Michael Perkins – författare

Covering the proceedings of the Child Language Seminar, held 4-6 September, 1998, in Sheffield, UK, this text aims to provide an overview of late-20th century research into child language development and disorders. Its 26 chapters, written by leading authorities around the world, address many of the key issues which are currently exercising the minds of child language researchers, and which are likely to motivate research for some time to come. A key theme of the book is the nature of language acquisition in children whose learning capacity is in some way impaired, and what this can tell us about language development more generally. The main topics covered are: cross-linguistic perspectives on language acquisition; the relationship between innate linguistic capacity and the specific properties of the language being acquired; syntax; argument structure; verbs and verb morphology; phonology; pragmatics and discourse; and literacy.

Pragmatics - the way we communicate using more than just language - is particularly problematic for people with speech disorders. Through an extensive analysis of how pragmatics can go wrong, this 2007 book not only provides a clinically useful account of pragmatic impairment, but it also throws light on how pragmatics functions in healthy individuals. Michael Perkins brings mainstream and clinical pragmatics together by showing that not only can our understanding of pragmatics be aided by the study of pragmatic impairment, but that clinical and theoretical pragmatics are better served by treating pragmatic ability and disability within a single framework. It is a comprehensive book aimed primarily at linguists and psycholinguists rather than clinicians, and includes illustrative material on conditions such as autism and aphasia and a wide range of other communication disorders in both children and adults.

Pragmatics - the way we communicate using more than just language - is particularly problematic for people with speech disorders. Through an extensive analysis of how pragmatics can go wrong, this 2007 book not only provides a clinically useful account of pragmatic impairment, but it also throws light on how pragmatics functions in healthy individuals. Michael Perkins brings mainstream and clinical pragmatics together by showing that not only can our understanding of pragmatics be aided by the study of pragmatic impairment, but that clinical and theoretical pragmatics are better served by treating pragmatic ability and disability within a single framework. It is a comprehensive book aimed primarily at linguists and psycholinguists rather than clinicians, and includes illustrative material on conditions such as autism and aphasia and a wide range of other communication disorders in both children and adults.

Research into child language development is being conducted more extensively, by more people, and in more countries throughout the world than at any point in the past. We now know more than we ever did before about the linguistic, cognitive, neurobio­ logical, and social capacities that children bring to their language learning task, as well as the ways in which these capacities interact with a whole range of factors present in the child's environment throughout the learning process, not least the particular character­ istics of the language or languages to which the child is exposed. Far from inducing a sense of complacency, this new knowledge seems instead to create an even stronger impetus to know more. This is partly because of the new and unforeseen questions it raises and partly because of competition between different theories to provide the best explanation of the phenomenon, and which in turn engender different methods of enquiry. This volume addresses many of the key issues which are currently exercising the minds of child language researchers, and which are likely to motivate research for some years to come. The chapters included here-all previously unpublished-present a great deal of new data and address a range of theoretical issues from a variety of perspectives.

This volume provides, at postgraduate student level, an accessible introduction to stoichiometric asymmetric synthesis. The authors focus on stereoselective C-C bond formation in acyclic systems, with an emphasis on the use of chiral auxiliaries and reagents. The book is extensively referenced and so provides a convenient point of entry to the research literature.