Issues in the Theory of Language Acquisition

This book offered in tribute to Jürgen Weissenborn brings together ten original contributions from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to cover key issues in current research on language acquisition. Jürgen Weissenborn is Professor for Psycholinguistics at the University of Potsdam, Germany. After having worked in the fields of semiotics, computational linguistics, and language and space for many years, Jürgen Weissenborn's current research focusses on learnability issues in language acquisition and the emergence of grammatical knowledge in the earliest developmental stages. The articles contained in this volume explore the formal representation of syntactic features in early grammar, the acquisition of noun phrase structure, the nature of early subordination in production and comprehension, the neurolinguistic aspects of learning syntactic rules, and the question of pragmatic/syntax/lexicon/morphology-interface. This wide range of topics not only reflects Jürgen Weissenborn's broad interest in language acquisition, but also offers a good perspective on ongoing research in the field of language acquisition.