The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabrück in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshop developed from the observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon. “Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court.” Ana Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on focus, topic, and givenness. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including quantification, dislocation, and intonation, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including language processing and acquisition. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.

In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and processing continuous speech. Part III moves on to the acquisition of syntax, including argument structure, questions, mood alternations, and possessives. In Part IV, chapters consider semantic aspects of language acquisition, including the expression of genericity, quantification, and scalar implicature. Finally, Parts V and VI look at theories of learning and aspects of atypical language development respectively.

Incorporating approaches from linguistics and psychology, The Handbook of Psycholinguistics explores language processing and language acquisition from an array of perspectives and features cutting edge research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and other related fields. The Handbook provides readers with a comprehensive review of the current state of the field, with an emphasis on research trends most likely to determine the shape of psycholinguistics in the years ahead. The chapters are organized into three parts, corresponding to the major areas of psycholinguists: production, comprehension, and acquisition. The collection of chapters, written by a team of international scholars, incorporates multilingual populations and neurolinguistic dimensions. Each of the three sections also features an overview chapter in which readers are introduced to the different theoretical perspectives guiding research in the area covered in that section. Timely, comprehensive, and authoritative, The Handbook of Psycholinguistics is a valuable addition to the reference shelves of researchers in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduate students interested in how language works in the human mind and how language is acquired.

The book identifies and assesses the importance of a range of influences on child language acquisition and development, paying particular attention to situational influences. Key issues are highlighted and recent research is succinctly presented. There are five sections: the deployment of speech during early development; linguistic interaction and family background: encoding the situation; multidimentional aspects of language development; and constraints on language development. There are twelve chapters on these themes contributed by leading researchers in this area.

Grammaticalization and lexicalization are at the heart of first language acquisition. Understanding how these processes begin and evolve is a major challenge for current theories and has implications for applications in teaching or clinical contexts. This volume examines the relative weight of cognitive and linguistic determinants of acquisition with particular attention to two questions. The first one concerns the origins of grammar and the processes underlying its development. Is grammatical knowledge innate or constructed by the child? Is it modular or does it interact with other capacities? How can we account for continuity and discontinuity in development? What is the role of input? Second, considerable variation is observed in lexical and grammatical development across child languages. Is the process of acquisition similar in all children or do language-specific factors impact its rhythm and course? Do typological factors determine children’s reliance on lexical or grammatical means of expression in some domains? Originally published in Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Langage, Interaction et Acquisition 2:1 (2011).

The present volume presents research on language processing and language disorders. Topics range across typical language processing, child developmental language disorders, adult neurodegenerative disorders and neurological bases of typical or impaired brains. The chapters cover a number of linguistic phenomena, including relative clauses, empty categories, determiner phrases and inflectional morphology. Work in this collection uses a variety of experimental methods, both online and offline, such as eye tracking, reaction times, Event Related Potentials, picture selection, sentence elicitation and picture matching tasks. This book will be useful for linguists, speech therapists, and psycholinguists working on the processing of morphosyntax.

The interplay between the interpretation of pronouns (e.g. bound/referential) and their form (e.g. null/overt) is still ill-understood. This volume has a cross-linguistic orientation with in-depth investigations of more than 10 different languages. It unites researchers from the linguistic subfields of syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics, thus furthering dialogue with the goal of shedding new light on the form/interpretation connection.