CONTENTS
Preface = ⅸ
Acknowledgements = xii
CHAPTER 1 Background concepts = 1
Introduction = 1
Communicative development = 1
Components of language = 2
Descriptive rules = 7
The non-linguistic repertoire = 7
Communicative competence = 8
A modular approach = 9
Further reading = 10
CHAPTER 2 Foundations of early communication = 11
Introduction = 11
Infant aural and visual perception = 12
A preference for faces = 12
A preference for voices = 13
Early perception of speech sounds = 13
Infant facial expressions = 15
Infant vocalizations = 17
Cries and gurgles = 17
Cooing = 18
Babbling = 19
Developing communication = 21
Intention and secondary intersubjectivity = 22
The basis for message meanings = 24
The Basis for a system of communication = 26
Conclusion = 28
Further reading = 28
CHAPTER 3 Prelinguistic communicative competence and the early lexicon = 29
Development of gestural communication = 30
Non-vocal gestures = 31
Reaching = 32
Giving and taking = 33
Pointing = 34
Other gestures = 35
Vocal gestures = 36
The naming insight = 42
First words = 43
Phonological development = 44
Processes of word production = 45
Prosody = 46
Processes of word perception = 48
Comprehended vs. produced vocabularies = 49
Early word meanings = 52
The pragmatics of gestures and first words = 53
Prelinguistic and early linguistic conversation = 62
Conclusion = 67
Further reading = 68
CHAPTER 4 Communicating with language = 70
Introduction = 70
Part 1 Early syntax and semantics: the two-word stage = 71
Syntactic categories = 74
Word order = 75
The development of bound morphology and function words = 76
Early semantic development = 78
Part 2 Advances in lexical development = 82
Demonstratives and prolocatives = 82
Articles = 84
Pronouns = 87
Words for relationships = 88
Perspective through tense, aspect, and modality = 90
Conclusion = 92
Part 3 Syntactic development = 93
Negation = 93
Passives = 96
Interrogative sentences = 97
Complex sentences = 101
Coordination = 101
Relative clauses = 105
Anaphora = 106
Conclusion = 110
Part 4 Pragmatic development in the linguistic stage = 111
Textual devices in conversation = 112
Developing cohesion markers = 113
Ideational relationships in conversation coherence = 117
Relations between speech acts = 120
Requests and directives = 121
Reinitiating exchanges = 123
Speaker corrections = 124
Requests for clarification = 124
Listener corrections = 125
Knowing what to say to whom = 126
Narratives = 127
Conclusion = 129
Further reading = 129
CHAPTER 5 Explaining the development of communicative competence = 131
Part 1 Components of explanations = 133
(1) The strict behaviourist position = 134
(2) The Piagetian approach = 134
(3) The Chomskyan approach = 134
(4) The Slobin approach = 135
Input(nurture) = 135
Caretaker speech = 136
Reasons for caretaker speech = 137
The potential value of caretaker speech = 138
Linguistic and non-linguistic cognition(nature) = 140
Part 2 Explaining the acquisition of morphology = 142
Grammatical categories and grammatical relations = 144
Bound morpheme acquisition = 146
Part 3 Explaining early syntactic development = 150
Explaining word omission at the two-word stage = 151
Explaining word order at the two-word stage = 154
Part 4 Explaining lexical development = 156
Input to lexical learning = 159
Part 5 Explaining later syntactic acquisition = 161
The strategy approach = 162
The parameter approach = 164
Simple sentences = 167
Passives = 167
Interrogatives = 168
Complex sentences = 170
Relative clauses = 171
Conclusion = 174
Semantics and syntax in early grammar = 175
Part 6 Explaining pragmatic development = 177
Conversational structure = 178
Cognition and input = 179
Social knowledge and conventions = 181
Experience and pragmatic learning = 182
Part 7 A model of communicative competence = 185
An illustration of the model at work = 187
Further reading = 189
CHAPTER 6 Studying child language = 190
The observation problem = 190
Solutions to the observation problem = 191
The ethnographic solution = 191
The experimental solution = 194
The logic solution = 196
Data versus theory = 197
Competence versus performance = 199
Simplicity and complexity = 200
Conclusion = 201
Further reading = 202
Bibliography = 203
Index = 235
