The Acquisition of Reference

Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses.

Ruth Berman, Tel-Aviv University:
The varied chapters of The Acquisition of Reference provide state-of-the-art coverage of one of the most elusive and important topics in linguistic analysis and language use, hence, too, in child language acquisition. The editors are to be praised for the careful work they have done in ensuring contributions of a consistently high quality in both scholarly level and style of presentation. I endorse this volume in the strongest possible terms.