Vera Kempe is a Professor and Chair in Psychology of Language Learning at the University of Abertay, Dundee. She has held posts at Carnege Mellon University, the University of Toledo, SUNY Oswego, and the University of Stirling. She has published extensively within her research areas, which include: the role of child-directed speech in language acquisition; crosslinguistic research and neural network modeling of language learning and processing; first and second language vocabulary acquisition and learning of inflectional morphology; Individual differences in language learning and in child-directed speech; emotion and communication.

Acknowledgements xv

Chapter 1 What Enables Infants to Acquire Language? 1

Chapter 2 What do Infants Learn Before they Speak their First Word? 19

Chapter 3 How does Social and Cognitive Development Support

Language Development? 43

Chapter 4 How do Children Learn Words? 63

Chapter 5 How do Children Learn to Combine and Modify Words? 89

Chapter 6 What Kind of Language do Children Encounter? 117

Chapter 7 How do Children Learn to Use Language? 141

Chapter 8 How does Language Development Aff ect Cognition? 163

Chapter 9 What is the Role of Literacy in Language Development? 189

Chapter 10 What Causes Language Impairments? 213

Chapter 11 How do Deaf Children Acquire Language? 239

Chapter 12 How does Language Development Aff ect the Brain? 263

Glossary 287

References 303

Name Index 367

Subject Index 379