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

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

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(03)12987-X.pdf

Down's syndrome

Race and Racism w “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” featuring Dr. Beverly Tatum’s book. w “Recovering from Racism: Redefining What it Means to be White.” w “50th Anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education.” w “The Mis-Education of the Negro” featuring Dr. Carter Woodson’s book. w “Moving Past the Margins: Creating successful strategies for Black males on campus,” presenting the Black Male Development Initiative (BMDI). w “He had a Dream... What is Yours?” Addressing Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and its current relevance in our society. w “Demystifying Malcolm X.” w “Racial Stereotyping and Responses to Terrorism.” w “Racial Stereotyping – Responding to Fear.” w “Free, White and (over) 21: Being White in a Multicultural World.” w “Constructing Race and Ethnicity in the 21st Century.” w “How did I Learn about Culture and Race?” Sharing your personal experiences and memories of moments where you become aware of similarities and differences among people. w “ABC: American-Born... and Confused?” w “The Invisible Asian: Where are the Asians in Diversity?” w “100 Years of Race Talk: Is It Enough?”

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria

https://people.brandeis.edu/~smalamud/ling197/3-6-tomasello-JennaFernandes.pdf

Do young children have adult syntactic competence

The relationship between child age and mean length of utterance measured in morphemes (MLU) was studied in a sample of 123 middle- to upper-middle-class midwestern children, aged 17 to 59 months, conversing with mothers in free play. A significant correlation was found between age and MLU: r = .88. Age accounted for 78% of the variance when MLU was regressed on age; and MLU accounted for 77% of the variance when age was regressed on MLU. Significant nonlinear components accounted only for an additional 1% and 3% (respectively) of the variance. Ranges within one standard deviation (SD) were estimated for predicted MLUs and derived for predicted ages on the basis of linear regression. MLU increased at an average rate of 1.2 morphemes per year; predicted variability in predicted MLU increased with age. These findings can play a useful role in three activities when the children studied are from populations similar to the one sampled here, and MLUs are obtained in the same way. They can aid in (1) finding chil...

The Relation between Age and Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes.

This article examines the question: Do lexical, syntactic, fluency, and discourse measures of oral language collected under narrative conditions predict reading achievement both within and across languages for bilingual children? More than 1,500 Spanish–English bilingual children attending kindergarten–third grade participated. Oral narratives were collected in each language along with measures of Passage Comprehension and Word Reading Efficiency. Results indicate that measures of oral language in Spanish predict reading scores in Spanish and that measures of oral language skill in English predict reading scores in English. Cross-language comparisons revealed that English oral language measures predicted Spanish reading scores and Spanish oral language measures predicted English reading scores beyond the variance accounted for by grade. Results indicate that Spanish and English oral language skills contribute to reading within and across languages.

Oral Language and Reading in Bilingual Children

Purpose To evaluate the clinical utility of the narrative scoring scheme (NSS) as an index of narrative macrostructure for young school-age children. Method Oral retells of a wordless picture book ...

Properties of the Narrative Scoring Scheme Using Narrative Retells in Young School-Age Children

Purpose Language sample analysis is considered by many to be the gold standard for documenting children’s oral language skills. One limitation, however, is the time required for collection and transcription of language samples. The goal of this study was to determine if stable language sample measures could be generated using relatively short language samples. Method Measures were generated from children’s conversational and narrative language samples after they were broken into three lengths (1-, 3-, and 7-min samples). The measures were compared to determine the stability of measures from the short samples (1 and 3 min) when compared to measures from the long sample (7 min). The measures were further analyzed to determine if differences across transcript cuts varied as a function of age group (2;8 [years;months]–5;11 vs. 6;0–13;3) or sampling context (conversation vs. narrative). Results Overall, the language sample measures were quite consistent across the transcript cuts. Measures of productivity, lex...

Jon F. Miller

Papers

The Relation between Age and Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes.

Oral Language and Reading in Bilingual Children

Properties of the Narrative Scoring Scheme Using Narrative Retells in Young School-Age Children

Language Sampling: Does the Length of the Transcript Matter?

Assessing Language Production using SALT Software. A Clinician's Guide to Language Sample Analysis. New Zealand version