About this Series

Elements in this series will include analytical surveys of foundational areas of the discipline, and original insights into frontiers areas of research. 

• What do children know about specific domains of language?   

• What are the main problems in language learning? What processes, mechanisms and types of experienced are required for learning a given set of linguistic properties? 

• What are the specific characteristics of various populations of child learners, including learners of languages from diverse typologies, monolingual and multilingualingual children, and typical and atypical children? 

Methodological challenges that arise in the search for understanding language knowledge and language ability in young children are covered by a fourth question:  

• What are the optimal methods for different age ranges and child populations? 

Specific elements are situated within one of those main research themes in the study of child language acquisition.  

This series aim to support the interdisciplinarity of the field by developing common ground between the various disciplines that approach the study of child language.  

Areas of interest

While we welcome proposals of original themes, these are some examples of relevant

1. What do children know about specific domains or subdomains of language?

• Crosslinguistic development of phonology
• Prosody in Children
• Early knowledge of syntax
• Development of complex syntax
• Children’s comprehension of referential dependencies, quantifiers and logical operators
• Sensitivity to scalar implicatures in children
• Epistemic language in children
• Co-speech gestures in child language acquisition
  
  

2. What are the main problems in language learning? What are the processes, mechanisms and types of experienced required for learning a given set of linguistic properties?

• Bootstrapping the lexicon
• Developmental interactions between modules of language and cognition
• The effect of frequency and variability in learning
• Timing in language acquisition: the roles of experience and cognition
• The impact of language contact, dialectal variability and language change in acquisition
• Syntactic priming in children and its potential role in learning
  
  

3. What are the specific characteristics of various populations of child learners, including typical and atypical, monolingual and multilingual?

• Multilingual populations
• Atypical development 
   

4. What are the optimal methods for different age ranges and child populations?

• Experiments on pragmatic sensitivity

• Advances in corpus studies
• Artificial language learning paradigms
• Computational models of language learning

Series Editor

Ana T. Pérez-Leroux
Yves Roberge

Contact the Editors

at.perez.leroux@utoronto.ca
yves.roberge@utoronto.ca 

Editor Biographies

Ana T. Pérez-Leroux is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Her work investigates how children acquire complex sentences, functional and null elements, and how language and cognition interact in development. She has coauthored Direct Objects in Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Analytic Grammar of Spanish (Routledge, 2024), and is co-Editor of the Revista de Logopedia y Foniatría (Elsevier). 

Yves Roberge is Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto and Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on argument structure, pronominal systems, and recursion, and on their development in first language acquisition. He has authored and edited several books, including The Syntactic Recoverability of Null Arguments (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990) and Direct Objects in Language Acquisition with Cambridge University Press (2017).