Language Acquisition and the Child: Developmental and Theoretical Tensions. Keynote Address on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Boston University Conference on Language Development

The inquiry into children’s language acquisition has shifted in the past 25 years in ways both profound and, perhaps, not so profound, yielding several themes that dominate current thinking about the enterprise. These themes have to do with the CHILD who is acquiring the language, THEORY about the language the child acquires, and the ESSENTIAL TENSION that is necessary for development of both the child and theory