Child: care, health and development 1976, 2, 113-122
Review: language acquisition in the normal child J O H N D. CORMICAN English Department, Utica College, Utica, New York 13502 Accepted for publication 20 November 1975 The debate over the process by which a normal child develops the ability to use language, like the processes by which any human being acquires any particular human characteristic, resolves itself into the customary naturenurture dichotomy. Of course, as is almost always the case, the process is influenced by both nature and nurture. The problem, then, is to determine the relative influence of both nature (biological inheritance) and nurture (environment) on the child's acquisition of language. Since no other species develops true language, it is obvious that one of the conditions for language development is biological inheritance. Noam Chomsky (1972) has theorized that language is 'a kind of latent structure in the human mind' and that 'acquisition of language is largely a matter of maturation of an
innate language capacity'. Eric Lenneberg (1964) views language acquisition as the result of 'an innately mapped-in program for behavior . . . with a rigid developmental history'. Neurological evidence shows that language development is contingent upon the maturation and changes, particularly specialization, within the neuromuscular systems (Mussen et al. 1974). Every normal child, then, as part of his biological inheritance should develop language as he matures physiologically. Indeed, even the biologically handicapped child, such as one with an IQ of 40, will normally develop language (Langendoen 1970). It is equally obvious that a child does not have as part of his biological inheritance a particular knowledge of French, English, Swahili, or any other language. What is inherited, according to Chomsky (1965), is a language acquisition device which includes: 1 A technique for representing input signals 2 A way of representing structural information about the signals 3 Some initial delimitation of a class of possible hypotheses about language structure 4 A method for determining what each such hypothesis implies with respect to each sentence 5 A method for selecting one of the (presumably, infinitely many) hypotheses that are allowed by (3) and are compatible with the primary linguistic data. 113
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This device allows the child to develop 'an internal representation of a system of rules (for a particular language) that determines how sentences are to be produced and understood' (Dinneen 1967). In essence, Chomsky (1965) is suggesting that that child inherits a linguistic theory biologically, and that the theory allows him to 'determine which of the possible languages is that of the community in which he is placed'. While it is impossible to verify the existence of either the innate language acquisition device posited above or the innate linguistic theory, some empirical observations suggest that they do exist. James L. Jenkins (1969) notes that there is overwhelming evidence that the child approaches language systematically although it is not clear whether he is testing alternative systems or choosing one system which he progressively differentiates and refines. Lois Bloom's (1970) study of language development in three children argues that the 'emerging grammars' of children as they approximate the adult language differ from each other because of different strategies that each child uses in approaching a language system. Although each child must devise his own grammar, it will be largely like everyone else's, but it will also reflect his own idiosyncracies based on the different varieties of the language he hears around him (Wardhaugh 1972). However, all linguists agree upon the importance of environment in the language acquisition of the child. No child can develop language unless he is exposed to people who speak a language. Feral children have never developed language before being found; indeed, they never develop a complete language at all if they are found after a certain maturational period has passed (Langacker 1973). Chomsky has written that 'the language-acquisition system may be fully functional only during a "critical period" of mental development or . . . that its various maturational stages have critical periods' (Chomsky 1965, p. 206). Nevertheless, reinforcement by the environment and imitation of persons around the child cannot completely explain the process by which the child acquires language (Mussen et al. 1974). Since 'normal speech consists, in large part, of fragments, false starts, blends, and other distortions,' the child's innate language theory must allow him to reject much of the speech around him as poorly formed, as he internalizes the grammar of a specific language (Chomsky 1972). Basically, what the child develops from hearing 'almost random and arbitrary linguistic data' is a linguistic competence that allows him to produce an infinite number of sentences, many of which, obviously, he could never have heard anyone else say (Owen 1965). Parents sometimes wonder what they should be doing to help their child develop language. Yet tests have shown that the grammatical knowledge of
