Ecology of Language Acquisition

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XI

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2. Towards an Ecology of Language Acquisition

   • Jonathan Leather, Jet Van Dam

   Pages 1-29

3. Critical Realism, Ecological Psychology, and Imagined Communities

   • Mark Fettes

   Pages 31-47

4. A Tale of Two Computer Classrooms

   • Leo van Lier

   Pages 49-63

5. From Joint Attention to Language Acquisition

   • Hideki Kozima, Akira Ito

   Pages 65-81

6. Beyond Cognitive Determination

   • Jordan Zlatev

   Pages 83-106

7. Language Socialization in Children’s Religious Education

   • A. Patricia Baquedano-López

   Pages 107-121

8. An Integrational Linguistic View of Coming into Language

   • Michael Toolan

   Pages 123-139

9. The Ecology of An Sla Community in a Computer-Mediated Environment

   • Wan Shun Eva Lam, Claire Kramsch

   Pages 141-158

10. Robot Babies

    • David Powers

    Pages 159-181

11. Borrowing Words

    • Gabriele Pallotti

    Pages 183-202

12. Language Acquisition Behind the Scenes

    • Jet van Dam

    Pages 203-221

13. Back Matter

    Pages 223-225

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While most research on language acquisition continues to consider the individual primarily in closed-system terms, Ecology of Language Acquisition emphasizes the emergence of linguistic development through children's and learners' interactions with their environment - spatial, social, cultural, educational, and so on - bringing to light commonalities between primary language development, child and adult second-language learning, and language acquisition by robots. Such a situated, context-responsive perspective on acquisition is able to interrelate insights from a variety of paradigms and disciplines while avoiding unjustifiable appeals to normativity. The theoretical and empirical studies presented here challenge a number of dominant ideas in language acquisition theory and mark an important new research orientation. This work should be of interest to language acquisition researchers and professionals in a wide range of specialisms.

• Language Development
• Language socialization
• language
• language acquisition
• learning
• robot
• semantics

• Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  Jonathan Leather, Jet Dam

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