Language use is a skill that requires exposure to language, feedback on usage, and practice. So children need exposure from expert speakers, feedback on the language being acquired, and on any errors children produce, and practice along the way. Languages differ, so the paths children follow within and across languages may vary, and some constructions may be harder to acquire in one language, easier in another. The goal is to learn to use language for communication. Language is essentially social, relying on common ground. Part I (Chapters 2-6) focusses on how adults talk with children; children’s analysis of the speech stream; their first production of words; and how they assign meanings to words. Part II (Chapters 7-11) focusses on children’s acquisition of structure: elaborations of information inside clauses, and combinations of clauses. They also rely on structure when coining new words. Part III (Chapters 12-14) looks at turn-taking, learning to be polite, persuasive, and informative, and how to tell stories. Children who hear two languages have two such systems to learn. Part IV (Chapters 15-16) summarizes evidence for biological specialization for language and considers how continuity and change are reflected in language processing.

Similar to changes that occurred during the Nadir, for the decades since the 1973–1975 recession, African American – White wage and family income inequality has remained stagnant, despite unambiguous progress in the average quantity and quality of African American education relative to White Americans. This progress was due do African American self-help, school desegregation, and increase in the years of free education. But, the Black–White college degree gap has increased since the demise of Jim Crow; this increase is explained by racial wealth differences.

This chapter begins the sociolinguistic journey of the book, focusing on quantitative analysis of compliments alongside more detail-oriented qualitative analysis. Compliments, as a speech act, work to attribute ‘goods’ to others and thus naturally carries larger value judgments about what a society views as ‘good.’ Compliments in childrens’ movies likewise act as a lens to reveal what the filmmakers consider worthy of praise in their characters — and importantly, whether that varies by gender. In Disney and Pixar films, compliment giving is not presented as particularly gendered but receiving compliments skews towards female recipients. Qualitatively, female characters on-screen together are portrayed as using compliments as a routine politeness strategy and female villains use the guise of this practice to hide more nefarious purposes. This chapter also finds some tentative initial evidence linking femininity and politeness. While compliments are used by both male and female characters, the female characters use compliments as a routine politeness or rapport-building strategy, whereas male characters complimenting another outside task-based settings is less routine, and at times even framed as a climatically “big deal.” This suggests that although characters of either gender can compliment, compliments as a routine politeness strategy is still associated more closely with femininity.

This chapter provides a thorough revision of the status of boys and youths in the early modern period, attending to the neglected question of physical skill and training. It argues that attending to historically situated forms of physical expectation can shed light on how particular bodily skills are culturally cultivated, placing a more active emphasis on boys' bodies than scholars of early modern culture have typically tended to. The chapter draws on religious writings, conduct books, memoirs, apprenticeship manuals, and educational tracts in order to provide a wide-ranging picture of how boys' physical capacities were understood, improved, and manipulated in this period. Examining the ways in which boys and their bodies are situated in these works – often with an emphasis on physical labour and potential for activity – the chapter argues for a shared culture of expectation around the bodies of early modern boys in which physical movement and productivity is at the forefront. This culture, it moves to suggest, is everywhere discernible in contemporary attitudes to the early modern theatre, which articulated a pervasive fascination with the moving, working bodies of boy performers.

This chapter considers how the moving, working bodies of boy actors were depicted on stage throughout the early modern period, drawing together a number of metatheatrical instances which explicitly stage the acquisition and performance of theatrical skill. Focusing particularly on moments in plays by Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare, it argues for a theatre directly influenced by and representative of early modern culture's fascination with boys' physical capacities. Having established the early modern stage as a site of heightened physical display, the chapter moves to consider what bearing this culture of physical training and skill demonstration had on the careers and reputations of individual boy actors. It traces the careers of leading boy actors Nathan Field and Richard Robinson, attending to the highly physical nature of the roles these boys played, as well as how playwrights and audiences celebrated and commemorated the corporeal nature of their performances. Boy actors' physical performances, it ultimately argues, had a demonstrable impact on individual careers and reputations as well as company repertories.

The Introduction takes as its starting point the desire expressed in James Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699) to 'guess at the action' of early modern players, arguing that the 'action' of boy performers is partially recoverable from the texts that have come down to us provided that we are willing to read with physical skill in mind. It surveys the past century's critical fascination with boy actors, suggesting that a great deal of pre-existing work has neglected the embodied stagecraft required of these young performers. It additionally makes a case for the value of practice-based research in the study of early modern drama's corporeal dynamics, and maps out the book's integration of this method into its analysis of a wide range of plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Introduction ends with an outline of the book's structure, which explains how the chapters cumulatively build a more physically and theatrically sensitive picture of the work of boy actors in this period.

This chapter considers how star roles such as Shakespeare's Cleopatra were sculpted and scored by precisely the kind of physical virtuosity that is demanded in the scenes of skill instruction and sporting display discussed elsewhere in the book. The chapter offers sustained, in-depth readings of a number of leading female roles, placing Cleopatra within a broad theatrical context of corporeally virtuosic leading women including the titular heroine of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, Pandora in John Lyly's The Woman in the Moon, and Lucretia in Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter. It also offers sustained, in-depth readings (partially informed by practice-based research) of particularly spectacular features of Cleopatra's stagecraft, demonstrating how specific acts of violence and physical collaboration redound widely across the early modern dramatic canon. These cross-repertorial readings create a complex network of physical feats and corporeal interactions between actors that centre on the dexterity of the leading boy player, further extending the concept of early modern theatrical culture’s shared investment in boys’ corporeal performances.

Stage talk is a style that makes theater out of one’s own mastery of talk by generating a density of formal coherence in place of the messiness that ordinary conversation entails. As Erving Goffman has proposed, “[e]very transmission … is necessarily subject to ‘noise.’” In conversation, this noise manifests as interruptions, overlaps, false starts, rewinds, and other influencies. And yet we manage to filter out such static as extraneous to the conversation at hand, often with such success that we might be surprised to discover their inclusion in a transcript of what we had just experienced. Stage talk aestheticizes the idealization of form that subtends representations of speech: It purifies the noise that defines ordinary talk – interruptions, false starts, gaffes are gone – in order to impart utterance a conspicuous poetic coherence. The actor who delivers this language to audiences assembled at a playhouse constitutes the early modern period’s animating fantasy of publicness, which is the fantasy that a style of talk can turn one from a stranger into a spectacle for other strangers to imitate.

Chapter 2 establishes the context usually neglected by histories of agricultural literature: how farming was learned without books in the prevailing system of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the discourse on the ‘mystery of husbandry’ (and closely associated discourse of ‘secrets’), a term denoting the knowledge and skills acquired by experienced practitioners that were inaccessible to amateurs, to both elucidate contemporary beliefs about learning through labour and to indicate the ways in which the publication of husbandry manuals disrupted existing notions of expertise. In doing so, it explores the parallels between craft and farming knowledge and borrows ideas from modern studies to argue that early modern husbandmen and housewives would have possessed a ‘peasant epistemology’ analogous to an ‘artisanal epistemology’. The chapter argues that when linked to broader socio-economic changes in farming, the emergence of the term ‘mystery of husbandry’ in the seventeenth century can be seen as a symptom of tectonic shifts in the social system of agricultural knowledge. In short, the knowledge of husbandry was being commodified in an increasingly competitive commercial environment.

This chapter explores the ideathat a discernible and Hebraic epistemological process is present, relevant, and persistent across the Christian Scriptures. Moreover, when looking for present-day analogs for biblical epistemology, the scientific enterpriseproposed by Michael Polanyi, Marjorie Grene, Thomas Kuhn, et al. best fits the bill.