ABSTRACT
During the past two decades the question of how children acquire language has been the focus of much research by psychologists and by linguists. It seemed, for some time, that theories of language acquisition which were based on the linguistic theory of transformation grammar gave quite an adequate account of the development of language in children. More recently, however, it has become clear that a satisfactory theory of language acquisition must relate the acquisition of language to cognitive development in general. In this paper I want to look at some of the reasons for this claim, and I want to look at what can be said about the relationship between language development and cognitive development.
