According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition contend that child language matches the input, with n...

Children start to communicate and use language in social interactions from a very young age. This allows them experiment with their developing linguistic knowledge receive valuable feedback – often more knowledgeable interlocutors. While research acquisition has focused great deal on children's ability learn the input or cues, little work, comparison, investigated nature role of Communicative F...

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a pro...