Clifton Pye is associate professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas, where he studies the crosslinguistic language acquisition among indigenous languages of the Americas with a primary interest in the acquisition of the verb complex.
"This is an important book, exemplifying a novel approach that Pye has been developing and refining for twenty years. Pye's thesis is that if one wants to understand how children learn their first language, it is not sufficient to study the acquisition of just one language in isolation--the study needs to be comparative, and to show how children adapt their learning strategies in relation to the structure of the language being learned. And further, he argues that the best way of doing this is to study several related languages, so that it is possible to establish precise cross-language equivalences of the morphemes, words, and syntactic structures being compared. All scholars of child first language acquisition should find this book of interest, partly for the methodological challenges it poses, and partly also for Pye's findings for three Mayan languages, which are of major theoretical significance. This is an original contribution that presents a strong challenge to the predominant paradigm for studying how children learn language."--Penelope Brown, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
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