Publications
A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool
Four distinguished scholars speak out about the importance of play and playful learning in young children's lives. While the benefits of early education are clear, and on the agenda of policymakers around the country, the research shows that pedagogy in preschool education really matters. "Preschool sweatshops" do not provide the best early education. Visit book website.
Play = Learning: How play motivates and enhances children's cognitive and social-emotional growth
Of interest to parents, practitioners, and researchers, Play = Learning is an outgrowth of a conference we ran at Yale University in June 2005. In attendance, and presenting the papers that appear in this volume, were leading scientists from all over the country. They presented evidence on the importance of play for children's thinking and social-emotional skills.
Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs
Researchers from all over the world who study language development, and in particular, how children learn verbs, contributed chapters to this book. Words are the building blocks of language so an understanding of word learning is central to any theory of language acquisition. Verbs are, as Lois Bloom stated many years ago, "the hero of the sentence," as the rest of the sentence is organized around them. Action Meets Word brings together the latest research on the universal foundations of verb learning, offering sections on how babies find verbs in the stream of speech; how they analyze the events that verbs label; how they map their very first verbs onto events; and how they learn to express verb meaning in language-specific ways.
Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less
This book won the 2003 Books for a Better Life award from the National Multiple Sclerosis Foundation. Our goal was to share the secrets of our field. What does it take to raise zero budget, smart, and well-adjusted children? We reassure parents that they can trust their instincts and allow their children to play. Children don't need flash cards, expensive electronic toys, computer programs, and endless adult-structured lessons to help them achieve in school and become socially and emotionally well adjusted.
How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life
Even before birth, nature and nurture are at work preparing babies with the tools for mastering their native language. Almost magically, in the first three years, babies learn to recognize words, decipher their meanings, put together sentences, and ask questions. How Babies Talk explores how babies learn language, and the concrete ways in which parents and caregivers can help nurture these linguistic skills at every stage of their children's development. This book has been translated into 6 languages.
The Origins of Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension
How do children achieve adult grammatical competence? This book describes our theory of how children break into the grammar of their language. It also presents many studies that used the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to "trick" babies into revealing their burgeoning linguistic competence.