Product Description: This book contains a Foreword by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff (authors of "Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize less"). New and expectant parents need support and confidence...read more

Product Description: Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Dr. Roberta Golinkoff, renowned authors and child development experts, offer a peek inside early childhood through the marvelous marks made by young children. There's much to see and celebrate in children's scribbles much more than meets the eye...read more

Two noted child psychologists condemn the growing trend toward accelerated learning and the pressure put upon parents to meet constant expectations, introducing a series of simple, creative games that parents can play with their child to enhance mental and physical development while embracing and enjoying precious moments without high-tech gadgets. 40,000 first printing.

Product Description: How do children learn their first words? The field of language development has been polarized by responses to this question. Explanations range from accounts that emphasize the importance of cognitive heuristics in language acquisition, to those that highlight the role of "dumb attentional mechanisms" in word learning...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

An informative look at the human language learning process explains how babies master language during their first three years of life and presents simple tests to measure a child's progress or identify potential problems in their development. Reprint.

How do children achieve adult grammatical competence? How do they induce syntactical rules from the bewildering linguistic input that surrounds them? The major debates in language acquisition theory today focus not on whether there are some sensitivities to syntactic information but rather which sensitivities are available to children and how they might be translated into the organizing principles that get syntactic learning off the ground. The Origins of Grammar presents a synthesis of work done by the authors, who have pioneered one of the most important methodological advances in language learning in the past decade: the intermodal preferential looking paradigm, which can be used to assess lexical and syntactic knowledge in children as young as 13 months. In addition to drawing together their groundbreaking empirical work, the authors use these results to describe a theory of language learning that emphasizes the role of multiple cues and forces in development. They show how infants shift their reliance on different aspects of the linguistic input, moving from a bias to attend to prosodic information to a reliance on semantic information, and finally to a reliance on the syntax itself. Viewing language acquisition as the product of a biased learner who takes advantage of the information available from a variety of sources in his or her environment, The Origins of Grammar provides a new way of thinking about the process of language comprehension. The analysis borrows insights from theories about the development of mental models, models of early cognitive development and systems theory, and is presented in a way that will be accessible to cognitive and developmental psychologists. (view table of contents)