The Proceedings of the 30th Annual Child Language Research Forum

First language acquisition is an integral component of linguistics research. If one can understand a child’s ability to learn a language, one can better understand the social and phonological implications of the complexities of language.

This volume displays researchers’ findings on first language acquisition in a variety of the world’s languages, reflecting the diversity of interests in the field and the range of languages being studied. Contributors discuss a range of topics in first language acquisition, including children’s use of tense, their ability to formulate coherent clarification requests, and their knowledge of word order. Other topics examined include the difficulties experienced by a bilingual child, the difference between the rhythmic characteristics of children compared to adults, and children’s ability to learn inflectional agreement from parental speech. The studies included in this volume were presented at the 30th Child Language Research Forum held at Stanford University in 1999.