First Steps in Language Acquisition
Katherine Nelson, Ph .D.
Abstract, The roo ts o f lan gu age acqu isition in preverbal cogn itive a nd co mm u nica tive syste ms and the earl y development o f co m pre he nsio n and product ion of language between 8 a nd 30 months arc described . Ind ividual differences in language learning patterns emerge from th e interaction of the child's the o ry of communicative function , the child' s prelinguistic cognitive organization, and the model of th e language presented to him or her by adults and other children.
In order to understand the development of language in the individual child it is important to go beyond the norms of development and to look at the development process as it unfolds. Recent research in developmental ps ycholinguistics has given us the foundation for doing this and thereby for deepening our understand ing at both a theoretical and a practical level. Until a few years ago most stud en ts of language development theory held that language begins when the child begins to spea k in short sentences , a position that limited our view of the process as a whole, The primary reason for this position was that the sentence was considered by linguists to be the basic unit of language and until the child gave evidence of syn tac tic structure by combining words, language was considered to be potential onl y. Very few of the studies of early syntax that were published in the 19()()s or early 1970s (e.g., Bloom, 1970; Brown, 1973 ; McNeill , 1970) gave an y consideration at all to the role played by earlier manifestations of language skills, such as babbling, one-word speech, or earl y comprehension. The child below the age of 2 years was considered basically prelinguistic. Today, the emphasis has shifted to the importance of early signs of language, or at least communication; for example, there is accumulating evidence for the specialized early perception of speech sounds (Morse, 1974 , 1977) and for the establishment of motherchild communication patterns in early infancy evident in mutual gaze and vocali zation exhanges (Stern et . ai, 1975). We are all Dr. N el.
Katherine Nelson, Ph .D.
Abstract, The roo ts o f lan gu age acqu isition in preverbal cogn itive a nd co mm u nica tive syste ms and the earl y development o f co m pre he nsio n and product ion of language between 8 a nd 30 months arc described . Ind ividual differences in language learning patterns emerge from th e interaction of the child's the o ry of communicative function , the child' s prelinguistic cognitive organization, and the model of th e language presented to him or her by adults and other children.
In order to understand the development of language in the individual child it is important to go beyond the norms of development and to look at the development process as it unfolds. Recent research in developmental ps ycholinguistics has given us the foundation for doing this and thereby for deepening our understand ing at both a theoretical and a practical level. Until a few years ago most stud en ts of language development theory held that language begins when the child begins to spea k in short sentences , a position that limited our view of the process as a whole, The primary reason for this position was that the sentence was considered by linguists to be the basic unit of language and until the child gave evidence of syn tac tic structure by combining words, language was considered to be potential onl y. Very few of the studies of early syntax that were published in the 19()()s or early 1970s (e.g., Bloom, 1970; Brown, 1973 ; McNeill , 1970) gave an y consideration at all to the role played by earlier manifestations of language skills, such as babbling, one-word speech, or earl y comprehension. The child below the age of 2 years was considered basically prelinguistic. Today, the emphasis has shifted to the importance of early signs of language, or at least communication; for example, there is accumulating evidence for the specialized early perception of speech sounds (Morse, 1974 , 1977) and for the establishment of motherchild communication patterns in early infancy evident in mutual gaze and vocali zation exhanges (Stern et . ai, 1975). We are all Dr. N el.
