Overview

Progressing gradually from babbling to meaningful sentences is something most babies do naturally. But why is that? What gives infants this remarkable capacity, and what in the world - or in the mind itself - inclines a child to speak? John Locke's answer constitutes a 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. As Locke shows, the first steps are inseparably perceptual and social. Because infants have a deep biological need to interact emotionally with the people who love and care for them, they study the movements of faces and voices and begin to reproduce these behaviours themselves. Locke retraces these steps as they lead to the development of the vocal, neural, and cognitive capabilities essential to language. He also shows how infants participate in this process, eliciting and structuring the social and linguistic stimulation they need for learning speech. To distinguish what comes naturally from what must be taught, Locke also considers language in a larger biological context. He examines comparative data on non-human primates and songbirds and looks at special human populations, including deaf, blind, autistic, brain damaged, and tracheostomized infants. This biolinguistic approach aims to raise questions about the evolution of linguistic capacity in the species.

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"In a fascinating, scholarly and clearly written account, [Locke] takes us to the brink of language proper by examining its perceptual, social, neural and cognitive precursors from before birth to the appearance of the first recognizable words.--Paul Fletcher ""Nature "" John Locke attempts to bring together a wide range of findings from infancy research in order to explore links between early development and the emergence of language...[and] provides authoritative and extremely clear summaries of relevant research...Locke has gone a good way towards charting the territory of a very important area and it is an essential read for those who are concerned with development in infancy.--Margaret Harris ""British Journal of Developmental Psychology "" Locke reminds us that language learning occurs in the very real context of physical and social maturation and that children are neither little linguists nor experimental subjects in the laboratory. Researchers approaching the problem of language acquisition from different perspectives should welcome his contribution.--Nan Bernstein Ratner ""Science """

John Locke attempts to bring together a wide range of findings from infancy research in order to explore links between early development and the emergence of language...[and] provides authoritative and extremely clear summaries of relevant research...Locke has gone a good way towards charting the territory of a very important area and it is an essential read for those who are concerned with development in infancy. -- Margaret Harris British Journal of Developmental Psychology

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