Abstract
Learning a native language is an accomplishment within the grasp of any toddler, yet discovering how children do it has eluded generations of philosophers and linguists. I would like to take this opportunity to ask anew some puzzling questions about what it is, beyond a splendid nervous system, that makes it possible for the young child to acquire language so swiftly and so effortlessly. Perhaps they are no longer puzzling questions save to those of us who have spent a great deal of time working and brooding over whether the acquisition of knowledge about the social world and about the world generally is in some sense constitutive of language.
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Bruner, J. (1985). The Role of Interaction Formats in Language Acquisition. In: Forgas, J.P. (eds) Language and Social Situations. Springer Series in Social Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5074-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5074-6_2
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