The acquisition of the ability to understand the meaning of words (semantics) and to use them in ways that are grammatically correct (synthetics) relative to a child‚was linguistic environment. In general, there are two features of this process: the production and reception of language, with the latter developing in advance of the former, and perhaps even starting in utero. Once the first words become evident, subsequent development consists of word perfection involving relating predicates to arguments. Theories of language development tend to be divided between treating language as a ‘special gift’ (i.e., innate) or as something that has emergent properties.
See Arguments (grammar), Babbling drift, Bilinguals, Clicks, Closed class words, Co-occurrence learning, Conventional word, Copula, Developmental bootstrapping, Diachronic emergence, Double object nouns, Emergence, Grammaticization (or grammaticalization) Innate (1), Handedness (bimanual versus unimanual), Mutual gaze, On-line emergence, Opaque orthographies, Open-class words, Overgeneralization, Pleonastic extensions, Predicates (grammar), Proper noun, Psycholinguistics, Reading comprehension, Scaffolding, Semantic bootstrapping, Semantics, Special gift, Speech development, Syntactic bootstrapping, Syntax, Undergeneralization