ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a selective overview of language acquisition in the broader context of learning to communicate, and take in such things as development of the facial and gestural channels. As with adult psycholinguistics, language acquisition research received a great boost from the ideas of Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. Another complicating factor is that development occurs on several fronts at once. At any one moment a child may be expanding his or her vocabulary, acquiring new concepts, mastering a wider range of sentence structures, learning to use facial expression, tone of voice and gesture in more sophisticated ways, and so on. According to Meltzoff and Moore, newborn infants will not only imitate facial expressions but will also make rudimentary attempts to imitate manual gestures. The creation of quite complex gestural communication systems is not the prerogative of the deaf children of non-signing parents, nor the hapless participants in royal 'experiments'.
