From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater, and you know we're going to do something a little different this week,

or at least a little different from me.

We're going to do a show about how kids learn language.

A lot of you have asked me for this over the past few years, and I haven't done it because,

frankly, I always thought I didn't care about the topic.

No offense to anybody whose topic this is, but I always kind of thought that it just wasn't my thing,

and it was kind of like the show for me is about sharing my toys, and I always thought of first language acquisition as linguists call it.

It's kind of when you're sharing one of your toys that you don't really like that much,

like if somebody gives you GI Jim.

Remember those sort of bad GI Joe's, or if like some kind person gives you a set of dominoes,

but you notice I dominoes this never really much fun.

You don't want to share that, but over the years, actually, I've been finding that I do like first language acquisition.

There's so many interesting things about it.

It's really just a matter of how you come at it.

You have to pull the camera back a little bit, but there are plenty of things to talk about.

It is a shareable toy.

So let's do this.

So much has been learned about this topic.

If you're looking for a new podcast, might I recommend our podcast?

Hi, I'm Gabe Dunn, and I'm Allison Raskin.

We have a weekly show called Just Between Us, where we explore every kind of topic out there.

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