This volume, edited by Jeffrey Lidz, William Snyder and Joe Pater, contains a collection of overviews of different fields of developmental linguistics, which is defined by the editors as the branch of linguistics that focuses on the development of children’s acquisition of native languages. The volume contains contributions by 45 leading scholars from across the globe, and constitutes a significant and comprehensive addition to the field of developmental linguistics, covering the core linguistic domains of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics/pragmatics in Parts I–IV, as well as computational approaches to learning in Part V, and learning in atypical populations in Part VI. The guiding principle of the book is to relate developmental findings to core generalizations accounted for by linguistic theory.

Chapter 1 offers an introduction by the three editors, which sets out the structure of the book and introduces of each part. Parts I–IV constitute the bulk of the volume. Each chapter in these parts focuses on a specific area of grammatical knowledge and follows the same pattern. First an overview of the fundamental generalizations that guide current linguistic analyses is provided, followed by the relevant literature review, which outlines what is currently understood or theorized about children’s development with respect to the phenomena under discussion, and, finally, considerations of language learnability are raised.

Part I focuses on children’s acquisition of the sound system. In Chapter 2, ‘The acquisition of phonological inventories’, Ewan Dunbar & William Idsardi begin by introducing two traditional views of phonological inventories from the points of view of linguists and psychologists. The linguistic view focuses on the production of sounds by children, while the psychological view puts more emphasis on infant speech perception. By revisiting the two traditions, the authors present a four-way distinction of the phonological inventory and point out that phonological processing involves receptive, productive and storage systems, with the storage system interacting with both receptive and productive systems. The authors argue that the future of phonological inventory acquisition should focus on cognitive modeling of phoneme acquisition.

In Chapter 3, Phonotactics and syllable structure in infant speech perception’ Tania S. Zamuner & Viktor Kharlamov begin by reviewing children’s phonotactic development, including acquisition of phonotactic patterns and the use of phonotactic knowledge in word segmentation and in lexical acquisition. A discussion of the acquisition of syllable structure is followed by a brief summary of various outstanding issues, including production related investigations and phonological modeling studies.

In Chapter 4, ‘Phonological processes in children’s production’, Heather Goad reviews children’s phonological processes from the perspective of whether they converge with and/or diverge from those attested in adult grammars, focusing mainly on sources of explanation for certain types of divergent behavior beyond the target grammar (e.g. ‘try’ $\rightarrow$ [twaɪ]), specifically the developing perceptual system and vocal tract. These divergent behaviors include processes that suggest that children might contain less or more in their ‘grammatical toolkit’ than adults, and have received little attention in the literature. According to the author, much more remains to be done in this field.

In Chapter 5, ‘Prosodic phenomena’, Mitsuhiko Ota reviews some key descriptive findings in the development of prosodic phenomena in newborns and infants, namely stress, tone, and intonation, within the models of metrical stress theory and autosegmental phonology, both of which have been central in prosodic phonology theories in the past decades. The author also discusses arguments for applying the metrical approach to gain better understanding the development of prosodic phenomena.

Beginning with Chapter 6, Part II deals with morphological development in child language acquisition. In Chapter 6, ‘Compound word formation’, William Snyder focuses on two types of compound words, synthetic-ER compounds (e.g. dishwasher) and endocentric bare-stem compounds (e.g. flower book). Systematic cross-linguistic variation is found across these two types of compounding, and a literature review addresses the resulting questions that emerge in relation to child language acquisition, especially questions about the acquisition of bare-stem endocentric compounding. Snyder proposes a hypothesis called The Compounding Parameter to the effect that the relationship between the head and the modifier in a novel endocentric compound is not flexible and thus context independent (110).

In Chapter 7, ‘Morpho-phonological acquisition’, Anne-Michelle Tessier looks at how infants develop the ability to use linguistic cues like pauses, lengthening, and pitch variations to segment word boundaries in major prosodic units such as sentences or phrases. The author discusses the use of language-specific cues and some bottom–up cues, as well as how known or isolated words help infants with segmentation.

In Chapter 8, ‘Processing continuous speech in infancy’, some empirical observations are presented to demonstrate how infants use diverse cues to segment utterances into word-sized units. Louise Goyet, Séverine Millotte, Anne Christophe & Thierry Nazzi argue that since most studies focus on English, cross-linguistic exploration of segmentation ability is needed, and future work should focus on the extent to which infants use all the segmentation procedures simultaneously.

