Product Description

Adults tend to take language for granted - until they have to learn a new one. Then they realize how difficult it is to get the pronunciation right, to acquire the meaning of thousands of new words, and to learn how those words are put together to form sentences. Children, however, have mastered language before they can tie their shoes. In this engaging and accessible book, William O’Grady explains how this happens, discussing how children learn to produce and distinguish among sounds, their acquisition of words and meanings, and their mastery of the rules for building sentences. How Children Learn Language provides readers with a highly readable overview not only of the language acquisition process itself, but also of the ingenious experiments and techniques that researchers use to investigate his mysterious phenomenon. It will be of great interest to anyone - parent or student - wishing to find out how children acquire language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #179727 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

Review
"The strength of this wonderful literary production lies in its simple and illustrative manner and how the author makes the research information reported here accessible to parents, students, and other people who are not in the field."
Maria C. Gomis, Childhood Education

"How Children Learn Language is a small but masterful introduction to research findings concerning language development. It is also an interesting read. Besides being well written, the book is adequately and relevantly illustrated and includes a bibliography of close to 300 works, most quite recent, but many of which are reports of important earlier research." PsycCritiques Lowell Brubaker

About the Author
William O’Grady is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii.

Customer Reviews

Good, but with a misleading title
This book exclusively deals with the issue of how children learn 'English'. Unfortunately, you won't notice this point until you finish reading this book, because either the table of contents or the first chapter doesn't tell you about that. The theses made in this book might apply to languages other than English, but it's tempting to assume that it is not the case. Although the author sporadically refers to the case of other languages, which serves primarily to spell out the case of English, he mention almost nothing about whether his theses are still applicable to other languages. The author may well have neglected the difference of learning different languages. That's why I think that the book title might have misled readers.

Apart from the matter of book title, it's still a good read for parents or those who will become parents in the not-to-distant future. Students, who are interested in linguistics or learning foreign languages, may well find something inspiring in this book.