Language Acquisition Lessons from Children with Specic Language Impairment: Revisiting the Discovery of Latent Structures

T he central theme of this chapter is drawn from Melissa Bowerman’s paper in honor of Roger Brown (Bowerman, 1988), in which she quoted Brown and Bellugi (1964) as the original source of the fundamental issue that motivated her scholarship: “The discovery of latent structure is the greatest of the processes involved in language acquisition, and the most difcult to understand” (p. 315). As a student of Bowerman’s, I was well tutored in the signicance of the latent structure issue for theories of children’s language acquisition.