OVERVIEW LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Research in the area of language socialization initially considered the relation between language acquisition and socialization, which had been separated by disciplinary boundaries, psychology on the one hand and anthropology and sociology, on the other. Developmental psycho-linguistic research focused (and continues to focus) upon phonological and grammatical competence of young children as individuals who are neurologically and psychologically endowed with the capacity to become linguistically competent speakers of a language along a devel-opmental progression (Bloom, 1970; Brown et aI., 1968; Slobin, 1969). Language acquisition research since the late 1960s has debated the source of linguistic competence as located either in innate structures, as the product of verbal input from the child's environment, or some combination of both (Chomsky, 1965; Pinker, 1994; Snow, 1972, 1995). Socialization research posed a set of complementary but inde-pendently pursued questions, primarily revolving around the necessit