Part III, made up of 10 chapters, explores the acquisition of syntax in child language acquisition. Chapter 9, ‘Argument structure’, by Joshua Viau & Anne Bunger, studies the acquisition of argument structure by first addressing several important terms and distinctions, such as ‘events’ and ‘event participants’. A comprehensive review of research pertaining to argument structure constitutes the main part of the chapter, followed by an assessment of the current state of research and some suggestions for future research, such as the focus on the learning mechanisms in the domain of argument structure.

Chapter 10 ‘Voice alternations (active, passive, middle)’, focuses on voice alternations and what makes the passive voice more difficult to acquire. Maria Teresa Guasti first discusses some generalizations about the passive voice and then examines various accounts that stress either the role of input or the role of syntactic or syntactic–semantic interface constraints. The author argues that technical innovation, such as syntactic priming methods, might offer new avenues for research.

In Chapter 11, ‘On the acquisition of prepositions and particles’, Koji Sugisaki explores how children learn to express spatial notions, focusing on the acquisition of prepositions and particles. Languages vary considerably in adpositional syntax and compositional semantics, so the question is how children converge on the target grammar. This chapter focuses on acquisition studies that consider the role of innate constraints on syntactic variation, namely studies on two syntactic phenomena: stranding, and the verb–particle construction.

In Chapter 12, ‘A-movement in language development’, Misha Becker & Susannah Kirby focus on children’s acquisition of A(rgument)-movement, including passives, unaccusatives, subject raising and raising-to-object constructions. Children’s acquisition of these structures seems to be staggered, with some of the acquisition (unaccusatives) occuring quite early (around two years old) and other structures (passives) appearing later (at between three and four years old). Researchers find that all these constructions are at play in children’s performance, thus weakening claims that argument movement is subject to biological maturation.

In Chapter 13, ‘The acquisition of complements’, Jill de Villiers & Tom Roeper explore how children follow systematic principles in the acquisition of complements. They suggest that complementation involves the lexicon more than other grammatical structures, and focus on the problems created by lexical variation, reviewing evidence that show strong connections between complementation and the conceptual interfaces. How children associate the mental state meaning with complement structure is identified as an emergent research topic. Finally, the core question of this chapter ‘how children acquire complementation’ is illustrated by experiments that show how various modules of grammar interact to trigger complement structure.

In Chapter 14, ‘Acquisition of questions’, Rosalind Thornton begins with a review of the literature over the last 40 years. Comprehension studies demonstrate that children can execute syntactic computation for understanding questions and have access to successive cyclic movement. Yet production studies show that some children make errors, and one of the possible reasons is because children try to map Universal Grammar onto the local language. The author argues that more cross-linguistic research needs to be done to explore how these structures develop in children’s grammar.

In Chapter 15, ‘Root infinitives in child language and the structure of the clause’, John Grinstead argues that there is still no satisfactory theoretical account for the existence of broad range of phenomena that are related to nonfiniteness in children’s verbs, since there is a great deal of cross-linguistic variation. Most theoretical accounts of the phenomenon are formulated based on Generative Grammar, while recently there have emerged Constructivist accounts as well as more learning-theoretic models. Grinstead suggests that studies in other areas of linguistics, for example morphological processing, could improve understanding of the phenomenon in child language.

In Chapter 16, ‘Mood alternations’, Kamil Ud Deen focuses on the acquisition of modals in child English. Naturalistic studies of child language reveal different findings from experimental results about whether deontic modality is expressed earlier than epistemic modality or vice versa. The Primacy of Modality Hypothesis is put forward to explain cross-linguistic research data, in which divergent use of morphology, such as infinitive as in root infinitive languages or imperative forms, as in Italian, is used to mark the irrealis–realis distinction. Deen suggests that future research may turn to studies on languages with divergent morphological systems.

Chapter 17 ‘Null subjects’, describes null subject phenomena in child language acquisition and presents various explanations of the data and the models for this aspect of the acquisition process. Explanations of data fall into two categories, syntactic and non-syntactic. The syntactic explanations account for behavioral phenomena in terms of faulty grammar, while non-syntactic explanations claim that knowledge deficiency is non-syntactic. Virginia Valian reviews several models including syntactic, non-syntactic, or hybrid, arguing that no model accounts for all the behavioral facts, and calling for a better model in this area.

