The authors of The Origins of Grammar have pioneered one of the mostimportant methodological advances in language learning in the past decade: theintermodal preferential looking paradigm, which can be used to assess lexical andsyntactic knowledge in children as young as thirteen months. They describe a theoryof language learning that emphasizes the role of multiple cues and forces indevelopment. They further show how infants shift their reliance on different aspectsof the linguistic input, moving from a bias to attend to prosodic information to areliance on semantic information, and finally to a reliance on the syntaxitself.