Children's language learning: An interactionist perspective

This review of children's language learning considers historical accounts o f acquisition and individual variation, recent advances in methods for stud ying language learning, research on genetic and environmental input that ha ve contributed to the interactionist perspective; and the relevance of cros s-disciplinary work on language disorders and the biology of learning to fu ture theories. It concludes that the study of children's language developme nt is converging on an interactionist perspective of how children learn to talk, incorporating the contributions of both nature and nurture to emergen t, functional language systems. Language learning is viewed as an integrati on of learning in multiple domains.