Frequency Effects in Language Acquisition―Defining the Limits of Frequency As and Explanatory Concept

Gulzow and Gagarina present a selection of 14 papers from a February 2005 workshop held in Cologne and a July 2005 conference held in Berlin which focus on the impact of a linguistic item's frequency in the input on the process of first language acquisition. Representing the two leading approaches to language acquisition, UG-based and usage-based accounts, the papers explore the nature of the relationship between the distribution of grammatical or lexical items in the input and their distribution in early child language, the degree to which frequency effects can serve as an explanatory concept for empirical findings, and in what way the mechanisms of a highly frequent item's acquisition can be related to that of an infrequent item. Studies from a variety of languages--French, German, Swedish, Italian, Czech, Hebrew, Serbian, Russian, and Norwegian--are included. For students, academics, and researchers in linguistics. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Insa Gulzow and Natalia Gagarina, Zentrum fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin, Germany.