Language Acquisition Books - Page 4

Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan Village (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language)

Elinor Ochs

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Editorial Review:

While children are learning to become competent members of their society, they are also learning to become competent speakers of their language, ie socialization and language acquisition take place at the same time in a child's experience. This book explores the interaction of these two processes.

The Handbook of Child Language (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics)

Paul Fletcher

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Editorial Review:

This volume, containing 25 papers on normal and non-normal language development, is an up-to-date complete sourcebook on child language development. All aspects of child's language development are addressed, including phonetics, phonology, grammar and lexical development. Connectionism and government-binding theory, as applied to development, are fully represented. The relevance of input, cognition and social factors to language development is explored. Chapters on methodology, particularly using computer databases, are provided for both normal and non-normal acquisition. Each topic is handled by a leading scholar.

Aping Language (Themes in the Social Sciences)

Joel Wallman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Student 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I've used this book to base presentations on ape-language research at university seminars. Having read every work that I that know of that partians to the subject, I believe there quite simply is no more comprehensive review of the research in one single book. One who is interested in the evolutionary origins of language will be offered an excellent start by reading Wallman's chapter on the history of the ape-language controversy. The rest of your investigation will unfold from there. Overall, I would highly recommend this work to anyone whom seeks to achieve a foothold in the literiture.

Editorial Review:

This book is a critique of the experiments of recent years that tried to teach language to apes. The achievements of these animals are compared with the natural development of language, both spoken and signed forms, in children. It is argued that the apes in these studies acquired merely crude simulations of language rather than language itself and that there is no good evidence that apes can acquire a language. A survey of the communication systems of apes and monkeys in nature finds that these systems differ from language in profound ways--language is a uniquely human attribute.

An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics)

Stephen Crain, Diane Lillo-Martin

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Editorial Review:

Directed towards general introductory linguistics courses, as well as courses in language acquisition, this textbook introduces the fundamentals of syntax and semantics in generative grammar and applies them to the study of child language. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, it represents the theory of Universal Grammar and shows how the theory has proved helpful in understanding the process of language acquisition. Edited by two of the foremost researchers in the field, the book benefits from their insight into conceptual issues, their understanding of experimentation, and their own pioneering research.

Learning to be Literate: The Development of Spoken and Written Language

Alison F. Garton, Chris Pratt

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Editorial Review:

The second edition of this successful book describes and explains the development of children's spoken and written language. Drawing on both classical and recent research studies, the processes whereby literacy is achieved during the period from infancy to about 8 years of age are traced. The authors emphasize the importance of early experiences with language in relation to later developments of literacy, highlighting the connections between learning to talk and learning to read and write.

Garton and Pratt argue that the social contexts within which talking, reading and writing are learned are essential for the development of literacy. Theoretical positions and research studies that support the argument are discussed, to provide a broad contextual framework. Early chapters describe the processes of spoken language development and the theoretical explanations put forward to account for them. Subsequent chapters discuss the development of reading and writing, as well as theoretical connections between spoken and written language development.

Uncommon Understanding: Development and Disorders of Language Comprehension in Children

Dorothy Bishop

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Editorial Review:

Discusses the comprehension process of children with specific language impairments. Emphasis on research and theory. Provides a theoretical framework for clinicians.

Children's Early Text Construction

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Editorial Review:

This text provides English-language readers with updated versions of papers presented at an international workshop on children's early text construction held in Rome. They covers such issues as the relationship between acquisition of language and familiarity with written texts.

What's Whole in Whole Language

Kenneth S. Goodman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Inspirational book! 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 13 people found this review helpful.

After reading this book, it is easy to see why WL was rapidly becoming a grassroots movement amongst US teachers ntil the textbook publishing companies realized that they were about to loose out on a major market share. (Don't believe it, then why are the states of California and Texas mandating curriculum to teachers? California and Texas represent a lion's share of the market. So, if you can't get teachers to buy the garbage you produce, you just manipulate the machinery to have the government shove it down their throats. So what if kids are dissed in the process?) So much of what this book has to offer is nothing more than good sense. Most any teacher that has spent more than 20 minutes in a classroom with students would agree.

Another Excellent Book for Teachers! 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This book provides teachers with the resources and information to help children learn to read effectively. A must for any good teacher's library.

Normal and Disordered Phonology in Children (Child Language Acquisition Series)

Carol Stoel-Gammon, Carla Dunn

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Learnability in Optimality Theory

Bruce Tesar, Paul Smolensky

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Highlighting the close relationship between linguistic explanation and learnability, Bruce Tesar and Paul Smolensky examine the implications of Optimality Theory (OT) for language learnability. They show how the core principles of OT lead to the learning principle of constraint demotion, the basis for a family of algorithms that infer constraint rankings from linguistic forms.

Of primary concern to the authors are the ambiguity of the data received by the learner and the resulting interdependence of the core grammar and the structural analysis of overt linguistic forms. The authors argue that iterative approaches to interdependencies, inspired by work in statistical learning theory, can be successfully adapted to address the interdependencies of language learning. Both OT and Constraint Demotion play critical roles in their adaptation. The authors support their findings both formally and through simulations. They also illustrate how their approach could be extended to other language learning issues, including subset relations and the learning of phonological underlying forms.