Children's Language: Revised Edition: Consensus and Controversy

(Paperback, 2nd edition)

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The popular notion of how children come to speak their first language is that their parents teach them words, then phrases, then sentences, then longer utterances. Although there is widespread agreement amongst linguists that this account is wrong, there is much less agreement as to how children really learn language. This revised edition of Ray Cattell's bestselling textbook aims to give readers the background necessary to form their own views on the debate, and includes accessible summaries of key thinkers, including Chomsky, Halliday, Karmiloff-Smith and Piaget.

Reviews

"A revised edition of the 2000 volume of the same name, this book aims to be a text for the beginning student, focusing on areas of agreement and disagreement within the field. However, whereas it succeeds to some extent, it has a number of shortcomings...The many largely overworked debates that form the focus of the book are not matched with the many important and interesting areas of controversy in current acquisition studies....In the text is riddled with statements to the effect that explanations of particular topics are too complex to be attempted. This is intensely irritating and risks causing students to feel hopelessly disempowered. The issues either needed to be addressed appropriately for the level of the text or not be mentioned at all (or perhaps only in footnotes)...overall, this work was a disappointment. It had grand and appropriate aims, but, for various reasons, its effectiveness is compromised." -Susan Foster-Cohen, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Vol. 30 No. 4, December 2008 -- negative
"Views about the nature of language acquisition differ dramatically, and it is not easy for the uninitiated non-specialist to gain a general overview of the field and the different views and perspectives held by various researchers in the field. Cattell's Children's Language: Consensus and Controversy meets this need and provides a welcome introduction to this very important field. It is well-written, cogent and easy to follow, and does an outstanding job of introducing some very complex topics in a readily-understandable manner. Highly recommended for general readers and undergraduate students." -Choice * Choice *

Author Bio

Ray Cattell is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.