This review of children's language learning considers historical accounts of acquisition and individual variation, recent advances in methods for studying language learning, research on genetic and environmental input that have contributed to the interactionist perspective, and the relevance of cross-disciplinary work on language disorders and the biology of learning to future theories. It concludes that the study of children's language development is converging on an interactionist perspective of how children learn to talk, incorporating the contributions of both nature and nurture to emergent, functional language systems. Language learning is viewed as an integration of learning in multiple domains.