As background material for this book, the reader is referred to "The Scientist in the Crib" (Dr. Gopnik, et al; Perrenial, 2001). It offers a fresh and detailed evaluation of the language acquisition process by infants. At about 6 months of age, a critical change seems to occur. The specific pronunciation patterns of the language(s) heard begin to be retained in a very focused manner. Also see "The Monday Tape" (The Snow Water Corporation) at Akilo.com for more insight into this process. This audio tape, one of a series, provides multilingual speech patterns for infants. These tapes are available exclusively through Amazon.com (not available in stores). It appears that they should help an infant (birth to age 2) gain good pronunciation skills for many widely used languages.

This is a great baby book (and I'm not just biased because I'm one of the baby models in it!). There are plenty of helpful facts and ideas, as well as a lot of useful how-to.

I recently read this book during my pregnancy, having read other books like, "What to expect when you're expecting", and the Mayo Clinic Guide, and this was the best book out of all of the books I have read. I found it well-organized, concise, easy to understand, and extremely informative. I highly recommend it to any expectant mother or father!