• Acknowledgements; Glossary of text conventions and symbols; Introduction; Part I. Problems with Words: 1. What's in a word?; 2. The child's road to words; 3. Blocks on the road to words; 4. Exploring the blockage; 5. 'Dant always day dings': problems with phonology; 6. 'Stip' or 'step' or 'slip' or what?: problems with lexical processing; Part II. Grappling with Verb Structure: 7. Translating events; 8. Growing verb structures; 9. Shortfalls with verbs; 10. 'Thing out. Tip in there': problems with verb processing; Part III. Missing Function Morphemes: 11. Filling out sentences; 12. 'That one not working, see': problems with auxiliary verb processing; Part VI. Hidden Meanings, Baffling Meanings: 13. The roots of meaning; 14. '[æ] you don't tell nobody this?': strengths in pragmatic processing; 15. 'I can speak Chinese. But I can't speak Chinese': problems in pragmatic processing; Endpoint and springboard; Further reading; References; Index.

'This is a delightful and an important book. The mixture of real life examples and linguistically sophisticated analyses is just right. Chiat focuses especially intently on phonological problems and word learning problems and the cascading effects these can have on other aspects of language development. Throughout, we never lose sight of individual children with their own individual problems.' Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology