Children's Language Revised Edition Consensus and Controversy [Paperback]

The popular notion of how children come to speak their first language is that their parents teach them words, then phrases, then sentences, then longer utterances. Although there is widespread agreement amongst linguists that this account is wrong, there is much less agreement as to how children really learn language. This revised edition of Ray Cattell's bestselling textbook aims to give readers the background necessary to form their own views on the debate, and includes accessible summaries of key thinkers, including Chomsky, Halliday, Karmiloff-Smith and Piaget.

1. Getting started with language2. Starting to make progress 3. Do we teach children to speak?: B F Skinner and behaviourism 4. Learning through touching and feeling: Jean Piaget 5. What goes on in the mind?: Noam Chomsky and mentalism6. A close look at Chomsky's theories 7. Do we help children to speak?: 'Motherese' or child-directed speech 8. Learning how to mean: Michael Halliday 9. The two hemispheres of the brain: their functions in relation to language10. The two hemispheres of the brain: modern discoveries 11. The bounds of language acquisition 12. Animals and language 13. New knowledge about infant knowledge 14. Bootstrapping in vocabulary15. The best of both worlds?: The work of Annette Karmiloff-Smith 16. Conclusion Glossary