1 Steinberg, Danny, 1997, An introduction to psycholinguistics, Longman How children learn language We have minds and in our minds we have language. Bor how did language gec there? How did we Icarn co produce and understand spe Ac birth we cannot speak, nor can we understand speech. Yet, by the age of + years we will have learned the basic vocabulary, syntax (gramoaccal rules and structures) and proauncianon of our language. Th tcué of children the world ever, whatever the language of their people may be. And, while they still have passives and other elaborate syntactic structures Lo learn (along with a never-ending stock of vocabulary items}, nevertheless, by that age they will have overcome the most difficult obstacles in language learning. Indeed, the language proficiency of che 4- or $-year-old is often the envy of the adult second language learnce who has been struggling for years to master the language. It is one of the fundamental tasks of the field of psycholinguistics to explain how all of this has occurred. Tor reasons that will become morc apparent later, language learning must be separaced into Lwo distinct, but related, psychological processes: thac of speech production and that of speech underscanding. I shall deal with each in turn and then consider how they are celaced. 1.1 The development of speech production 1.1.1 Vocalization While babies a few months old do notspeak, they do make sounds through their moudhs, In fact, they make quite a variety of sounds. 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