Child language: Acquisition and development (review)

This up-to-date and engaging textbook includes ten chapters, author and subject indices, end-of-book references, and a glossary of boldfaced terms. Targeting primarily psychology students, its glossary emphasizes linguistic concepts. Many individual entries are impressive for their examples and lack of circularity. Themes running through the book include the nature-nurture debate, mismatches between comprehension and production, individual variation, and methodological issues. Chapters include boxes with supplementary material that link clearly to the main text and slip in extras. The quality of the exercises is generally high; more (even some without answers) would be desirable. Some chapters include discussion points for use during class. Each chapter starts with an overview of important concepts and the chapter's organization; chapter summaries echo and expand overviews. Chapters end with generally well-chosen suggestions for further reading and websites that relate to the preceding chapter.

In many such textbooks, the first chapter is a grueling mini-course on linguistics. But Saxton's first chapter, 'Prelude: Landmarks in the landscape of child language', is gentle (e.g. a word-categorizing exercise), eye-catching (e.g. a section on neonate perception entitled 'The cat in the hat in the womb'), and amusing (e.g. the newborn's repertoire of sounds like fussing and burping 'is lent some charm at about eight weeks, with the emergence of cooing and laughter' (2)). Shortcuts like referring to morphology as 'bits of meaning encoded in the grammar' (4) are unpacked and clarified later (but table 1.1 should have contrasted flower with something like grower). This chapter is thoroughly grounded in language development, and it will not alienate the less analytically inclined. Its clear and frequent references to future chapters are effective.

Ch. 2, 'Can animals acquire human language? Shakespeare's typewriter', trots out the usual primates. Beginning with Charles Hockett's design features for human language (Hockett 1963, Hockett & Altmann 1968), S emphasizes four of them (surprisingly, not duality of patterning): creativity, semanticity, arbitrariness, and displacement. For example, creativity supports discussion of the natural systems of humans and other animals. Moving to artificial systems, the dog Rico illustrates fast mapping and the parrot Alex training on object labels. S omitted research with Alex that seems more relevant to child language. Shown an array of objects differing in shape, color, and matter, Alex could choose the 'red square' or 'wood car'. He could also answer 'none' to questions like 'how many blue blocks?'. The categorical and combinatorial skills in these behaviors were noteworthy, as was his use of a zero-like concept.

Ch. 3 addresses 'The critical period hypothesis: Now or never?' with details from comparative and cognitive psychology. Experiments on visual perception in cats lead to questions of good science, both in research design and ethics. Feral and isolated children come next, with inflectional morphemes reemphasized via Genie's lack of them. Exercises introduce word order and distinctions between content and function words. The chapter furthers the student's definition of language with consideration of populations learning languages like American Sign Language.

Ch. 4, 'Input and interaction: Tutorials for toddlers', addresses child-directed speech (CDS). Unfortunately, S lists other terms for this register rather than characteristics of CDS (unlike with Hockett's features). But a list of characteristics might note which patterns also occur in adult-directed speech (e.g. fewer disfluencies in shorter utterances; subjects of sentences tend to be agents). The chapter has little about functions of particular features, and the link to grammatical considerations is weak. However, S's goal is to challenge the 'no negative evidence' claim associated with nativism. This is one of the few conceptual weaknesses of the book, as S interprets the claim to be essentially empirical. The comparison between B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky made in this chapter is especially interesting because S challenges common assumptions about their positions.

What S includes in Ch. 5, 'Language in the first year: Breaking the second barrier', on sounds is well chosen (e.g. individual differences, segmentation), but there are some gaps. He...