How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years

That children learn to speak so skillfully at a young age has long fascinated adults. Most children virtually master their native tongue even before learning to tie their shoelaces. The ability to acquire language has historically been regarded as a "gift"—a view given scientific foundation only in the present century by Noam Chomsky's theory of "universal grammar," which posits an innate knowledge of the principles that structure all languages.

In this delightful, accessible book, psycholinguist Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies presents a broad picture of language development, from fetal development to the toddler years, and examines a wide range of puzzling questions: How do newborns recognize elements of speech? How do they distinguish them from nonspeech sounds? How do they organize and analyze them? How do they ultimately come to understand and reproduce these sounds? Finally, how does the ability to communicate through language emerge in children? Boysson-Bardies also addresses questions of particular interest to parents, such as whether one should speak to children in a special way to facilitate language learning and whether there is cause to worry when a twenty-month-old child does not yet speak. Although the author provides a clear summary of the current state of language acquisition theory, the special appeal of the book lies in her research and "dialogue" with her many young subjects.

Some say that children should be seen and not heard, but it turns out that might not be for the best. Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies, director of research in the Experimental Psychology Laboratory at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, goes beyond folk wisdom to tell the real story in How Language Comes to Children. Her 20 years of experience conducting research on young children's language acquisition shine through on each page, as her writing (and Malcolm DeBevoise's expert translation) perfectly captures the essence of the data and why it should be important to caretakers.

Did you know that a fetus in the womb can differentiate sounds and voices with delicate sensitivity? That cultural differences strongly influence how--and whether--mothers hear their children's first words? Modern linguistic theory tells us that we are all born with the pre-programmed capacity to learn language, but that our early experiences fill in the details of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. How we get from wailing at 2 a.m. to gossiping over coffee at 10 a.m. is all the more intriguing for the wildly different (but parallel) paths we all take to get there. How Language Comes to Children is a fantastically engaging field guide to everyone's first journey. --Rob Lightner