LING/PSYCH 228: First Language Acquisition

"The first edition of this Handbook is built on surveys by well-known figures from around the world and around the intellectual world, reflecting several different theoretical predilections, balancing coverage of enduring questions and important recent work. Those strengths are now enhanced by adding new chapters and thoroughly revising almost all other chapters, partly to reflect ways in which the field has changed in the intervening twenty years, in some places radically.

Infants and very young children develop almost miraculously the ability of speech, without apparent effort, without even being taught - as opposed to the teenager or the adult struggling without, it seems, ever being able to reach the same level of proficiency as five year olds in their first language. This useful textbook serves as a guide to different types of language acquisition: monolingual and bilingual first language development and child and adult second language acquisition. Unlike other books, it systematically compares first and second language acquisition, drawing on data from several languages. Research questions and findings from various subfields are helpfully summarized to show students how they are related and how they often complement each other. The essential guide to studying first and second language acquisition, it will be used on courses in linguistics, modern languages and developmental psychology.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics provides concise and clear definitions of all the terms any undergraduate or graduate student is likely to encounter in the study of linguistics and English language or in other degrees involving linguistics, such as modern languages, media studies and translation. lt covers the key areas of syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, semantics and pragmatics but also contains terms from discourse analysis, stylistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and corpus linguistics. It provides entries for 246 languages, including 'major' languages and languages regularly mentioned in research papers and textbooks. Features include cross-referencing between entries and extended entries on some terms. Where appropriate, entries contain illustrative examples from English and other languages, and many provide etymologies bringing out the metaphors lying behind the technical terms. Also available is an electronic version of the dictionary which includes 'clickable' cross-referencing.