Research on creolization, language change over time, and language acquisition has been converging toward a triangulation of the constraints along which grammatical systems develop within individual speakers - and (viewed externally) across generations of speakers.

The originality of this volume is in its comparison of various sorts of language growth from a number of linguistic-theoretic and empirical perspectives, using data from both speech and gestural modalities and from a diversity of acquisition environments. In turn, this comparison yields fresh insights on the mental bases of language creation.