Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in
overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance (" U-shaped …

Many developmental psycholinguists assume that young children have adult syntactic
competence, this assumption being operationalized in the use of adult-like grammars to …

An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages.
All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a …

In this groundbreaking book, Michael Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based
theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in …

It is with renewed appreciation for the size of the task that I come to writing the present
chapter. The number of special issues of journals dedicated to im/politeness these days …

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive
and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the …

The central focus of this text is language development as a field of basic research, but
applied issues are also considered. Chapter 1 provides an overview and history of the field …

The new edition of a comprehensive introduction to a rapidly developing field, combining
developmental data with theory. How do children begin to use language? How does …

It is a simple observation that children make mistakes when they learn a language. Yet, to
the trained eye, these mistakes are far from random; in fact, they closely resemble perfectly …

In language learning, the rule of thumb is: the earlier the better. Children exposed to
language from birth are uniformly successful in first language acquisition (L1A), whereas …