"The Child and the World! There is nothing more wonderful
to watch than a small child, 2 or 3 years old, speaking to
its mother, holding a conversation with its mother. It
seems miraculous that in such a short period a child can reach
so far in its use of this most precious of human possessions,
language. In this book I consider how it is possible that a child
can acquire all the complexities of its parent language and amass
a large lexicon to refer to objects and actions of all kinds, through
language to mirror the world in which it fi nds itself. The miracle
can be explained by accepting that all aspects of language are
not arbitrary.
They derive from the brain systems controlling perception and action.
We internalise perceived patternings in the world and transfer them
from our eyes and other senses to the motor patternings of speech.
Children acquire words effortlessly because the motor programs
generated by perception of particular objects or actions are matched
instantaneously with the motor programs generated by the soundstructure
of the words for the given objects and actions. This is the
essence of the motor theory of language"
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