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children under the age of three and a half years has not been increased either by modelling (providing well-formed examples of speech) or by expansion (filling in the missing parts of the child's 'telegraphic' sentences) (Mussen et al. 1974). It would also be impossible for a parent to develop a radonal, ordered plan to teach a child the grammar of his language because 'no adult "knows" how he generates new grammatical sentences' (Lenneberg 1964). However, it is often said that class differences in language ability of children result in lower class children, whose less educated mothers teach them a restricted linguistic code 'which emphasizes authority and tells the child how to behave without giving him the reasons', performing more poorly on verbal problem solving tests than those middle or upper class children, whose educated mothers teach them an elaborated code 'which tries to explain how things are and why certain courses of action are desirable' (Stone & Church 1973). However, researchers have pointed out that performance is not competence, and some evidence shows that lower class children can perform in an elaborated code when they are motivated to do so, meaning that their internalized knowledge (competence) of the language does not differ from those children who might more frequendy perform with an elaborated linguistic code (Mussen et al. 1974). In reality, a person's speech does not show what a person knows about language. An adult may comprehend sentences that he himself would never say. Similarly, 'children appear to comprehend utterances before they are able to produce such utterances for themselves' (Falk 1973). Before the child is a year old and before he begins to use words himself, he understands 'simple commands and requests' as well as 'cue words and phrases for familiar games and routine activities like bathing and eating' (Stone & Church 1973). Julia Falk (1973) discovered that her daughter who could not say spoon IspunI acted as if she did not understand adults who used her childhood pronunciation of spoon as /sun/ or /pun/; this was interpreted as indicating that her daughter knew the correct form of the word although she could not articulate it yet herself. Since language development depends upon maturational development (Lenneberg 1964), it seems obvious that the biological components used in cognition mature at a more rapid rate than those used in articulation. The constant order of language development may also be considered 'an indirect cue for the deepseated nature of language predisposition in the child' (Lenneberg 1964, p. 597). This constant order of development of language as the child matures physiologically can be shown by examining the order of development in the three components of language according to the structuralists' analysis. 'The structural aspects of language consist essentially of the sound system
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(phonology), rules for formation of words from sounds (morphology), and rules for word combinations (grammar or syntax).' (Mussen et al. 1974, p. 235).
The first two stages in the child's production of sounds are unrelated or related only peripherally to the sound system of any language. After initially just making crying noises, the child usually adds cooing noises during the third month after birth. These cooing sovmds are primarily high vowel sounds like /i/, /E/, and /u/ (the vowel sounds in beet, bet, and boot respectively) and back consonants like /k/ and /g/ (the first sounds of coat and goat respecdvely) (Falk 1973). Children make these sounds regardless of the language they hear in their environment; in fact, even deaf children coo the same way (Falk 1973). The babbling stage in the fifth or sixth month also falls short of true language (Stone & Church 1973). During this stage, environment again plays no part. A child in an English-speaking environment may produce many of the sounds, rhythms, and pitch patterns used in the English language, but he also produces sounds, rhythms, and pitch patterns never used in English words or sentences (Langendoen 1970). It has been said that children in the babbling stage 'produce all the sounds that form the basts of all languages including German gutterals, French trills, and Hebrew ch sounds. The early babbling of an Indonesian baby cannot be distinguished from that of a Russian or English infant.' (Mussen et al. 1974, pp. 241-242).
Although babbling at its later stages gradually mixes with true speech, it is not clear that 'babbling plays any true role in the acquisition of language'.
