Details theoretical and methodological advances in the study of language acquisition as an emerging, rather than built-in, capacity, addressing levels of language from phonology to social interaction. For linguists, psycholinguists, and developmentalists

Contents: Preface. J.L. Elman, The Emergence of Language: A Conspiracy Theory. E. Bates, J.C. Goodman, On the Emergence of Grammar From the Lexicon. T. Givón, Generativity and Variation: The Notion 'Rule of Grammar' Revisited. J. Allen, M.S. Seidenberg, The Emergence of Grammaticality in Connectionist Networks. R. Miikkulainen, M.R. Mayberry, III, Disambiguation and Grammar as Emergent Soft Constraints. M.C. MacDonald, Distributional Information in Language Comprehension, Production, and Acquisition: Three Puzzles and a Moral. A.E. Goldberg, The Emergence of the Semantics of Argument Structure Constructions. B. MacWhinney, The Emergence of Language From Embodiment. C.E. Snow, Social Perspectives on the Emergence of Language. L.B. Smith, Children's Noun Learning: How General Learning Processes Make Specialized Learning Mechanisms. R.M. Golinkoff, K. Hirsh-Pasek, G. Hollich, Emergent Cues for Early Word Learning. W.E. Merriman, Competition, Attention, and Young Children's Lexical Processing. R.N. Aslin, J.R. Saffran, E.L. Newport, Statistical Learning in Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Domains. D.C. Plaut, C.T. Kello, The Emergence of Phonology From the Interplay of Speech Comprehension and Production: A Distributed Connectionist Approach. J.P. Stemberger, B.H. Bernhardt, The Emergence of Faithfulness. P. Gupta, G.S. Dell, The Emergence of Language From Serial Order and Procedural Memory.