Emergence of Linguistic Abilities

Product Description This book attempts to address an interrelated set of issues about the emergence of linguistic abilities in the child. The various chapters intend to shed light on a particular and critical period in language development: the first three years of life. It is generally assumed in the field of the ontogeny of language that the child's first years of life are particularly crucial. This period is even sometimes considered as predictive at least in the short term, of the later abilities to communicate. During these first three years, gestures, phonetico-phonological, lexical and morpho-syntactic skills chronologically emerge. The main goal of this book is to address the issue of continuity between the developments of the different language components, by the means of recent findings of experts in each domain. Furthermore, the originality of this selection of chapters is to broaden the scope of the discussion by including papers dealing with related phenomena but from different perspectives such as phylogeny, pathology and animal communication. This book primarily concerns graduate students and researchers in the field of language acquisition but the audience can also include scholars from evolution of language, language pathology, animal communication, ontogeny/phylogeny research fields. About the Author Sophie Kern is Reseacher at the Laboratory Dynamique Du Langage (UMR5596 CNRS/University of Lyon, France). Her research projects cover very early language development in a crosslinguistic perspective. Among others, she adapted and normed the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories for French. Her work has been published in Journal of child language and First language. Frederique GAYRAUD is Assistant Professor of Psycholinguistics at the Université Lumière-Lyon 2 and member of the Laboratory Dynamique Du Langage (UMR5596 CNRS/University of Lyon, France). She received a PhD from Lyon2 University in 2000. Her research interests include first language acquisition and processing of complex syntax in adults. Her work has been published in First Language and Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Egidio Marsico is engineer at the Laboratory Dynamique Du Langage (UMR5596 CNRS/University of Lyon, France). His main areas of interests are the evolution of language, phonetics, and the study and characterization of phonological inventories from a typological perspective. He is co-editor of a volume on ""Approaches to phonological complexity"" (to appear in the Mouton de Gruyter Phonetics and Phonological Series).