Child Language (review)

The original edition of this workbook, published six years ago, aimed to provide a hands-on approach to the study of the linguistic abilities of children at different ages and was primarily intended for readers with little or no linguistic background. Therefore, linguistic terminology was kept to a minimum, and keywords are introduced only if absolutely necessary. The new edition contains more exercises and has an expanded corpus of child language data at the end of the book. Also new to the second edition are unit summaries. The book is true to the mission of the series of which it is a part: Everything is kept simple, yet a section entitled ‘Further Reading’ at the end of the workbook provides suggested background reading at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced level.

The core of the book is spread over ten units covering the basic techniques involved in examining children’s acquisition of word meanings, sentence structure, word formation processes, conversation skills, and pronunciation patterns. At the beginning of each unit, the author provides some practical information. Then she guides the reader through some exercises that are based on the corpus of child-language data in the appendix of the book. Some exercises require an analysis of these data while others are designed to give the reader the practical linguistic skills needed for the type of analysis that is required. Peccei invites her readers to complete each exercise on their own before reading the comment section in which a solution is offered and in which she embarks on a further discussion of the topic under consideration. At the end of each unit, she provides more exercises, some of which have answers at the end of the workbook.

In Unit 11, the author presents eighteen small research projects that the reader can carry out and provides some guidelines to follow when working with children. Not all of her projects require access to a child. These projects may stimulate readers to be creative and to design their own projects, too. In the last unit, we find a very brief treatment of theoretical approaches to language acquisition. I would recommend this book as a workbook to accompany a textbook in an introductory course on language acquisition.