The child has made /k/ sounds throughout the cooing and babbling stages, but when an English-speaking child begins to speak, he may not make /k/ sounds in cookie /kuki/ but say /tuti/ instead (Falk 1973). On the other hand, the common baby talk words in many languages for mother and father, ma-ma and da-da, may have developed from two standard babbles the world over; how does one know when the child has stopped babbling and started reacting to his parents ? (Stone & Church 1973). Similarly, the babbling of a ten-month-old child will reflect the basic intonation patterns of the language in his environment, i.e. the babbling of a child who will speak Chinese sounds different from that of a child who will speak English. Specifically, some of the utterances of a child in an English-speaking environment will sound like statements with a falling final intonation contour, and others will sound like questions with a rising final intonation contour (Falk 1973). The child's first true speech sounds are basically the same, regardless of the language he hears regularly in his environment (Mussen et al. 1974). The child is said to have spoken his first word, usually from eight to eighteen months of age or older, when he produces a sequence of sounds that are more or less similar to the sequence of sounds that an adult would produce with the
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same meaning. The word will normally consist of the first vowel /a/ (as in hot), a low back vowel, and a bilabial consonant like /p/, /b/, or /m/ produced with a complete closure of the mouth with the two hps. Having begun with soimds that differ maximally from each other, the child then gradually makes finer distinctions until all of the sounds of his language are learned. The vowels that differ most from /a/ are learned second and third; for example, /i/ (as in heat) and /u/ (as in boot) which are both high vowels are learned next because they differ maximally from /a/ by being high vowels and from each other maximally because /i/ is the highest front vowel and /u/ is the highest back vowel. Mid vowels like /e/ (as in wait) and /o/ (as in go) are learned later, and vowels involving secondary articulatory activity like French nasalized vowels are learned only after the corresponding vowel produced only by primary articuladon, i.e. position of the tongue in the mouth, are learned (Falk 1973). Similarly, since the child began by producing stopped consonants formed by a complete closure at the front of the mouth like /p/ and /b/, he next produces stopped consonants formed by a complete closure at the back of the mouth (/k/ and /g/) and in the center of the mouth (/t/ and /d/). The stopped consonants are learned before the fricative consonants like If I and /v/ because it requires less articulatory control to block the air stream completely than it does to position the speech organs to allow the air stream to come out of the mouth impeded, i.e. passing between the organs of ardculation with friction. The fricatives are learned before affricates like /c/ (the first sound in child) and /]/ (the first sound in gentle) because affricates are produced by combining the procedures for producing stopped consonants (a complete closure) and for producing fricatives (a partial closure with the air forced between two organs of articulation). Liquids like /I/ and /r/ which are produced by combining the procedures for producing vowels and the other consonants as well as adding their own special tongue movements are learned much later than the other sounds of a language (Falk 1973). The order in which the significant sounds or phonemes are learned can be used to support the argument for language being an innate inherited feature of man. The order of acquisition corresponds roughly to the frequency of occurrence of these sounds in languages in the world; /a/ appears in all languages in the world, for instance, and almost all languages which have three vowels or more have /i/ and /u/ as well. Similarly, the first consonants that a child learns are those that appear most frequently in world languages, and those that are rarer like /0/ (the first sound in thin) and /O/ (the first sound in then) are learned relatively late (Falk 1973). When the child first begins to speak, his 'sentences' have neither mor-
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phology nor syntax. At the holophrastic stage, the child uses one word to stand for a thing, but the thing 'may be a single object called mama or a whole situation called mapank. The parents will interpret the latter as a sentence— Mama spank—but to the child it is a word. He has no basis for dividing it.' (Bolinger 1965). The holophrastic period may last from only a few days (for those who enter it late) to a year, but the common range is from three to nine months (Falk 1973). During this period, there are no morphological markers like noun plural inflections or verb tense infiections, and, of course, there are no function word morphemes like articles or prepositions (Stone & Church 1973). However, since children at the holophrastic stage consistently use 'words in appropriate grammatical and situational contexts', they may know more about syntactic relationships than their performance devoid of morphological markers and words in series would indicate. The absence of complex syntactic structures may also be only the result of the child