In Chapter 18, ‘Case and agreement’, Paul Hagstrom points out that while most research into the acquisition of case is conducted on English, the most representative studies on agreement are not focused on English since English is not a language with a very morphologically complex agreement system: the interesting questions will be how to extend the findings from one language to another and to predict what non-adult form might occur.

In Chapter 19, ‘Acquiring possessives’, Theodoros Marinis focuses on adnominal possession and how it is acquired by children with typical language development in a variety of languages. Literature on the acquisition of adnominal possession in five languages reveals that there is substantial cross-linguistic variation in the way adnominal possession is grammaticalized across languages. Acquisition literature and learnability issues are discussed in relation to grammatical morpheme omission, frequency and syntactic structure. Finally, Marinis identifies three ways to fill the gap in the acquisition of possessives for future research, namely comprehension experiments, dense longitudinal data and elicitation experiments.

Part IV addresses children’s acquisition of semantics. It consists of seven chapters. Chapter 20, ‘Acquisition of comparatives and degree constructions’, looks at children’s ability to form comparative and degree constructions. Kristen Syrett first explains how the morphosyntactic elements of comparatives and degree constructions correspond to their semantics, as well as cross linguistic variability of comparative expressions. Both the explicit and implicit comparatives and degree constructions are touched upon, with the main focus on the former, to explore how children assign linguistic representations to these constructions.

Chapter 21, ‘Quantification in child language’, explores linguistic and psycholinguistic issues in children’s acquisition and use of quantificational expressions. Jeffrey Lidz focuses the discussion on the cognitive mechanisms that produce quantificational expressions in natural language. Children develop approximate number representations first, followed by precise number representations later. Studies that compare adults with children attribute differences to online information processing mechanisms and interaction with pragmatic reasoning, suggesting that immature processing mechanisms and immature pragmatic abilities can impact children’s ability to interpret or use information in real time.

In Chapter 22, Sergio Baauw addresses ‘The acquisition of binding and coreference’. Studies on children’s interpretation of pronouns and reflexives and the cross-linguistic evidence both suggest an early mastery of linguistic principles and language specific syntactic and semantic properties of pronouns. However, cross-linguistic studies show that children have difficulty in interpreting pronouns and reflexives at the interfaces between syntax and discourse or semantics. Children’s performance on logophors and long-distance reflexives indicates that the acquisition of pragmatics and particular properties of lexical items are comparatively late.

Chapter 23, ‘Logical connectives’, explores how developmental psycholinguistics informed by theoretical linguistics has uncovered the acquisition of logical connectives in natural language. Takuya Goro discusses two important theoretical issues: the dissociation of pragmatic implicatures from the interpretation of disjunction, and the model of semantic interaction between a logical connective and another logical word in the same sentence. Theoretical studies of cross-linguistic variation in logical connectives find unexpected universality in child language. Goro argues that recent research has made significant advances since linguistic theories have been applied in experimental studies in this area.

In Chapter 24, ‘The expression of genericity in child language’, Ana T. Pérez-Leroux studies production and comprehension of generic expressions, first offering an overview of the meaning and relevant grammatical forms of generic expressions in English and in other languages. The author then explores errors in children’s acquisition of generics, including input and output stages, to assess how much children know about generic expressions. The nature of the learnability problem is extended from English studies to other languages.

In Chapter 25, on ‘Lexical and grammatical aspect’, Angeliek van Hout first summarizes the generalizations about lexical and grammatical aspect and the connections between these two aspectual notions, followed by an overview of cross-linguistic variation in aspect expression, which raises learnability issues relating particularly to telicity and the perfective–imperfective aspect.

In Chapter 26, ‘Scalar implicature’ Anna Papafragou & Dimitrios Skordos explore scalar implicatures (SIs) as a paradigm case to probe the nature of early pragmatic abilities. After some theoretical background, the authors review the developmental evidence and propose an account of early successes and failures with pragmatic inferences. Children’s developmental data and theories of word learning and semantic development can both inform and constrain each other. Directions for future research include integrating the findings on SIs with other findings in developmental pragmatics and relating results on SI-calculation in older children to findings from toddlers.

