How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

Learners rely on a combination of experience-independent and experience-dependent mechanisms to extract information from the environment. Language acquisition involves both types of mechanisms, but most theorists emphasize the relative importance of experience-independent mechanisms. The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/274/5294/1926.full.pdf

Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants

/pdf/weird-languages-have-misled-us-too-comment-on-henrich-et-al-57dmcdjt24.pdf

WEIRD languages have misled us, too [Comment on Henrich et al.]

Richard Schmidt presents on the role of consciousness in second language learning at the 1988 Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) held in at the University of Hawai‘i.

/pdf/the-role-of-consciousness-in-second-language-learning-4tc4iwvjpu.pdf

The role of consciousness in second language learning

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition

From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”

Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study.

Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar

The chapters in this volume, along with the extensive list of
 frog-story studies in Appendix II, provide a rich database for the exploration
 of particular questions of language use and acquisition. The studies
 reported in Part I
 reflect a range of languages of different types, making it possible
 to focus on the role of linguistic typology in narrative
 construction.
 1
 A recurrent concern in those studies is the
 expression of motion, which is one of the dominant themes of
 Frog, where are you? In one way or another, all
 of the studies confront Talmy’s by now familiar typology of
 verb-framed and satellite-framed languages (Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000b). Briefly, the typology is concerned with the
 means of expression of the path of movement. In
 verb-framed languages (“V-languages”) path is
 expressed by the main verb in a clause (‘enter’, ‘exit’, ‘ascend’,
 etc.), whereas in satellite-framed languages
 (“S-languages”) path is expressed by an element associated with the
 verb (‘go in/out/up’, etc.). This dichotomy has engendered a good
 deal of research and debate in the literature on motion-event
 descriptions over the past decade or so.
 2
 In this concluding chapter on
 typological perspectives I suggest that several different sorts of
 factors “conspire” to produce a range of frog-story varieties. These
 varieties result from combined influences of linguistic structure,
 on-line processing, and cultural practices. Talmy’s typology was
 designed to characterize lexicalization patterns, and it has
 provided important insights into the overall set of structures that
 define individual languages. However, the typology alone cannot
 account for discourse structures, because language use is determined
 by more than lexicalization patterns. It is striking how much has
 been learned by application of the V-language/S-language contrast,
 and it still plays a part in the mix of factors considered here. But
 a fuller account of narrative organization will require attention to
 a range of morphosyntactic, psycholinguistic, and pragmatic 220factors. Some of
 these factors are explored in this chapter, with regard to motion
 events in the frog story. The aim is to come to a fuller explanation
 of the ways in which languages differ in rhetorical
 style.

/pdf/the-many-ways-to-search-for-a-frog-linguistic-typology-and-47z0v7z993.pdf

Dan I. Slobin

Papers

The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition

From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”

Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study.

Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar

The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events