ABSTRACT
The study of different languages is of obvious relevance to the theory of language development. For one thing, it provides a description of the “target state” of the acquisition process; one could not come to understand the process through which children come to acquire principles of word order in different languages, for instance, without some theory of how word order is understood by adult speakers of those languages. As Macnamara (1982) stressed with regard to cognitive development in general, in order to explain how children come to possess competence within a given domain, we have to have some understanding of just what this knowledge is supposed to be.