Part V shifts the emphasis to theories of learning. In Chapter 27, ‘Computational theories of learning’, Jeffrey Heinz states that the central problem of learning is generalization and that what is debatable is the learning criterion, i.e. how ‘learning’ should be defined. Heinz suggests that the design of artificial language learning experiments, which integrate the insights of computational learning theories with the methodologies of developmental psycholinguistics, offer a bright future for research in this area.

Chapter 28, ‘Statistical learning, inductive bias, and Bayesian inference’, discusses ways in which Bayesian modeling can be used to investigate the inductive bias needed for language acquisition. Lisa Pearl & Sharon Goldwater first review some behavioral evidences that suggest children can extract generalizations from statistical information. The Bayesian approach is then fully discussed, including its benefits that may interest developmental and theoretical linguists. Several case studies are presented by applying Bayesian inference techniques to probe problems of interest in different domains, such as phonetics and phonology, word segmentation, word-meaning mapping, syntax-semantics mapping, and syntactic structure.

In Chapter 29, ‘Computational approaches to parameter setting in generative linguistics’, William Gregory Sakas first addresses three core concepts related to computational modeling, namely learnability, feasibility and the Subset Principle (the idea being that a language learner should not hypothesize a superset of a target language). A review of computational models of parameter setting constitutes the main part of this chapter. The author suggests a return to the original conception of ‘triggering theory’ for future investigation, which holds that parameter setting is more or less instantaneous, accurate, and deterministic and there no need to revise a parameter value once a choice is made.

In Chapter 30, ‘Learning with violable constraints’, Gaja Jarosz discusses computational modeling of learning for constraint-based grammars. For each learnability subproblem, (for example, the narrower grammar-learning subproblem, including the learning of grammars from full structural descriptions, or the broader grammar-learning subproblem, which that makes the assumption that learners do not have access to hidden structure), there exist a number of alternative computational models with different strengths and weaknesses. Jarosz also reviews developing approaches for dealing with hidden structure and the results from the learning of ‘restrictive languages’, natural languages having a restrictive grammar that ‘does not overgenerate by accepting forms that are ungrammatical in the target language’ (743). Research relating the predictions of computational models to developmental findings provides further support for existing constraint-based learning models, though many challenges remain.

Part VI turns to studies of language acquisition in atypical populations, exploring how these populations offer a better understanding of children’s language development under normal conditions. In Chapter 31, ‘Language development in children with developmental disorders’, Adrea Zukowski addresses language impairments in children with neurocognitive disorders. The bulk of this chapter provides relevant findings on language disorders including Specific Language Impairment, Down Syndrome, and Williams Syndrome. Findings from typically developing children and from children learning a second language serve as a baseline for comparison.

In Chapter 32, ‘The genetics of spoken language’, Jennifer Ganger deals with the genetic basis of language development with a focus on spoken language and the multivariate research from twin studies. While recent twin research has addressed both normal variation and language disorders, advances in molecular genetics have also shed light on language, primarily on disorders. The behavioral and molecular data together offer support for the view that genes are associated with language learning and language disability.

In Chapter 33, ‘Phonological disorders’, Daniel A. Dinnsen, Jessica A. Barlow & Judith A. Gierut highlight some of the findings from a large body of descriptive and experimental research on phonological disorders, discussing the issue of children’s underlying representations and the processes that map these representations onto the phonetic output. While different theoretical frameworks offer different interpretations of the same phenomena, the authors argue that phonological disorders offer the opportunity to evaluate linguistic theories.

In sum, this volume offers a thorough synthesis of recent studies in developmental linguistics, and a particularly useful research resource. This comprehensive survey of existing research has the potential to provide researchers with a sound basis for new research, and by identifying gaps in each area, the chapters provide excellent departure points for future research. The critical reflections on typological variation and the role of input in acquisition are also likely to lay the groundwork for future studies that examine how the learner interacts with the input in acquiring various features of the grammar. Finally, the wide range of languages and developmental linguistic phenomena covered by the book serve to meet the editors’ goals, which are to provide ‘a definitive statement of (a) the set of phenomena to which a theory of language development must be responsive, (b) the overarching learning-theoretic issues posed by the complexity of grammar acquisition, plus (c) a picture of the constraints on grammatical theory that are determined by our understanding of language acquisition’ (3).