This book presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of the acquisition of Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in various contexts, such as L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual, heritage languages, pathology as well as language impairment, and sign language acquisition.

Section I Second-language.- Putnam, Michael T.,  The role of formal features in an exo-skeletal grammar: Implications for language acquisition and maintenance.- Ahern, Aoife, José Amenós-Pons and Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, Intepreting evidentiality in non-evidential languages: L2 Spanish by L1 French speakers.- Tuniyan, Elina and Roumyana Slabakova, L2 acquisition of definiteness in English: non-target mapping of anaphoricity onto the ...- Diaubalick, Tim, Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes and Katrin Schmitz, Language influence in the acquisition of aspect: Advanced L2 learners versus heritage speakers.- Genevska-Hanke, Dobrinka, Pronominal use in late L1 attrition in near-native L2 acquisition: the case of pro-drop L1 Bulgarian and non-pro-drop L2 German.- Section II Language acquisition under specific conditions.- Wimmer, Eva, Bernadette Witecy and Martina Penke, Syntactic problems in German individuals with Down syndrome: evidence from the production of wh-questions.- Herbert, Marjorieand Acrisio Pires, Contact signing and English-based production among L1 and L2 deaf ASL-English bilinguals.- Müller, Natascha and Abira Sivakumar-Thiyagarajah, Acquiring three languages from birth: It does matter.- Section III First language.- Ito, Masuyo and Kenneth Wexler, Maximality trouble? Japanese-speaking children’s interpretation of comparatives.- Agostinho, Celina and Anna Gavarró, The acquisition of implicit control in European Portuguese.- De Villiers, Jill, Jessica Kotfila, and Tom Roeper, When is recursion easier for children?.- Sicuro Correa, Letícia Maria,  On the domain specificity of intervention effects in children’s comprehension of relative clauses and coordinate clauses.- Bosch, Jasmijn, Shalom Zuckermann and Manuela Pinto, The acquisition of ‘bridging’ tested in a coloring task.- Roeper, Tom, Jennifer Rau, Dagmar Bittner, Nadine Balbach, Milena Kuehnast, Presuppositions, implicatures, and repair emerge slowly.- Smeets, Liz and Luisa Meroni, Stress or context for the computation of scalar implicatures.

This book presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art treatment of the acquisition of Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in various contexts, such as L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual, heritage languages, pathology as well as language impairment, and sign language acquisition. The book explores a broad mix of methodologies and issues in contemporary research. The text presents original research from several different perspectives, and provides a basis for dialogue between researchers working on diverse projects with the aim of furthering our understanding of how languages are acquired.  The book proposes and refines new theoretical constructs, e.g. regarding the complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adults’ and bilingual individuals’ acquisition of morphological, syntactic, discursive, pragmatic, lexical and phonological structures.  It appeals to students, researchers, and professionals in the field.

Discusses the challenge of traditional accounts of language acquisition Presents new thoughts on the acquisition of linguistic phenomena in (Non)-Indo-European languages Includes contributions on how linguistic features are represented in the brain during the acquisition process