This chapter focuses on one of the first steps in comprehending spoken language: How do
listeners extract the most fundamental linguistic elements—consonants and vowels, or the …

Our selective review of perceptual development has attempted to highlight three different
structural levels: sensory primitives, perceptual representations, and higher-order …

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive
and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the …

" This book represents an integrative theory of cognitive development in infancy and early
childhood, emphasizing the important role that language plays in taking the 2-to 5-year-old …

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely
linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such …

Language involves a duality of patterning, as Hockett (1954) has noted. On the one hand,
there are patterns that pertain to the way that sounds are organized; on the other, there are …

This is a classic edition of Geoffrey Beattie's and Andrew Ellis' influential introduction to the
psychology of human language and communication, now including a new reflective …

In this important volume, Lois Bloom brings together the theoretical and empirical work she
has carried out on early lexical development. Its focus is on the expressive power children …

This article reports three studies designed to increase our understanding of developmental
changes in cross-language speech perception. In the first study, we compared adult …

The function of motherese has become a pivotal issue in the language-learning literature.
The current research takes the approach of asking whether the prosodic characteristics that …