This volume presents current research findings on vital issues in language development compiled by an international group of leading researchers. The data are drawn from studies of the acquisition of Swedish, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Italian, and English. Themes emphasized in all the chapters include the importance of the social context of acquisition, the existence of interconnections among various domains of language development, and the impossibility of understanding acquisition using a simple theory or a single methodological approach.

This volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the contribution of multiparty intergenerational talk in a variety of cultures to the development of children's communicative capacities. The book focuses on the complexity of the cultural and interactional contexts in which pragmatic learning occurs and re-examines certain assumptions implicit in research on language socialization to date, such as primacy of dyadic interactions in the early ages and the presupposition of a monolingual social matrix.