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<p>Preface vii</p> <p><b>Part I: Phylogenetic Origins 1</b></p> <p>1. A Very Long Look Back at Language Development: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Human Language 3<br /><i>Catherine Hobaiter, University of St. Andrews, Scotland</i></p> <p>2. Building a Communication System in Infancy 31<br /><i>Athena Vouloumanos and Amy Yamashiro, New York University, New York</i></p> <p>3. Connecting Language Acquisition and Language Evolution: Clues from the Emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language* 57<br /><i>Ann Senghas, Barnard College, New York</i></p> <p><b>Part II: Ontogenetic Origins and Mechanisms 87</b></p> <p>4. The Role of Prenatal Experience and Basic Auditory Mechanisms in the Development of Language 89<br /><i>Maria Clemencia Ortiz Barajas and Judit Gervain, Université Paris Descartes, Paris</i></p> <p>5. Infant Speech Perception: Integration of Multimodal Data Leads to a New Hypothesis – Sensorimotor Mechanisms Underlie Learning 113<br /><i>Patricia K. Kuhl, University of Washington</i></p> <p><b>Part III: Functions 159</b></p> <p>6. Does Vocabulary Help Structure the Mind? 161<br /><i>Gary Lupyan and Martin Zettersten, University of Wisconsin-Madison</i></p> <p>7. Numerical Symbols as Explanations of Human Perceptual Experience 201<br /><i>David Barner, University of California, San Diego</i></p> <p>Author Index 243</p> <p>Subject Index 253</p>

<b>Maria Sera</b> was born in Havana, Cuba and emigrated to the U.S. at the age of seven where she initially lived with her grandparents in Washington Heights, New York. After her family was re-united in the U.S. they settled in southern Indiana. She earned her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa before being hired by the University of Minnesota in 1989, where she bacme a Full Professor since 2003. She has over 40 publications on the development of language and its role in cognition. She approaches developmental questions from dynamic systems and neural network persepctives. Her work has included monolingual and bilingual speakers of English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Hungarian and American Sign Language, and is among the first to show that language differences can reflect differences in categorization across speakers of different languages. She currently lives with her husband in Minneapolis. 

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