not having mastered the phonology of his language sufficiently to produce longer utterances (Falk 1973). At the second or analytic stage, the child recognizes the different elements in his holophrastic sentences so that papank (when his father spanks him) may occur along with mapank. At this stage mapank is a sentence composed of two parts and 'will probably be modified to Mama pank' (Bolinger 1965). This stage usually begins at from eighteen to twenty-four months (Mussen et al. 1974). Once it is reached, the combining of new words seems automatic, and the child may combine words that have not been given to him for repetition such as 'eat cup' meaning 'the dog is eating out ofthe cup' (Lenneberg 1965). These first sentences suggest that the child is aware of syntactic relationships since an English-speaking child will speak subject and predicate or verb and object in the proper English word order (Mussen et al. 1974). 'Once a child has produced a combination, he usually follows up by producing several more that contain one of the words in his first combination . . . . The word that occurs over and over again in such two-word sentences is often referred to
as the pivot word.' (Falk 1973, p. 239). The pivot words are usually words that are also used alone quite often, and the phenomenon occurs not only in English but also in Russian and Spanish and probably in other languages as well (Falk 1973). Pivot speech has been described as 'the child's attempts to apply a single form with invariable grammaticalfunction in different formal contexts' in contrast to telegraphic speech which is 'the child's attempts at manipulating substantive forms with various grammatical meaning' (Bloom 1970, p. 223). Telegraphic speech expresses a broad range of syntactic relationships as has been shown by analysis of children speaking German, Finnish, Russian,
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Turkish, and Luo (spoken in Kenya) as well as English, and it includes questions and commands (Mussen et al. 1974). Telegraphic speech involves no grammatical morphemes like articles, prepositions, or noun and verb inflections; instead, it is made up of what adults would consider nouns, verbs, and adjectives without the inflections that adults would add to them (Falk 1973). The earliest part of this stage is sometimes called the syntactic stage because the child has determined classes of words which are the same, like nouns and verbs, and recognizes that different combinations of the same words reflect different situations, i.e. Mama spank and Spank mama (Bolinger 1965). Of course, the child has no name for these classes of words which he considers the same type of word, but the fact that this 'associative clustering' may occur as early as two years of age lends credence to the idea 'that language may exist for the child in an organized way almost from the beginning' (Stone & Church 1973). The last two sentence stages last for longer periods of time than the flrst three. The structural stage involves combining sentences from the syntactic stage together by the process of embedding. Initially at this stage, structures like baby chair and Daddy sit chair may be combined to produce Daddy sit baby chair. This stage ends when the child starts subordinating one whole sentence to another: If I go, will you stay may result from the subordination of a statement like I go to a question like Will you stay ? (Bolinger 1965). It is obvious from the examples above that, despite the customary structuralist hierarchy of language analysis going from phonology to morphology to syntax, the child actually learns many syntactic relationships before he learns grammatical morphemes. It is at the structural stage that many of the grammatical morphemes are learned, however, and usually in a flxed order. The flrst grammatical morphemes that an English-speaking child will learn are a few prepositions like in and on, articles like an, forms of the linking verb like is or are, noun plural and possessive inflections, and some verb inflections like the past {-ed} and the present participle {-ing}, although it may take a year or two before the child uses them consistently the way adults do. Studies show that the use of in and on, {-ing}, and noun plurals normally precedes the use of {-ed} and of forms of be like is (Mussen et al. 1974). Roger Brown has pointed out that those grammatical morphemes which involve only one concept like went which only involves past tense are learned before those that reflect two concepts like were which involves plurality as well as past tense; this suggests that grammatical knowledge is linked to 'cognitive and intellectual' maturation. Similarly, grammatical concepts that are expressed relatively simply in a particular language's structure are learned before those
