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  • Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition ed. by Jürgen Weissenborn and Barbara Höhle
  • Diana Apoussidou
Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition, 2 vols. Ed. by Jürgen Weissenborn and Barbara Höhle. (Language acquisition & language disorders 23, 24.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Vol. 1: Pp. 305. ISBN 1556199929. $132 (Hb). Vol. 2: Pp. 342. ISBN 1556199937. $132 (Hb).

This work addresses the question of how language-acquiring children make use of existing structures and abilities when processing new linguistic and nonlinguistic information in the speech input. The two volumes, consisting of articles written by key researchers in the field, give an elaborate picture of the cues in the input that children are sensitive to and the learning mechanisms they use. Most of the articles are new material, while some are introductory reviews on the state of the art. Rather than representing just one particular theoretical framework, the work shows both how some linguistic primitives can be explained as originating from language universals and how the linguistic environment can be responsible for the concrete development of language and the order of acquisition. Topics such as the development and change of bootstrapping abilities in the course of time and the discrepancy between production and perception are also addressed. The languages discussed include English, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Research was done language-specifically and crosslinguistically.

The volumes are organized into five sections, with two in the first volume and three in the second. Both volumes have rather brief language and subject indices. The first section, ‘Early word learning and its prerequisites’ (seven articles, 1–144), includes research on the acquisition of word segmentation through the use of prosodic cues in the signal, recognition through long-term memory representations, and comprehension through linguistic and nonlinguistic contextual information. The second section, ‘From input cues to syntactic knowledge’ (six articles, 145–293), investigates how children use prosodic and phonological cues and grammatical morphemes to segment phrases into units in order to learn the word order of their language and to distinguish between word classes. Section 3, ‘Interactions of prosodic and morphosyntactic knowledge in early language production’ (seven articles, 1–177), demonstrates which parts of prosodic knowledge can enhance the acquisition of morphosyntactic knowledge, and vice versa. The articles in the rather short Section 4, ‘Neurophysiological aspects of language acquisition’ (three articles, 179–259), describe how ERPs (event-related brain potentials) display activities in the brain in language processing, and how ERPs can predict the course of language development in the individual. The likewise short Section 5, ‘Additional perspectives on language acquisition’ (three articles, 261–331), contains discussions about the interaction of general learning mechanisms with the linguistic environment, a contribution on the extent to which linguistic primitives can be a prerequisite to or an outcome of the acquisition process, and a comparison between the development of bird song and that of human language.

In the introduction, the editors give a detailed overview about the research that has been done on bootstrapping and outline the contribution of this work to the field. In sum, Approaches to bootstrapping not only gives good insight into various kinds of bootstrapping such as prosodic, lexical, semantic, and morphosyntactic bootstrapping, but also points out directions for further research.

Diana Apoussidou
University of Amsterdam
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