Language Acquisition Device

Reviews the book, A First Language: The Early Stages by Roger Brown (see record 1973-30971-000). The topic of Brown's important book is the development of the first stages of linguistic knowledge. He describes, discusses, and analyzes an impressive body of material, most of it from detailed naturalistic studies of English-speaking children. This book brings together the best work of the last decade in this area of language acquisition. While staying close to the naturalistic data, the author makes a serious effort to infer linguistic competence and to make hypotheses about universals of language and language acquisition. One of the strengths of this book is its discussion of a wide range of data from a variety of viewpoints. I feel that there is some weakness in the actual presentation of the data. There are many charts and tables that display or support Brown's analyses; but nowhere are the data presented in such a way that the reader can arrive at his own estimates about them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)