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Chapter 11: Child Language Acquisition

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  • Page ID
    192723

    • Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi
    • eCampusOntario
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    Learning Objectives

    When you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to:

    • Identify children’s typical language development milestones.
    • Interpret data from various experimental methods to draw conclusions about children’s mental grammar.
    • Explain how development in signed language parallels that of spoken language in an accessible language environment.
    • Discuss some of the benefits of acquiring more than one language.

    This chapter looks at how children develop the various components of mental grammar: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. As we’ll see, children’s minds are equipped to acquire grammar very quickly as long as they have other language users to observe.

    This page titled Chapter 11: Child Language Acquisition is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi (eCampusOntario) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.