This guide to how children learn language highlights the “extraordinary in the ordinary” and applies the latest scientific research to understanding the art of speech. Golinkoff and Hirsh-Patek, academics at the University of Delaware and Temple University respectively, draw from linguistics, psychology, and their own experience as mothers to plumb the depths of language learning. Their conclusion? Babies know a lot more than they—re letting on. In fact, because of breakthrough studies that monitor fetal heartbeats, researchers now know that even before birth, babies not only recognize their mothers’ voices, but can also discriminate between nursery rhymes they’ve heard before and those that are new. From that point, the authors discuss babies’ early attempts at nonverbal communication, moving toward those hard-won first words, through the toddlers’ “vocabulary spurt,” right up to the preschoolers’ Herculean struggle to master not only the niceties of grammar, but also the social aspect of knowing what to say and when to say it. Using techniques that track babies’ gaze, heartbeats, and bottle-sucking rates, the book does an impressive job of taking readers behind the scenes of each of these milestones. While they stress that “children’s minds are rich with language-learning resources,” the authors emphasize what parents and caregivers can do to help the process along; suggestions include using “infant-directed” language, commonly known as “baby talk” so that words, phrases and vowels stand out amidst the endless stream of adult talk, and engaging in “rich interpretation” of a toddler’s two-word sentence by expanding on the thought without offering corrections. How Babies Talk takes a refreshingly reassuring tone about speech delays, asserting that most children eventually catch up to their more loquacious peers. When it comes to language learning, the authors declare, “nature and nurture are involved in an intricate dance with each other. ‘’ This book will certainly help parents learn some new steps.
Pub Date: May 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-94455-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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