For college students in courses with the same topic in communication disorders, psychology, and education. A best-selling, comprehensive, easy-to-understand introduction to language development. This best-selling introduction to language development text offers a cohesive, easy-to-understand overview of all aspects of the subject, from syntax, morphology, and semantics, to phonology and pragmatics. Each idea and concept is explained in a way that is clear to even beginning students and then reinforced with outstanding pedagogical aids such as discussion questions, chapter objectives, reflections, and main point boxed features. The book looks at how children learn to communicate in general and in English specifically, while emphasizing individual patterns of communication development. The new Ninth Edition continues the distribution of bilingual and dialectal development throughout the text; expands the discussion of children from lower-SES families, including those living in homeless shelters; makes substantial improvements in the organization and clarity of Chapter 4 on cognition and its relationship to speech and language; consolidates information on Theory of Mind in one chapter; improves readability throughout with more thorough explanations, simplification of terms, and increased use of headings and bullets; weeds out redundancies and asides to help streamline the reading; provides more child language examples throughout; and thoroughly updates the research, including the addition of several hundred new references.