FREE delivery Sep 30 - Oct 7. Details

Or fastest delivery Wed, Sep 28. Details

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app.

[{"displayPrice":"$34.94","priceAmount":34.94,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"34","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"94","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"%2BsOO7O5dyLmwlMAL4pZBAciNHLe2dL8607ukykCW5ejezBf%2BBNXqezmH0g1sEqFqY81Ol8GDbi6Z1pJ%2BBlwuQgueFeypoiXVADeAz1x0YiY1BZRjLRT8GQ9ftOyOqP748FKqaAD3jkPHvqxpYnQoo3UtG7w%2BeqCKEfLBZQOZiJ7mBnvQqbqSubZpFBoSx%2BQs","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW"},{"displayPrice":"$16.97","priceAmount":16.97,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"16","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"97","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"YMhXMHWrLw%2B0hWYGTuQDLLW0OWy2Y%2FgPCQIeJVDyjVBa3zNleDb4f%2BKgO1Z53ETC9HmHKx9AUpbpRI09lUUvp%2FkMoVyiygML2DK5oWRRlsDCOyPPcrsyZzYR0Fjyf25%2BMJ9fhdE0aVqrNYleYYyphh2A%2BvhJvHWekv3LJ22GxIkh9g4gszMv1O9TFHn5JaP0","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED"}]

$$34.94 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

2InfinitI

Sold by

2InfinitI

Details

Ships from

2InfinitI

Sold by

2InfinitI

Return policy: Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Fri, Sep 30 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery Wed, Sep 28. Order within 15 hrs 20 mins

Select delivery location

Pre-owned: Good | Details

Sold by Family Value Store

Fulfilled by Amazon

Share <Embed>

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Charles D. Yang

The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World Hardcover – June 27, 2006

by Charles Yang (Author)

28 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$13.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$34.94

$28.47

$4.00

Paperback, Illustrated

"Please retry"

$18.99

$13.60

$3.79

Enhance your purchase

A preeminent researcher in language acquisition draws on cutting-edge scientific findings to address key issues about language development, demonstrating how human beings are born with an innate ability to speak any language but customize their communication abilities to accommodate the language that they hear, in an account that also explores the sources of grammatical rules. 35,000 first printing.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Scribner
Publication date

June 27, 2006
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0743237560
ISBN-13

978-0743237567
See all details

Matthew H. Olson
14
Paperback
20 offers from $63.49
Cathy O'Neil
3,054
Paperback
115 offers from $3.31
Tye Rattenbury
13
Paperback
20 offers from $13.97
Alberto Cairo
360
Paperback
39 offers from $10.74
Brent Dykes
204
Hardcover
26 offers from $23.90
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
2,334
Paperback
58 offers from $1.72

Editorial Reviews

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Charles Yang teaches linguistics and psychology at Yale University. Trained as a computer scientist at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he has written extensively on children and language and contributes articles to The London Review of Books, among other literary publications. He lives in Delaware with his wife, a frequent research collaborator, and young son, a frequent research subject.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; 1st edition (June 27, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743237560
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743237567
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.95 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,715,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,720 in Alphabet Reference
- #2,866 in Medical Child Psychology
- #4,472 in Popular Child Psychology

Customer Reviews:
28 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Charles D. Yang

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

5 star		71%
4 star		20%
3 star		9%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Quyen Hoang

Library book laminate their books

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 28, 2021

Verified Purchase

Book was in perfect condition & laminate by the Library to keep the book edges from falling apart.

Helpful

Wellsoberlin

Great book about language acquisition

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 29, 2007

Verified Purchase

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.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Rameez Rahman

Language is an infinite gift and Yang explains it infinitely well!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 22, 2013

Verified Purchase

I really learned a lot from this book. I think this is the first book
that I have read, which explains in layman terms all the revolutionary
stuff that has been happening in linguistics for the last 50 years.

A must read for anyone interested in understanding how languages
function inside our brains, and how children acquire their particular
native language.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

phrase anatomy

A captivating read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 18, 2008

Verified Purchase

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.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

meeps

Yanguage

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 28, 2012

Verified Purchase

Charles Yang makes all the convolutions of Mentalism and Structuralist ideas understandable and clear in such a way that allows you to read other more convoluted books and articles with more ease. If you don't leave this book as a Generativist, you didn't read it right.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Brandon

i recommend to linguists everywhere

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 23, 2016

Verified Purchase

This was required for my Ling50D class and was a captivating read on the mind and language, i recommend to linguists everywhere!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 5, 2017

Verified Purchase

Must read it.

Helpful

ROLLAND Francois-Regis

Fascinating, but a little sloppy here and there

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 15, 2016

This is indeed a fascinating topic: how children can learn within a very short time the language they hear around them, no matter how diificult it may be. Charles Yang demonstrates that Noam Chomsky was right in positing an inborn ability, i.e. an inborn garmmar in the child's brain. Children are born already knowing a universal grammar, all they have to do is to whittle it dow to the particular grammar of the language spoken in their country, or their group, and flesh it out with the corresponding vocabulary.
The book is easy to read, pleasant, and has lots of humour in it.
It also has its share of petty mistakes.
Proof-reading is certainly very tedious work, but Charles Yang should have taken a few hours to check his examples, or have some undergraduate student do it for him.

Speaking about the infinitive, C.Yang says that "to eat" is "comere" in Latin (page 119). No, this is just bad Spanish ("comer"). The Latin verb is "edere" or "comedere". In Spanish, intervocalic -d- tends to be disappear, "judex" became "juez", for instance.

A Hungarian sentence given on page 120 is pure gibberish: *Balazs nem ltott semitt. Four mistakes in four words ! Correct is: "Balázs nem látott semmit".

On page 60, C.Yang states that Germans speaking English will pronounce "this thing" as "zis sing". Wrong again, it's the French who do this. Germans will rather pronounce it as "Dis ding", because that's the way it is said in German: "dies(es) Ding". I often heard German students mispronounce the English -th- as a -d- in English language classes.

If a linguist makes this kind of mistakes with well-known languages like Latin, Hungarian and German, how can we trust him when he writes about warlpiri, an Australian language ?

On page 197, a few things are downward ludicrous. We have here a list of words imported into English from several foreign languages. The word "science" is cited as coming from the Greek ! (It's from Latin "scientia", from "scire", to know. The corresponding Greek is επιστήμη)
"Ethnic" is said to come from Hebrew (it's a Greek adjective, "εθνικός", from the noun "εθνος", people, race).

Well, this doesn't in any way detract from the worth of this book, which is still a fascinating read. The details are just a little sloppy at times.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Mitchell

BOOK THE INFINITE GIFT

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 24, 2012

Verified Purchase

My daughter uses this book to aid her with her studies at Uni. She informs me that so far it has been invaluable to her. Much cheaper than High Street Book Retailers very pleased with this purchase.

Mehdi

.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 4, 2016

Verified Purchase

The Infinite Gift is a truly enlightening book for all who (still) doubt about the genetically-determined mechanisms of language acquisition, and the merits of Chomskyan 'Universal Grammar'. Yang's book is a source of nightmare for the so-called 'Cognitive' linguists.

See all reviews

Follow the Author