The Mirror of Language: The Debate on Bilingualism

o appreciate the nature of this con- of child language research, into the heady T tribution by Dan Slobin, we need to days of the 1960s. These were the days step back at least 20 years into the historv when the empiricist account of language CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY, 1988, Vol. 33, No. 7 acquisition and behavior had been dealt a lcthal blow in the form or Cltonisky’s (1959) classic review ofskinner’s (1957) Verbal Behnuior: Most significantly for the new generation of developmental psy-cholinguists, a revolution-very much in the sense of Thomas Kuhn-had oc-curred in the field of linguistics, resulting in a parallel new agenda for the study of child language. The aspect of the new linguistic agenda that most tantalized the developmental