How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years (review)

In trying to define what makes us human, we often point to a trait unique to our species: our capacity to acquire language. What is remarkable about language is its universality; every normal child learns to talk, and only extreme circumstances can hinder the development of this capacity. No less impressive is the ease, rapidity, and uniformity with which all children acquire language in spite of the considerable latitude in their linguistic and cultural experience. Nevertheless, these observations often conspire to mask our appreciation of how spectacular an accomplishment language acquisition really is. After all, what can be so hard about something that happens so naturally?

In How language comes to children, Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies skillfully conveys the sense of awe inspired by infants’ linguistic accomplishments. Human infants are indeed gifted creatures, but what is the nature of this gift? What role does the environment play in its development? What do children know before they talk, and what do they absorb from the speech of others? These are the central questions that B sets out to investigate in her book, following infants from birth until around age 2 when they produce their first sentences, ‘an attempt to show how the initial capacities possessed by all human beings are organized in successive and definite stages by which the infants becomes a speaking subject’ (11).

This book is a clear and authoritative guide to early language acquisition well-suited to an audience from a wide variety of backgrounds, from students of psycholinguistics and related disciplines to parents and general readers with an interest in language and its development. What makes this book particularly attractive is that it is one of only a handful of texts to offer a picture of language development which is broad in scope and lucid while at the same time remaining highly accessible. The material is well-organized and the text, written in a clear and engaging style, contains numerous well-chosen examples, diagrams, and illustrations. The book also contains a number of useful and original features such as a glossary (227–38) providing a list and a succinct definition of the technical terms and concepts used throughout the text. Another feature that I found particularly useful is the summary, in Appendix A (217–20), of ‘The principal stages in the development of speech from before birth to two years’ arranged in the form of a chronological table listing babies’ perceptual and productive abilities at different stages in development. Also, Appendix B (221–23) provides the International Phonetic Alphabet, another useful feature especially for the less phonetically inclined.

Part of the originality and appeal of this book comes from B’s emphasis on issues too often neglected in other accounts such as individual and cross-linguistic differences in developmental patterns. In fact, B devotes a whole chapter to each of these themes: Ch. 6, ‘To each baby his own style’, and Ch. 7, ‘Languages, cultures and children’. Another important aspect of the book is its advocacy of the experimental method as an illuminating tool in the study of developmental psycholinguistics and, also, its detailed discussion of the various techniques used by psycholinguistics to assess children’s developing linguistic knowledge. Throughout, and especially in Chs. 2 and 6, B manages to adroitly integrate some of her own findings and observations into the body of the text without disrupting its natural progression.

The only minor criticism that I would make is that on a few occasions appropriate references are missing, as for example in the introduction, ‘Of course, the claim that language is modular has resolute adversaries. For them, . . .’(7) where these recalcitrant minds remain unnamed, although one may have some suspicions as to their identity. Nor are we told, in Ch. 8, about those psycholinguists who have proposed that ‘children...