How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)

Rating:
Summary: What a great book!
Review: I have a two year old and a newborn. This topic is of immediate interest to me. But this isn't why I bought it.

As a product designer I wanted to gain some perspective on how we acquire language in the first place and found most of the documentation weak. Then I found this book.

I realy enjoyed reading it. I left my copy on the plane on a trip overseas and was greatly disapointed by the airlines failure to recover it (I sure hope the cleaning crew enjoyed it!). So I bought another copy immediately and continued reading.

One of my favorite books this year.

Rating:
Summary: What a great book!
Review: I have a two year old and a newborn. This topic is of immediate interest to me. But this isn't why I bought it.

As a product designer I wanted to gain some perspective on how we acquire language in the first place and found most of the documentation weak. Then I found this book.

I realy enjoyed reading it. I left my copy on the plane on a trip overseas and was greatly disapointed by the airlines failure to recover it (I sure hope the cleaning crew enjoyed it!). So I bought another copy immediately and continued reading.

One of my favorite books this year.

Rating:
Summary: A Marvelous and Readable Synthesis
Review: This book is a marvelous synthesis of research, by the author, his students, and many others, on how children learn the meanings of words. It makes clear why learning the meanings of words is a difficult task requiring explication, which is not immediately obvious, and then presents a great deal of evidence bearing on how it is done. As someone accustomed to reading very critically and frequently finding faults and gaps even in arguments to which I am sympathetic, I was amazed at how rarely I could find anything to quibble with. The book is also very balanced theoretically; the author considers a wide range of possible factors, from innate constraints on lexical semantics to general principles of theory of mind, and argues his case very fairly.

The book is not always easy reading, but it is always clear and pleasant. In a few cases the interpretation of an experiment described will not be entirely clear to someone with no background in psycholinguistics; in a few others, linguistic ideas are referred to without much explanation. Overall, however, the book should be accessible even to those without specialized trainng in linguistics or psychology.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book about children's language development
Review: This is a wonderfully informative, readable, and engaging book about how children learn words, and more generally about children's early conceptual knowledge and understanding of the minds of other people. Anyone interested in how children learn language, or in the relationship between language and thought, will enjoy this book. The author surveys a large body of the latest, most exciting research findings about how children learn words, and presents his own very interesting proposals, covering such issues as: The prelinguistic concepts that infants and young children possess, how they read the minds of others in order to decide what a speaker is referring to when they hear a new word, how they attend to certain aspects of the world at the expense of others when considering possible meanings for a new word; in short, how children are able to perform such a remarkable feat as learning a language in their first few years of life. The book also addresses such deep and interesting issues as whether the language one learns influences how one sees and thinks about the world. I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in children's early language and thought and its development.