Born to Talk: An Introduction to Speech and Language Development

This authoritative introduction to language development offers a stage-by-stage description of how human speech and language are acquired over the course of the early childhood years, and how they are changed and diversified by the influences of gender, geography, and culture. Rather than discuss speech and language components as separate, individual elements, these authors strive to give readers a real-time sense of speech acquisition and language growth as it happens, at every stage of development. They organize information on morphology, syntax, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics around general stages of language development as described by Roger Brown...thus emphasizing the integration and interaction of components, rather than their individual characteristics. The book explores similarities and differences between human speech and the communication systems of other species, discusses the anatomy and physiology of the physical speech mechanism, and addresses the nature of communication disorders. Conversational and friendly, the book's writing style and generous use of examples make it exceptional, reader-friendly, and accessible to readers who have no previous background in either linguistics or speech-language pathology.