Preface

I have been teaching courses on language acquisition for about 25 years and have developed a take on the field that is not perfectly reflected in the existing stock of otherwise excellent books. But I’ve also been either too busy or too lazy to try to write my own. As a result, my courses involve a lot of reading of primary literature, with lectures providing a kind of frame within which I encourage students to understand that literature. But, as a result, there is no clear record of what I take to be the important concepts for students of language acquisition to master, and it is easy for students to understand the literature in a piecemeal fashion that doesn’t connect the material into a coherent whole. In 2019, I was fortunate enough to have Tyler Knowlton as my TA for my language acquisition course. As it happens, Tyler is a magnificent note-taker, in addition to being a deep and careful thinker. The solution to my laziness thus presented itself in the form of Tyler’s notes. The notes were so good that they could serve as first drafts of the chapters. From there, of course, a lot of work had to happen, but as I tell my students, it is much easier to edit than to write. So, over the past several years, Tyler and I have been turning those initial notes into actual writing. In the meantime, of course, Tyler had a dissertation to finish, papers of his own to publish, postdoctoral positions to apply for, etc. And despite all of these other things on his plate, he continued to work on further writing, editing, and graphics. Tyler has a real gift for boiling down problems to their essence. This gift has really served the book well, and it would probably never have existed were it not for Tyler’s mix of hard work, enthusiasm, unflappability, and good taste.