The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 288 pages
• Published by: Scribner June 27, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0743237560
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0743237567
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 12.8 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Children may start to speak at a year, but that's hardly the beginning, as Yale linguist and psychologist Yang shows in this engrossing book. Babies recognize the first elements of language before birth, start to babble at three to four months and can memorize and recognize the sounds of words at six to nine months. Yang uses this fascinating progression to explain one of the core theories of contemporary linguistics: Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, that human understanding of language is in the genes. Yang takes the theory a step further in arguing that the keys to acquiring language are not in the learning, but in unlearning: "Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in a child's environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes." Yang unfolds this complex argument systematically and with appealing animation, using creative examples—his son's first word, neurological experiments, baseball analogies—to keep the narrative moving. For readers who will never venture into the field to study language acquisition, he reveals that some of the most exciting linguistic experiments are happening much closer to home. (June)
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Product Description
A child's very first word is a miraculous sound, the opening note in a lifelong symphony. Most parents never forget the moment. But that first word is soon followed by a second and a third, and by the age of three, children are typically learning ten new words every day and speaking in complete sentences. The process seems effortless, and for children, it is. But how exactly does it happen? How do children learn language? And why is it so much harder to do later in life?

Drawing on cutting-edge developments in biology, neurology, psychology, and linguistics, Charles Yang's The Infinite Gift takes us inside the astonishingly complex but largely subconscious process by which children learn to talk and to understand the spoken word.

Yang illuminates the rich mysteries of language: why French newborns already prefer the sound of French to English; why baby-talk, though often unintelligible, makes perfect linguistic sense; why babies born deaf still babble -- but with their hands; why the grammars of some languages may be evolutionarily stronger than others; and why one of the brain's earliest achievements may in fact be its most complex.

Yang also puts forth an exciting new theory. Building on Noam Chomsky's notion of a universal grammar -- the idea that every human being is born with an intuitive grasp of grammar -- Yang argues that we learn our native languages in part by unlearning the grammars of all the rest.

This means that the next time you hear a child make a grammatical mistake, it may not be a mistake at all; his or her grammar may be perfectly correct in Chinese or Navajo or ancient Greek. This is the brain's way of testing its options as it searches for the local and thus correct grammar -- and then discards all the wrong ones.

And we humans, Yang shows, are not the only creatures who learn this way. In fact, learning by unlearning may be an ancient evolutionary mechanism that runs throughout the animal kingdom. Thus, babies learn to talk in much the same way that birds learn to sing.

Enlivened by Yang's experiences with his own young son, The Infinite Gift is as charming as it is challenging, as thoughtful as it is thought-provoking. An absorbing read for parents, educators, and anyone who has ever wondered about the origins of that uniquely human gift: our ability to speak and, just as miraculous, to understand one another.

Reader Reviews
This is the book to read for a clear and deep and ORIGINAL account of how children "learn" language. It is also by far the best accessible account to the linguistics of Noam Chomsky, an intellectual accomplishment that has spread to many other fields, and whose excitement Yang communicates very well.