Analyzing children's language

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Analyzing Children's Language is a guide to all aspects of the methodology of child language research, and to its conceptual and historical background.It explores from first principles such issues as the competing merits of of naturalistic and controlled observation, the selection of research subjects and the collection and analysis of data.

The author brings together the different contributions of the two disciplines- psychology and linguistics- which lay claim to child language research; disciplines which are diverse in their methods and often incompatible om their theoretical goals. Illustrating her argument in detail with examples from commonly cited books and articles, Tine Bennett-Kastor evaluates those methods and theories which will best allow the process of language acquisition to be discovered, described and, ideally, explained. She concludes her discussion with an historical survey of the content and methods of child language research since 1970.