ABSTRACT
Very young children have remarkable linguistic abilities that enable them to acquire language under the varying conditions that exist in all the different societies of the world. This is obvious, since there are no cultures in which children fail to acquire language. At the same time, at least in the societies we know, children develop language in the course of conversations with those around them, in conversational context, and not simply by first observing adult speech to other adults and then deriving the rules.
