Language Development Across Childhood and Adolescence

Book excerpt: This volume brings together work by scholars with backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, education, and language pathology. As such, the book adds psycholinguistic and crosslinguistic perspectives to the clinical and classroom approaches that have dominated the study of later language development . Incorporating insights from prior language acquisition research, it goes beyond preschool age to consider both isolated utterances and extended discourse, conversational interactions and monologic text construction, and both written and spoken language use from early school-age across adolescence. Data from French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish as well as English cover varied domains: morphology and lexicon, syntax and verb argument structure, as well as peer interaction, spelling, processing of on-line writing, and reading poetry. The epilogue suggests explanations for the findings documented. Across the book, the authors show how cognitive and social maturation combines with increased literacy in the path taken by schoolchildren and adolescents towards the flexible deployment of a growing repertoire of lexical elements in varied morpho-syntactic constructions and different discourse contexts that constitutes the hallmark of maturely proficient language use.