This course addresses fundamental issues in developmental linguistics. We will examine data about children’s language acquisition through the lenses of learning and linguistic competence. Key topics to be covered include: The Poverty of the Stimulus and Universal Grammar; Associationist vs. hypothesis driven theories of learning; The role of direct, implicit and indirect negative evidence; Differences between input and intake; Bootstrapping theories and cross-domain inference; and, The role of extralinguistic cogntive and information capacities in language acquisition. Phenomena to be examined include word learning, grammatical categories, phrase structure, grammatical dependencies and quantification.