Foundations -- The history of child language studies -- The period of diary studies (1876-1926) -- The period of large sample studies (1926-1957) -- The period of longitudinal language sampling (1957 to present) -- Stages of language acquisition -- Some possible meanings of 'stage' -- Some proposals on stages of acquisition -- Descriptive vs. explanatory stage -- Explanation and language acquisition -- Child Language vs. Language Acquisition -- A theory of acquisition -- Theoretical assumptions about language acquisition -- Sources of variation among children -- Milestones -- The period of prelinguistic development -- Infant speech perception -- Infant speech production -- Early cognitive development -- The linguistic environment -- The period of single-word utterances -- The definition of word acquisition -- Early word comprehension and production -- The explanation of early word meaning -- Pragmatic and grammatical development -- The onset of phonemic perception and production -- The linguistic environment -- The period of the first word combinations -- Defining the period of the first word combinations -- Grammatical development: an overview -- The grammatical analysis of early word combinations -- Current theoretical approaches -- The methodology of grammatical analyses of children -- The period of simple sentences: phonological and semantic acquisition -- The phonological acquisition of single morphemes -- The further development of word meaning -- The period of simple sentences: acquisition of grammatical morphemes.