Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

Coherence in discourse One of the pervasive illusions which persists in the analysis of language is that we understand the meaning of a linguistic message solely on the basis of the words and structure of the sentence(s) used to convey that message. We certainly rely on the syntactic structure and lexical items used in a linguistic message to arrive at an interpretation, but it is a mistake to think that we operate only with this literal input to our understanding. We can recognise, for example, when a writer has produced a perfectly grammatical sentence from which we can derive a literal interpretation, but which we would not claim to have understood, simply because we need more information. Extract (1), the first sentence of a novel, may provide an illustration of this point. (1) Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there. (Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff , Bantam Books, 1981) The novelist is, of course, leading his reader to read on and find out just what the first sentence, though literally complete, has only partially described. At the opposite extreme, we can point to linguistic messages which are not presented in sentences and consequently can't be discussed in terms of syntactic well-formedness, but which are readily interpreted.

Discourse Analysis: Coherence in the interpretation of discourse

Assessing Writing: Series Editors' Preface

Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone

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Automated Evaluation of Text and Discourse with Coh-Metrix: Introduction

At Chinese universities, English is more considered a subject you need to succeed in than a language that you would like to use. Almost all Chinese students, who spend a lot of time learning English, complain that their English has not improved at university. The main objective of this dissertation was to empirically verify this complaint by means of five separate consecutive studies. A first study investigating the development of writing skills of Chinese students during a course of 18 months showed that the most advanced students did not improve in their English writing skills. However, two follow-up studies suggested that these more advanced students had reached a ceiling when looking at the more general dimensions of linguistic sophistication and complexity. However, they generally showed improvement in subtle aspects of language use such as idiomaticity and text quality. The final study looks at the writing of two students from the advanced group: one student who made clear progress and one student who did not seem to have made any progress. The strong learner showed a coordinated, stable pattern; the weak learner, on the other hand, showed a fairly spread pattern and was significantly more variable than the strong learner.

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The Dynamics of English Writing Development in Advanced Chinese Learners

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The Dynamics of English Writing Development in Advanced Chinese Learners