- 11. The Emergence of Periphrastic Questions in Child—French.- 12. The Role of Performance Limitations in the Acquisition of “Mixed” Verb-Argument Structure at Stage I.- 13. Argument Structure Preferences in Pre-School and School-Age Children.- 14. Argument Structure Alternation in French Children’s Speech.- 15. Lexically Specified Patterns in Early Verbal Morphology in Spanish.- 16. Infants of 24-30 Months Understand Verb Frames.- 17. Morphological Future in Italian Children.- 18. Cross-Linguistic Developmental Evidence of Implicit Causality in Visual Perception and Cognition Verbs.- 19. What They Hear Is What You Get? Infinitives and Modality in Child Language and Child-Directed Speech.- 20. An Experimental and Computational Exploration of Developmental Patterns in Lexical Access and Representation.- 21. Learning to Produce Three-Syllable Words: A Longitudinal Study of Finnish Twins.- 22. The Acquisition of the Systematic Use of Pitch By German/English BilingualChildren: Evidence for Two Separate Phonological Systems.- 23. Acquisition of Sentence-Final Particles in Japanese.- 24. Cohesion and Coherence Anomalies and Their Effects on Children’s Referent Introduction in Narrative Retell.- 25. The Cognitive Determinants of Literacy Skills in a Regular Orthography.- 26. Social Class Does Not Predict Reading Success, But Language and Metalinguistic Skills Do.- 27. Do Children With Literacy Difficulties Have Non-Native-Like CVC Perception?.- Contributors.