Dr. Tomasello has been acknowledged as one of the world leaders of modern developmental psychology. This volume is especially important to those in the autism community, as it provides an up-to-date understanding of the amazing progress that has been made, in the past twenty years, in understanding language development. This book should be considered essential reading in a field that is still largely mired in a 1950's Skinnerian view of language as "verbal behavior" (recommended for professionals and motivated parents).

In this groundbreaking book, Michael Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Tomasello demonstrates that we don't need a self-contained "language instinct" to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.

Tomasello argues that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, which rests on the uniquely human ability to comprehend intention. Grammar emerges as the speakers of a language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols; children pick up these patterns in the buzz of words they hear around them.

All theories of language acquisition assume these fundamental skills of intention-reading and pattern-finding. Some formal linguistic theories posit a second set of acquisition processes to connect somehow with an innate universal grammar. But these extra processes, Tomasello argues, are completely unnecessary--important to save a theory but not to explain the phenomenon. -book description Harvard University Press