Progressing gradually from babbling to meaningful sentences is something most babies do naturally. But why do they? John Locke's answer constitutes a fascinating journey along the path of language development, a tour that takes in all the stops--neurological and perceptual, social and linguistic--that mark the way to intelligible speech. A major synthesis of the latest research on early language acquisition, this volume revises the way we understand ourselves and our approach to speech.

John L. Locke is Lecturer on Neurology, Harvard Medical School. He is Director of the Neurolinguistics Laboratory and of the Graduate Program in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital.