Introduction. Language acquisition and cognitive science at the crossroads

The articles compiled in this volume provide an account of current research in "core" areas in the field of language acquisition (primary, secondary and bilingual) and suggest new avenues of research and ways of approaching the relationship between the theories and methodologies. Within the framework of cognitive sciences, specifically linguistics and psycholinguistics, the articles investigate language acquisition from four different dimensions: processing and lexical access, the prosody-pragmatics interface, the discourse-syntax interface and language impairment (so-called specific language impairment). Using data from four Romance languages - Catalan, French, Portuguese and Spanish these articles address state-of-the-art issues pertaining to the relationship between language acquisition and other cognitive modules.