This is a preliminary list of the topics we will address. More details will be added as they become relevant, and some might be skipped if time gets pressing.

Part I. The General Picture.

[Topic 1] The paradox of language acquisition. Innateness. Evidence for genetic predisposition. The Pullum-debate.

[Topic 2] What it is that the children are learning? A brief introduction to what we know when we know a language. This part will be kept minimal since our goal is to get to children's facts as soon as we can. It will present a general background, to which we will add parts as we go.

Part II. Children between 2 and 4

[Topic 1] They seem to know it all already! We start by surveying a couple of studies showing that children seem to know a lot, very early on.

• Wexler & Poeppel - V2 in German
• Relative Clauses

[Topic 2] Experimental studies. Clever experiments with small kids have uncovered domains where children's language is clearly different from the corresponding adult language. What kind of differences are they? How do we reconcile them with the fact that children seem to already know so much?

• Question-copying in long distance questions
• Acquistion of Coreference

[Topic 3] Corpus-based studies. Examining the spontaneous production of children also reveals aspects in which their speech differs from adult speech. By now, we will have some hypotheses about how the difference can be expressed and how it is reconciled with the fact that children already know so much.

• Missing Subject
• Root Infinitives

Part III. What happens before they speak?

[Topic 1] Between 1 and 2. Many things happen before children even start producing sentences. The major development after the first birthday seems to be fast word-learning. Here we will read about ingenious ways to ask them how they are learning their words. We will also briefly examine the difference between their production and their comprehension.

[Topic 2] Infants from birth to year 1 Spectacular results have been obtained over the last twenty years with babies as young as 4h after birth thanks largely to the technique of non-nutritional sucking. Many questions about what infants know about the sound system of their language are now answered.

Part IV. Case Studies

[Topic 1] How kids talk about numbers From works by Elizabeth Spelke, Sue Carey and colleagues, we have learnt a lot about how the development of the language system relates to the development of other systems in the baby's mind. How babies count (or don't!) provides a particularly interesting case study.

[Topic 2] Abnormal Language Acquisition Although linguistic research into Special Language Impairment has started only recently, the field is growing very rapidly, and is already starting to provide some interesting and puzzling results which are relevant to language in general. We will examine these works, and we will also look at particular transcripts of SLI children.