Trends and Transitions in Language Development: Looking for the Missing Piece

Abstract

In this article, we show that developmental neuropsychology can make significant inroads into the study of language acquisition. The 1st section describes new methodological developments in the field of language acquisition, including the headturn preference procedure (e.g., Fernald, 1985; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996a). The 2nd section shows how these new methods are altering our view of the process of acquisition and placing more emphasis on the period prior to the emergence of speech. The 3rd section presents a profile of language acquisition, reviewing recent research in the areas of phonological, lexical, and syntactic development. Using Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's (1996a) coalition model as a base, we examine major transitions in the landscape of development. Finally, we conclude that the transitions observed in the behavioral data offer ripe opportunities for the use of convergent neuropsychological data.