This book attempts to address an interrelated set of issues about the emergence of linguistic abilities in the child.

The various chapters intend to shed light on a particular and critical period in language development: the first three years of life. It is generally assumed in the field of the ontogeny of language that the child's first years of life are particularly crucial. This period is even sometimes considered as predictive at least in the short term, of the later abilities to communicate. During these first three years, gestures, phonetico-phonological, lexical and morpho-syntactic skills chronologically emerge.

The main goal of this book is to address the issue of continuity between the developments of the different language components, by the means of recent findings of experts in each domain.

Furthermore, the originality of this selection of chapters is to broaden the scope of the discussion by including papers dealing with related phenomena but from different perspectives such as phylogeny, pathology and animal communication.

This book primarily concerns graduate students and researchers in the field of language acquisition but the audience can also include scholars from evolution of language, language pathology, animal communication, ontogeny/phylogeny research fields.