CHILDREN’S FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION FROM A USAGE-BASED PERSPECTIVE¹

There are, however, major debates as to what they bring to this language learning: do they come with innate, specifically syntactic skills or, rather, with more general cognitive and interactive skills? In this chapter, we will argue for the latter and suggest that children’s language development can be explained in terms of species-specific learning and intentional communication. We argue that the child learns language from actual “usage events,” i.e. from particular utterances in particular contexts, and builds up increasingly complex and abstract linguistic representations from these.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Tomasello Psychology & Neuroscience