Language Development in Childhood

Abstract The field of language development is marked by serious disagreement with respect to both what the correct explanation of language development will look like (when we know what it is) and how best to discover that explanation. There is, however, an abstract level at which all researchers in the field are trying to answer the same question: What is the nature of the human capacity to acquire language? This chapter describes current theory and research within four different approaches to answering this question: the biological, the linguistic, the social, and the domain general cognitive. Topics include the neurobiological and genetic bases of language development, learnability theory and Universal Grammar, the social bases of language development, and the contribution of general learning capacities to the acquisition of language. For each approach, the chapter outlines the associated theoretical premises and arguments, provides illustrative examples of the research generated, and evaluates its contribution to our understanding of how children learn to talk.