ABSTRACT
One way of thinking about the study of language acquisition is to see
it as concerned with questions that are divisible into two major
kinds. On the one hand, there are questions concerning what the
child acquires. And then, there are questions about how the child
acquires it. We will refer to these two types of question about
language development as the WHAT question and the HOW question.
Given this way of dividing the territory, any rethinking of the topic
of language acquisition should begin with the WHAT question,
because it lays the groundwork for the HOW question and, so, for the
ways that we might approach the latter. At the same time, we should
resist the commonsense view that the WHAT question is really very
simple and that it is the HOW question that poses all the difficulties.
