San Antonio College Library

"According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, and appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways." "This book requires no background...

Between early childhood and adulthood, language acquisition is succeeded by a bloom of repertoire for managing interaction, a growing sensitivity to the relation of language and society, an expanding ability to wield power through the strategic use of language, and an increasing sophistication in framing speech activities. This book examines a wide range of language practices among school-age children and teenagers, using data from naturally occurring...

Altmann describes - in terms accessible to the non-specialist reader - the ways in which the mind produces and understands language, and the state-of-the-art of our understanding of the mental processes which underlie our use of language.

For many years, Roger Brown and his colleagues have studied the developing language of pre-school children--the language that ultimately will permit them to understand themselves and the world around them. This longitudinal research project records the conversational performances of three children, studying both semantic and grammatical aspects of their language development. The five stages of linguistic development Brown establishes are measured...