Intended as an introduction to psycholinguistics from the linguist's point of view, this book addresses itself to three main topics: the innateness of language, the relationship of linguistic knowledge to language usage, and the comprehension and production of speech. In 12 chapters, the book discusses the nature of language development, the language process of animals, biological evidence for innate language capacity and the stages of language acquisition, the nature of innate grammatical information, the rules which govern child language, the basic structure of child language, transformational grammar and its role in speech, and the encoding and decoding process involved in speech and comprehension. The book provides numerous illustrations and examples, offers notes and suggestions for further reading, and lists 11 pages of references. (MAI)