Language development remains one of the most hotly debated topics in the cognitive sciences. In recent years we have seen contributions to the debate from researchers in psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, though there have been surprisingly few interdisciplinary attempts at unifying the various theories. In Language and the Learning Curve, a leading researcher in the field offers a radical new view of language development. Drawing on formal linguistic theory (the Minimalist Program, Dependency Grammars), cognitive psychology (Skill Learning) computational...

Language development remains one of the most hotly debated topics in the cognitive sciences. In recent years we have seen contributions to the debate from researchers in psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, though there have been surprisingly few interdisciplinary attempts at unifying the various theories. In Language and the Learning Curve, a leading researcher in the field offers a radical new view of language development. Drawing on formal linguistic theory (the Minimalist Program, Dependency Grammars), cognitive psychology (Skill Learning) computational...

The pragmatic system consists of the rules for appropriate and communicatively effective language use. Pragmatic Development provides an integrated view of the acquisition of all the various pragmatic subsystems, including expression of communicative intents, participation in conversation, and production of extended discourse.For the first time, the three components of the pragmatic system are presented in a way that makes clear how they relate to each other and why they all fall under the rubric pragmatics. Ninio and Snow combine their own extensive work in these three domains with an...