This is a volume in the Fontana series, The Developing Child. The authors are Assistant Professors of Psychology at Harvard University, and authors of Language Acquisition.

At the beginning of the book, the authors set themselves three questions: how does the child learn language so well in such a short time? what is the course of language learning? how do you establish what a child knows? They answer them in reverse order. The first chapter outlines the historical development of language research, some recent testing techniques and basic problems of research. The second, third and fourth chapters outline the course of language development, through sounds, words and simple grammatical rules. The fifth and sixth chapters cover the growing complexity of expression of relationships and concepts. The final two chapters explore the process of