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Previous Volume 353:1655-1657 October 20, 2005 Number 16 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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Learning to talk is one of the most important milestones in human development, but we still have only a limited understanding of the way in which the process occurs. It normally takes just a few years to go from babbling newborn to fluent communicator. During this period, the child learns to produce a rich array of speech sounds through intricate control of articulatory muscles, assembles a vocabulary comprising thousands of words, and deduces the complicated structural rules that permit construction of meaningful sentences. All of this (and more) is achieved with little conscious effort.

The acquisition of language usually proceeds . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Fisher is a Royal Society Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, England.

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