Child's Path to Spoken Language - Couverture rigide

Locke, John L.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0674116402 ISBN 13 : 9780674116405

Editeur : Harvard University Press, 1993

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Progressing gradually from babbling to meaningful sentences is something most babies do naturally. But why do they? John Locke's answer constitutes a fascinating 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. A major synthesis of the latest research on early language acquisition, this volume revises the way we understand ourselves and our approach to speech.

Biographie de l'auteur

John L. Locke is Lecturer on Neurology, Harvard Medical School. He is Director of the Neurolinguistics Laboratory and of the Graduate Program in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date d'édition: 1993
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0674116402
• ISBN 13: 9780674116405
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 530
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible