Book Notice

[Michael Tomasello]

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Book Notice
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Language Development: The Essential Readings
Blackwell, $39.95 US paperback

Michael Tomasello & Elizabeth Bates (Eds)


Language development is an extraordinarily active subfield in the
cognitive sciences, with a long history and a bright future.  Research
on child language is an interdisciplinary enterprise, uniting the
efforts of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, educators,
neuroscientists and health practicioners.  Selection of representative
readings from such a large and well-established field is no easy
matter.  To respond to this challenge, Tomasello & Bates have emphasized
recent papers (including some that were updated or commissioned for this
volume) that illustrate the contribution of child language research to
developmental cognitive science.  Essential works on the major
milestones of language development are provided (on speech perception in
the first year, vocabulary development in the second and third year, and
the full flowering of grammar), followed by tutorials that emphasize the
neural substrates of language development, computational models of
language learning, and the proper interpretation of genetic
contributions to developmental language disorders.  Although the authors
of the papers chosen for this volume represent a broad spectrum of
theoretical perspectives, there is a deliberate bias in favor of an
interactive approach.  The volume is designed to avoid jargon and
in-group technicalities, and should be accessible to advanced
undergraduates, graduate students and research scientists within the
many disciplines that participate in cognitive science.


0.  General Introduction

1. Introduction to Speech Perception

1.0  Introduction

1.1.  Peter W. Jusczyk. Finding and Remembering Words: Some Beginnings
by English-Learning
Infants.  Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1997, Volume 6,
170-174

1.2.  Janet F. Werker and Renée N. Desjardins. Listening to Speech in
the 1st Year of Life:
Experiential Influences on Phoneme Perception. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 1995,
Volume 4, 76-81.

1.3.  Franck Ramus, Marc D. Hauser, Cory Miller, Dylan Morris, Jacques
Mehler. Language
Discrimination by Human Newborns and by Coton-Top Tamarin Monkeys.
Science, 2000, Volume
288, 349-351

1.4.  R. L. Gómez and L. A. Gerken. Infant artificial language learning
and language acquisition.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2000, 4, 178.186

1.5.  Anne Fernald, John P. Pinto, Daniel Swingley, Amy Weinberg, and
Gerald W. McRoberts. Rapid
Gains in Speed of Verbal Processing by Infants in the 2nd Year.
Psychological Science, 1998, Volume
9, 228-231


2. Inrroduction to Word Learning

2.0.  Introduction

2.1.  Helen I. Shwe and Ellen M. Markman. Young Children’s Appreciation
of the Mental Impact of
Their Communicative Signals.  Developmental Psychology, 1997, Volume 33,
630-636

2.2.  Maria Cristina Caselli et al. Lexical Development in English and
Italian.  Cognitive
Development, 1995

2.3.  Michael Tomasello. Perceiving Intentions an Learning Words in the
Second Year of Life.  In:
M.Bowerman and S. Levinson (Eds.), Language Acquisition and Conceptual
Development, 2000,
Cambridge University Press

2.4.  Lori Markson and Paul Bloom. Evidence Against a Dedicated System
for Word Learning in
Children.  Nature, 1997, Volume 385, 813-815

2.5.  Elizabeth Bates, Judith C. Goodman. On the Inseparability of
Grammar and the Lexicon:
Evidence from Acquisition, Aphasia and Real-Time Processing.  Language
and Cognitive Processes,
1997, 507-584


3. Introduction to Grammtical Development

3.0.  Introduction

3.1.  Michael Tomasello. The Item-Based Nature of Children’s Early
Syntactic Development.. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences, 2000, Volume 4, 156-163

3.2.  Nameera Akhtar. Acquiring Basic Word Order: Evidence for
Data-Driven Learning of Syntactic
Structure.  Journal of Child Language, 1999, Volume 26, 339-356

3.3.  Klaus-Michael Koepcke. The Acquisition of Plural Marking in
English and German Revisited:
Schemata Versus Rules.  Journal of Child Language, 1998, Volume 25,
293-319

3.4.  Nancy Budwig. An Exploration Into Children’s Use of Passives.
Linguistics, 1990, Volume 28,
1221-1252

3.5.  Lois Bloom, Matthew Rispoli, Barbara Gartner, and Jeremie Hafitz.
Acquisition of
Complementation. Journal of Child Language, 1989, Volume 16, 101-120

3.6.  Dan I. Slobin. Form/Function Relations: How Do Children Find Out
What They Are?.  In:
M.Bowerman and S. Levinson (Eds.), Language Acquisition and Conceptual
Development, 2000,
Cambridge University Press


4. Brain, Genes, & Computation in Language Development

4.0.  Introduction

4.1.  Jeffrey. L. Elman. Connectionism and Language Acquisition.

4.2.  Barbara Clancy and Barbara Finlay. Neural Correlelates of Early
Language Learning.
Excerpted from: E. Bates, D. Thal, B.L. Finlay, and B. Clancy.  Early
Language Development and its
Neural Correlates (in press) Early Language Development and its Neural
Correlates To appear in I.
Rapin and S. Segalowitz (Eds.), Handbook of Neuropsychology, Volume 6,
Child Neurology (2nd
edition). Amsterdam: Elsevier

4.3.  Annette Karmiloff-Smith. Development Itself Is the Key to
Understanding Developmental
Disorders.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1998, Volume 2, 389-398