A First Language: The Early Stages

For many years, Roger Brown and his colleagues have studied the developing language of pre-school children-the language that ultimately will permit them to understand themselves and the world around them. This longitudinal research project records the conversational performances of three children, studying both semantic and grammatical aspects of their language development.

These core findings are related to recent work in psychology and linguistics-and especially to studies of the acquisition of languages other than English, including Finnish, German, Korean, and Samoan. Roger Brown has written the most exhaustive and searching analysis yet undertaken of the early stages of grammatical constructions and the meanings they convey.