Maria Teresa Guasti Livres

This text provides a comprehensive introduction to current thinking on language acquisition. Following an introductory chapter that discusses the foundations of linguistic inquiry, the book covers the acquisition of specific aspects of language from birth to about age 6. Topics include the language abilities of newborns, the acquisition of phonological properties of language, the lexicon, syntax, pronoun and sentence interpretation, control structures, specific language impairments, and the relationship between language and other cognitive functions.

This book offers an updated overview of the rich results from theory-conscious experimental and corpus-based research on the acquisition of Italian in different modes (monolingual, early and late L2, SLI, etc.).