The Child's Path to Spoken Language

Progressing gradually from babbling to meaningful sentences is something most babies do naturally. But why do they? John Locke's answer constitutes a fascinating journey along the path of language development, a tour that takes in all the stops--neurological and perceptual, social and linguistic--that mark the way to intelligible speech. A major synthesis of the latest research on early language acquisition, this volume revises the way we understand ourselves and our approach to speech.