How Children Learn Language

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.

• Written in an accessible style and assumes no knowledge of linguistics, so accessible to the general reader and to parents with young children • Deals comprehensively with all the major phenomena involved in language development: sounds, words, meanings and structure • Draws on the latest research in the field, giving readers an appreciation not just of ‘what’ we know about language acquisition, but ‘how’ we know it

1. Small talk; 2. The great word hunt; 3. What’s the meaning of this?; 4. Words all in a row; 5. What sentences mean; 6. Talking the talk; 7. How do they do it?; Appendix 1. Keeping a diary and making a tape of recordings; Appendix 2. The sounds of English.