ABSTRACT
The contrast between children and chimps is remarkable. Children make plenty of noise before they start speaking. As children grow, they acquire the finer syntactic details of their language, while all the time their vocabulary is increasing quite dramatically. This chapter shows that babies are sensitive to the rhythm of language from a very early age. It's easy to focus on the difficulty of the task facing the child trying to understand language. The children who learn fastest are those who receive most encouragement and acknowledgement of what they say, who have the opportunity to share attention with their mothers while talking, who are questioned most, and whose comments get amplified by their parents. Children probably simplify their output because at a time when their resources are stretched they omit what is less important at conveying meaning. Language skills continue to develop throughout life, although it's apparent that the bulk of linguistic development happens in early childhood.
