ABSTRACT
For the past 20 years developmental psycholinguists have successively explored a number of theoretical approaches to account for the process of language development. Early research, which focused primarily on grammatical development, was motivated primarily by linguistic theory dominated by Chomsky’s radical nativism (e.g., Chomsky, 1965). As more developmental psychologists joined the field, the scope of interest in language broadened, initially to include an emphasis on cognitive development—especially in relation to semantic development (e.g., Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979; D. M. Morehead & A. Morehead, 1974; Sinclair, 1973)—deriving in large part from Piagetian theory (Piaget, 1962) and then to social interaction and pragmatics (e.g., Bates, 1976; Bruner, 1975). Very soon these broader perspectives were proposed by some as explanations for how all aspects of language are acquired, including syntax. On the cognitive view, syntactic categories could be reduced to semantic concepts, which, in turn, were built up from developing knowledge about the world (e.g., Sinclair, 1973). On the social-interactionist view, syntactic categories and rules could be discovered in the formats of nonverbal social interaction between the infant and caretaker (e.g., Bruner, 1975; Lock, 1980; Snow, 1979).
