Below is the abstract of a forthcoming precis of a book that will shortly be circulated for Multiple Book Review in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS): [Please note that this precis was in fact accepted and archived to the web in August 2000 but the recent move of BBS to New York delayed the Call until now.] PRECIS OF: HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE MEANINGS OF WORDS by Paul Bloom http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Bloom/ This book has been accepted for a muliple book review to be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Reviewers must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a reviewer for this book, to suggest other appropriate reviewers, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to nominate someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. A full electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) To help us put together a balanced list of reviewers, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a reviewer. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate reviewer for this book, an electronic draft of the precis (only) is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. Please note that it is the *BOOK*, not the precis, that is to be reviewed. Please also indicate in your reply whether you already have the book or would require a copy to be sent to you. _____________________________________________________________ PRECIS OF: HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE MEANINGS OF WORDS Paul Bloom Department of Psychology Yale University P.O. Box 208205 New Haven, CT 06520 Paul.Bloom(a)yale.edu http://pantheon.yale.edu/~pb85 KEYWORDS: cognitive development, concepts, meaning, social cognition, semantics, syntax, theory of mind, word learning ABSTRACT: Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How children learn the meanings of words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are not special to word learning. This proposal is an alternative to the view that word learning is the result of simple associative learning mechanisms, and it rejects as well the notion that children possess constraints, either innate or learned, that are specifically earmarked for word learning. This theory is extended to account for how children learn names for objects, substances, and abstract entities, pronouns and proper names, verbs, determiners, prepositions, and number words. Several related topics are also discussed, including naïve essentialism, children’s understanding of representational art, the nature of numerical and spatial reasoning, and the role of words in the shaping of mental life. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Bloom/ ____________________________________________________________ Please do not prepare a review yet. Just let us know, after having inspected the precis, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the book. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. _______________________________________________________________________ *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENTS *** (1) The authors of scientific articles are not paid money for their refereed research papers; they give them away. What they want is to reach all interested researchers worldwide, so as to maximize the potential research impact of their findings. Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View costs are accordingly access-barriers, and hence impact-barriers for this give-away research literature. There is now a way to free the entire refereed journal literature, for everyone, everywhere, immediately, by mounting interoperable university eprint archives, and self-archiving all refereed research papers in them. Please see: http://www.eprints.org http://www.openarchives.org/ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- (2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are strongly encouraged to self-archive all their papers in their own institution's Eprint Archives or in CogPrints, the Eprint Archive for the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/ It is extremely simple to self-archive and will make all of our papers available to all of us everywhere, at no cost to anyone, forever. Authors of BBS papers wishing to archive their already published BBS Target Articles should submit it to BBSPrints Archive. Information about the archiving of BBS' entire backcatalogue will be sent to you in the near future. Meantime please see: http://www.bbsonline.org/help/ and http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- (3) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!).