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In this important volume, Lois Bloom brings together the theoretical and empirical work she has carried out on early lexical development. Its focus is on the expressive power children acquire as they begin to talk and, in particular, on contributions from cognitive development, affect expression, and the social context for making the transition from prelinguistic expression to the expression of contents of mind. The first half of the book reviews the developments in infancy that enable the emergence of language and presents the theoretical perspective required for an understanding of the longitudinal study described in the second half. The book's main thesis is that language is acquired for expressing contents of mind and that its usefulness as a 'tool' is of only secondary importance. The Transition from Infancy to Language makes a major contribution to our knowledge of early lexical development, providing a persuasive theoretical model for researchers and students.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Part I Theory and Background
• 1 The power of expression
• 2 Representation and expression
• 3 The emergent infant
• 4 The expressive infant
• 5 The transition to language
• Part II From Nine Months to Two Years
• 6 Translation from theory to method
• 7 Developments in expression
• 8 Developments in affect expression
• 9 Developments in word learning
• 10 Developments in cognition
• 11 Meaning and expression

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CHOICE Review

A detailed report of an extensive longitudinal research project on child language acquisition, combined with a complete literature review and theoretical introduction to the topic of how children move from being nonusers of language to users of words. Bloom (Columbia) uses her extensive experience in developmental linguistics to combine references both old and new from philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with her own research findings in her search for an explanation of the crucial transitional period between infancy and the earliest (pre-grammar) stages of language use. This book is not intended as a textbook or a general account of a period of language development; instead, it presents a unified argument concerning certain large questions in the child language field. Even so, some of the latter half of the book might be useful on its own because of its thoughtful discussions of the methodology of child language research. Although her writing is clear and extremely well organized, the nature of the material in the first half of the book makes it unsuitable for many students at the undergraduate level. However, its thoroughness and its elegant intertwining of empirical results and theoretical arguments make it essential reading for graduate students and faculty in the field of first language acquisition and in any relevant subfields of psychology, philosophy, and education. L. Bebout; University of Windsor