Steps to Language: Toward a Theory of Native Language Acquisition

Originally published in 1982, Steps to Language was intended as a contribution toward a theory of language acquisition in children. The title may be taken to refer not only to the steps taken by the child toward mastery of the linguistic system but also to those taken by the theorist trying to solve the enigma of how the child achieves this goal. In the first part of the book, the steps taken by other theorists in the previous few decades are retraced, starting from the behaviorist approach and passing through the proposals made by adherents of the Chomskyan school, to the more recent semantically oriented approaches of the time. In part two proposals are presented concerning the acquisition of words and the concepts underlying them and the development of the earliest syntactic constructions and the relational categories underlying them. The chapters of the book constituted a developing argument, in the course of which the author’s sketch of a theory gradually unfolds. Today it can be read in its historical context.

Izchak Schlesinger was a professor of psycholinguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focused primarily on language acquisition and was presented in a series of books and studies that developed a semantic approach as an alternative to generative linguistics. He also examined the structure of argumentation through an interdisciplinary perspective that drew on Talmudic discourse and was among the first researchers of Israeli Sign Language. In later years, he was awarded the Israel Prize in Psychology for his contributions to the field.