Critical Thinking Questions

1. Drawing on the many references to parental behaviors relevant to language development that were discussed in this chapter, give some examples of ways parents are known to influence their children’s language development.
2. Language development is a particularly complex aspect of child development, and no single theory successfully accounts for all that is known about how children acquire language. Would you weight the child’s contributions (nature) or the environment’s contributions (nurture) more strongly?
3. What are overregularization errors, and why do they offer strong evidence for the acquisition of grammatical structures by children?
4. Many parallels were drawn between the process of language acquisition in children learning spoken language and in those learning signed language. What do these similarities tell us about the basis for human language?