The Acquisition of Relativization (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Series Number 173)

How does a biologically-programmed language faculty interact with language experience in the acquisition of language across the world? Bringing together linguistic theory, language typology, and cross-linguistic experimental results from parallel studies of development in language acquisition, this book reports new research on the nature of the human competence for language acquisition. It investigates the acquisition of complex sentence formation through relativization -a fundamental component of language knowledge- through systematic, formally explicit, hypothesis-driven experimental studies from English, French and Tulu (in the US, Belgium and India). It demonstrates that across languages, the course of acquisition shares basic properties in keeping with universals of a language faculty, while at the same time, in all languages, specific relativization forms are achieved through development. The results show the power of an approach to the study of language acquisition which bridges linguistic theory of Universal Grammar with real-time creation of a specific language by the child.

Barbara Lust is Professor Emerita at Cornell University and Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Linguistics and Philosophy. She has conducted research on language acquisition for over 40 years, concentrating on cross-linguistic studies of basic principles and parameters of language variation.

Suzanne Flynn is Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Linguistics and Philosophy. She is a leading researcher in bilingualism and multilingualism as well as on the multilingual brain. She also studies language impairment and deterioration.

Claire Foley is Lecturer in Linguistics, Research Professor, and Associate Director of City Connects and the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children at Boston College. She has collaborated on many cross-linguistic studies of language acquisition with scholars of diverse languages.

Charles R. Henderson, Jr. (Chuck) specialized in multi-level modeling to allow statistical analyses of multi-factored data. As chief statistician for the Cornell Roybal Center, his theoretical and empirical work advanced many aspects of medical and social behavioral sciences. His deep statistical knowledge and understanding enabled sound design and analyses of complex developmental data reported in this volume.

James W. Gair specialized in South Asian languages, particularly Sinhala. His decades-long work merged theoretical linguistics with typological and areal studies; language history, contact and change; and extended to language acquisition and loss. His research studies are now classics across numerous fields of linguistics. His extensive knowledge allowed incisive insights into cross-linguistic analyses in this volume.