About the Book

This volume contains contributions from leaders in the field of child language in honor of one of the lights, Melissa Bowerman, who has had a profound, widespread, and enduring influence on research conducted for nearly 40 years.

In Section I, on Learning Words, Dedre Gentner & Lera Boroditsky lay out their latest theorizing--and new data from Navajo--on the status of their complementary hypotheses, the Natural Partitions hypothesis and the Relational Relativity hypothesis. Esther Dromi provides a rich review of theories of word meaning and re-examines her own data from her daughter Keren's acquisition of Hebrew to uncover the best components of theories that have evolved from early categorical views of children's word meanings to more current dynamic systems and emergentist perspectives.

In Section II, on Crosslinguistic Patterning and Acquisition of Lexical Semantics, Lourdes de León explores children's early sensitivity to language-specific verb meaning, through an examination of children's acquisition of verbs for 'fall' and 'eat' in the Mayan language Tzotzil, and argues for early influence of both the input and cognition. Bhuvana Narasimhan & Penelope Brown further examine a "Semantic Specificity Hypothesis" by comparing children's acquisition of Hindi and the Mayan language Tzeltal and find that the data are not consistent with the hypothesis.

In Section III, Crosslinguistic Patterning and Events, Paths, and Causes, William Croft addresses the nature of the causal-aspectual structure of events and proposes that a proper treatment requires two major components--aspectual structure and force-dynamic structure--as well as incorporation of multiple subevents. Soonja Choi explores speakers' expression of PATH and CAUSE in Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages and argues from English, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese data that PATH must be broken into two sub-types, "endpoint" paths and "trajectory" paths, as languages differ in their treatment of these two sub-types. Dan Slobin further examines whether PATH expression in motion verbs relates to paths of vision and argues, from English, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish data, that just as the structure of the language directs "thinking for speaking" about physical paths, it by extension also influences conceptualizations regarding paths of vision.

In Section IV, Influences on Development, Eve Clark argues that adults "shape the way children speak" by offering terms and elaborations in the input and by providing feedback when children make errors. Ping Li examines the acquisition of meaning from a connectionist-emergentist perspective and argues that the child's discovery of meaning emerges as a natural outgrowth of the processing of statistical probabilities--the frequency of co-occurrence of form-to-form, form-to-meaning, and meaning-to-meaning mappings. Mabel Rice focuses on children with Specific Language Impairment and provides a rich analysis of the research while trying to solve a conundrum: How is that children with SLI can demonstrate deficits in learning some aspects of language, and yet show robust abilities in other areas of linguistic development? Virginia Mueller Gathercole traces the protracted development of a wide range of "scalar predicates" in English and argues that cognitive abilities and linguistic input work together to "invite" the child to move from rudimentary lexical-specific usage to complex usage.