How children acquire their first language is a deep and enduring puzzle that has captivated scholars from Locke to Descartes, from St. Augustine to Darwin, from Piaget to Chomsky. This volume provides an excellent overview of the theoretical and empirical advances in this field over the past 30 years. Lust, the author, is a renowned linguist and psychologist at Cornell University who has contributed a sizable body of research on language development in young children. The present volume focuses on phonology, syntax, and semantics in children acquiring their first language.
To a great extent, studies of language acquisition are as much a battleground as ever, with nativists and empiricists facing off, presenting increasingly sophisticated arguments and evidence. This volume acknowledges these debates but does not attempt to present all sides. Instead, it makes an articulate and thorough presentation of a Chomskyan (nativist) approach, focused primarily on initial states and early-emerging capacities. One unique aspect of the volume is that it merges theoretical linguistics with the rich empirical literature on children. The author is a knowledgeable and balanced guide, walking the reader through the key framing questions, varied methods, and fascinating phenomena. There is a welcome chapter on brain development, which is an area of research of increasing interest as new methodologies permit increasingly sensitive investigations. At times, especially in the introductory chapters, the terminology might be a challenge to readers not already immersed in this literature. On the whole, however, the writing is lucid and engaging, and the author makes good use of examples from a variety of languages.
Appropriate for a volume of this length, the book does not provide a comprehensive survey of the field. Consequently, the coverage is selective. One topic that was omitted is pragmatics. Given recent advances in this area, including children's theory of mind, and arguments that pragmatic understanding might be key to typical semantic development (as well as language deficits in autism; see Baron-Cohen, Baldwin, & Crowson, Reference Baron-Cohen, Baldwin and Crowson1997; Bloom, Reference Bloom2000; Lohmann, Tomasello, & Meyer, Reference Lohmann, Tomasello, Meyer, Astington, Wilde and Baird2005; Tager-Flusberg, Reference Tager-Flusberg and Glidden2000), such a section would have been a welcome addition. Recent work on language-thought relations (both language-influencing thought and naïve theories influencing language) also receives relatively light treatment.
Readers of SSLA might wish to know how this volume contributes to the literature on bilingualism. This work is squarely situated within the literature on first language acquisition, with only a few brief forays into bilingualism. However, the author ends the volume by pointing to multilingualism as an important area for research, noting (in an understated observation) that “the mystery of language acquisition deepens when we realize that humans are capable of acquiring more than one language at once” (p. 269). How true that is.
