Negotiation, sales talk and the art of spin 4

Language and the Learning Curve combines mainstream Chomskyan linguistics with learning theory, providing an original interdisciplinary approach to understanding syntactic development in children. It presents a view of language as a complex network that young people join via the development of syntactic skills. Examples are drawn from Hebrew, German and Finnish.

It also provides a background from linguistics, cognitive psychology and complexity theory, covering key theories of early language acquisition.

Explicit reference is made to relevant work within computational linguistics, and it will also provide those in developmental psychology with an account of the field of language development.

The title draws on traditional disciplines, with an interesting idea about valency as a concept applied to semantics and syntax.

Who is it for? Developmental psychologists and linguists with an interest in early language acquisition.

Presentation: Standard layout with graphs and footnotes. There is a solid bibliography and an author index.

Would you recommend it? Yes.

Tim Connell is director of language studies at City University London.