Investigations in Universal Grammar : A Guide to Experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics

This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammer, a theory of the human faculty for language.

The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Eliecited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Production task, a comprehension task.

Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence.In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence and a model of language processing.

In the following two sections, they discuss in detail their two experimental techniques.