Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

The book interprets the current research on language acquisition for the non-academic. There is a lot of meat here. While it's presented in a very readable way, it is not for the casual reader.

It gave me a better understanding of how grammar as an organizing concept plays out in first language development and once established provides impediments to learning subsequent languages.

For someone interested in languages, there is a lot of food for thought, such as the compounding of words in Eskimo and that the vowel shift that we see in the US is also observable in the speeches of Queen Elizabeth II.

The last chapter on the superiority of the German language lost me. As a non academic, I don't have the tools to refute the thesis. It would seem, though, that even on the hypothetical desert island, to predict the surviving language, more variables than grammar should enter into the equation. English (a grammatical child of German) did survive Latin and French on the Islands of Great Britain. I'd be interested in a discussion of the commonly considered factors (adaptivity, King Alfred, literature, etc) against grammar.

In this wonderfully readable and compelling book, Charles Yang, a noted professor of linguistics now at Penn, uses evidence from children's babbling, biology, neuroscience, and historical literature to provide deep insights into the nature and origin of language and how children accomplish the remarkable feat of learning a language. The book is clearly written and understandable to a broad audience, and poses and answers some of the key questions about understanding what makes humans unique.

This is a great book if you want to have an informed view while you watch your (grand)children learn their native language. It is fascinating to watch children do just what current theory says they will do!

This book is mainly for people who are used to thinking about technical and abstract stuff. I already knew a little about the subject and found the book at just the right level -- the author communicates the basic ideas but does not get bogged down in excessive detail.

I got interested in lingustics by reading Steve Pinker's books. But what I learned after reading this book is some of the things Pinker presents as settled cases are actually not so settled. In the Infinite Gift, Yang presents a veiw of language aquisition that seems different than Pinker on the surface, untyil you realize the language instinct is more about how kids learn language in total while this book applies more specifically to the aquisition of grammer.

I highly recomment reading this and the language instinct, especially to those who have kids and view them at least partially as little labs for learning about language aquisition. I think the two books together are much better than either alone.

Despite my own lack of linguistic training I did not find this dry. The writer has an engaging, conversational style, and makes the technical aspects accessible to all. (If you can make tree-diagrams seem compelling, you have achieved something special.) A good book for parents curious about language development, and amateur-linguists alike.

Fine for the shape the book was described to be in and for what we paid for it. Took a little long to arrive, but seller probably used book rate/media mail.

This is a good introduction to child language acquisition, and to the field of linguistics more generally. Yang is a good writer, but Steven Pinker is a great writer, so I'd recommend The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought ahead of this one. The main focus of Yang's book is Principles and Parameters (P&P) theory, which is explained in more detail in Mark Baker's book Atoms of Language. Yang's own contribution, a theory of language acquisition as a Darwinian struggle between competing P&P grammars in the child's mind, is presented superficially in the main text but in mathematical detail in the book's copious endnotes. One gripe I have is that Yang presents P&P theory as if it is established fact, when in fact it is quite controversial within linguistics. That aside, this book is a nice contribution to the linguistics-for-laypeople genre. For a vastly different perspective child language acquisition, see Constructing a Language by Michael Tomasello.

This book was referred to me by someone who read about it in the local paper and thought I would enjoy it. Indeed I did find certain portions of the book quite intriguing as the author does a marvelous job of discussing in an almost narrative format otherwise dry topics such as language morphology, evolution of grammar, etc. As the parent of a five-month old, I also enjoyed reading about the author's personal experiences with his own child's early language production.

Unfortunately I thought the book was very heavily riddled with linguistic jargon and therefore a bit stilted and overly technical. I studied language acquisition and linguistics in college so much of the terminology was familiar to me, but there were still some chapters that sent me running to my old Linguistics textbook for a refresher. Those without a Linguistics textbook or at least a twisted appreciation for SVO languages, declensions and labio-dental fricatives might prefer a less scholarly text.

Like Webster, Merriam and other linguaphiles out there, Yang's book might be better received if it were abridged.