Date: 22-Sep-2004 From: Dylan Maiden <dylan.maidentaylorandfrancis.com> Subject: The Ups and Downs of Child Language: Gualmini
Title: The Ups and Downs of Child Language
Subtitle: Experimental Studies on Children's Knowledge of Entailment Relationships
and Polarity Phenomena
Series Title: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
Author: Andrea Gualmini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hardback: ISBN: 041597125X Pages: 208 Price: U.S. $ 75.00
Abstract:
The new experimental evidence presented in The Ups and Downs of Child Language
shows that it is possible to extend research on child language to children's
semantic competence, adopting the same theoretical framework that has proven
useful to the study of children's syntactic competence. Andrea Gualmini
investigates the role of entailment relations for child language in a series of
interconnected experiments assessing children's negation and their
interpretation of words like or, every, and some. Comparing his study to other
models of language acquisition and characterizing the observed differences
between children and adults, Gualmini asserts that even in the domain of
semantic competence there is no reason to assume that child language differs
from adult language in ways that would exceed the boundary conditions imposed
by Universal Grammar.
Linguistic Field(s):
Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics
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