THE EIGHT-FINGERED CRIMINAL'S SON is a quirky collection of mostly true stories about growing up in 1970s Southern California.

It's the day after Christmas. Bill Snyder, a disillusioned high school teacher who's pretty sure he's been receiving signs from a higher power, feels compelled to wander up a mountain trail and into a mysterious valley where he undergoes a bona fide transcendental experience. Snyder's grizzled spirit guide leads him on a strange and powerful journey of self-discovery with Ernest Hemingway, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, and a mystical procession of curious characters at The Spirit Guide Bar.

The plan was to teach for a year, make a little dough, and get back to doing stand-up comedy. The comedy routine got lost in the shuffle and William Snyder's one year gig stretched into a 29-year career that included stints teaching at inner-city schools, Catholic schools, charter schools, accommodation schools, and boys reformatories, in addition to working as a satellite TV teacher and teaching at an upper-middle-class "normal" school that turned out to be anything but normal. William Snyder's stories are gritty, poignant, funny, and often bizarre, honestly recounting the triumphs and...

In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning.
The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics such as phonotactics and syllable structure, prosodic phenomena, compound word formation, and...