Milestones: Normal Speech And Language Development Across the Lifespan

This new book is written as a textbook for the introductory course in Language Development for students in Speech-Language Pathology, Communication Disorders, Special Education, Educational Psychology and Education. It adopts a coherent chronological approach, beginning with responsiveness to speech and language in the womb and working across the lifespan into maturity and beyond. By using a chronological organization, the text helps students relate the material to the whole person at each milestone. It takes a constructive approach, starting with the simplest theoretical apparatus of the youngest infant, gradually increasing in complexity and comprehensiveness one milestone at a time. The organizational background becomes a series of narratives of interesting cases, keeping the theory and structure of language development grounded in real stories.

John W. Oller, Jr., Ph.D. is Hawthorne Regents Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Stephen Oller, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Theater Arts at Texas A&M University–Kingsville. His research papers apply the theory of abstraction to language assessment with first, second, and disordered language populations. He also spends time in the natural laboratory of life with his own developing language learners (Brenden David and Gabrielle Alana, to name only the first two). Linda C. Badon, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is Assistant Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her primary research papers, complementing her clinical work, deal with assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of disorders as well as language, literacy, and cultural diversity. She has served on essential doctoral committees producing some of the key research presented in this book.