ABSTRACT
The field of first language acquisition has made large theoretical and empirical strides in recent years. On the one hand, the amount and quality of empirical material that is investigated has shown a significant increase. On the other, the theoretical integration of this material has proceeded rapidly, so that a variety of empirical material, in a much more unified fashion than in the past, is understood. In this chapter, there is no way to review the range of work in language acquisition that shows these characteristics. What I do instead is present a few of the general ideas in the field and develop one of the areas of active interest in a bit more detail, namely the area of inflectional development. In this way, I hope to have developed enough of the ideas in the field to discuss how they might interact with the study of genetics.