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that are expressed complexly at the morphological level. For instance, English noun plurals which are manifested phonemically as suffixes to nouns (usually /s/ as in cats or /z/ as in dogs) are learned much earlier than are the noun plurals in Arabic whose pattern is more complex. Bilingual children who speak both Hungarian and Serbo-Croat learn to express the relationships shown by into, out of, and on top of earlier in Hungarian than they do in Serbo-Croat because the relationships are expressed more simply at the morphological level in Hungarian. Similarly grammatical concepts reflected in morphemes that are suffixed to nouns and verbs or which occur after nouns or verbs are learned at an earlier age by the child than those same concepts that are reflected by morphemes which are prefixed to noims or verbs or which appear in normal word order before nouns or verbs (Mussen et al. 1974). The final stage of sentence development is the stylistic stage. At this stage, the child has several constructions at his command in order to express the same primary information and is able to pick the right one for a particular emphasis. For example, Give the bone to Dingo and Give Dingo the bone convey the same primary information, but the second form is more appropriate if someone is about to give Dingo (a dog) the liver that is supposed to be for the family cat (Bolinger 1965). Even at the stylistic stage, however, 'the grammar of a child . . . differs in a number of significant respects from adult grammar' (Chomsky 1969). For example, the child of five or six who speaks English will not yet use the auxiliary morpheme have the way adults do, will seldom comprehend a passive form and almost never use one, will use because and therefore like then only to express time relationships rather than causal ones, and will not understand sentences in which the surface subject of a sentence is diflFerent from the deep subject like Lucy was impossible to see (Mussen et al. 1974). Children up to the age of nine are still likely to misinterpret the subject of the embedded sentence in Promise the teacher to sit down to mean that the teacher is to sit down rather than themselves (Falk 1973). Just as the child develops the phonology, morphology, and syntax of his language in an ordered fashion tied to his own physical maturation, he also develops the semantic specification of the words he uses systematically. Initially, he may overextend the meaning of a word to include more than the word means in adult language. For example, car may at first mean a large object that moves on the street and be used to refer to a bus or a truck as well as car; gradually then, the meaning of car is restricted as the child learns the words bus and truck (Falk 1973). Conversely, between the ages of two and six, the child may underextend the meaning of a word to exclude familiar things like a dog from the general class of animal and to exclude atypical
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things like caviar from the general class oi food until his concept of the category becomes broader (Mussen et al. 1974). A common type of overextension, as Piaget has observed, involves words like brother and sister which may initially be considered by the child as synonyms for boy and girl. Gradually the child adds the semantic specification to brother and sister that the terms mean that other siblings are present in the family and finally that the terms involve a reciprocal relationship among siblings. Classic examples of a special kind of underextension involve 'double-function words' like bright, hard, sweet, and cold whose original physical meanings are seldom broadened to include the metaphorically extended psychological meanings as applied to people, before the child reaches the age of seven (Mussen et al. 1974). There is some evidence that the semantic specification of words which involve universal polar dichotomies are learned by the child before those words whose semantic specifications are not innate but culturally determined. For example, although colour words are used with high frequency in English, the child learns to use them correctly much later than he learns big and little, hot and cold, wet and dry, or light and heavy. Kindergartens in America have to include special training in learning colours (Lenneberg 1964). The reason for this difficulty in learning English colour words, despite the feeling that an English-speaking adult has that our way of dividing colour spectrum is 'natural', is that colour words are arbitrary and that divisions of the spectrum vary from language to language. For example, Shona spoken in Rhodesia has only three words to divide the spectrum: dcena covers the same range as English yellow and green (except bluish-greens) as well as white; citema covers bluish-green and blue (except the blues approaching purple) as well as black; and cips'^uka encompasses purplish-blue, purple, red, and
orange on the spectrum. Bassa spoken in Libera has only two colour words: hui which covers the spectrum from green through purple and ziza which includes red through yellow (Gleason 1961). As was pointed out in the first paragraph, then, the child acquires language through the confluence of both biological and environmental factors. The parts of the acquisition process that have been detailed above show the clear influence of biology or nature. The child clearly inherits as part of his biological constitution the innate ability to develop language, but not language itself. Although it is not necessary to subscribe to the existence of Chomsky's language acquisition device, it is clear from the systematic way that the child develops phonology, morphology, and syntax that these processes are contingent upon the general rate of physiological development and maturation. However, the influence of environment or nurture is equally
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clear. Without being exposed to language in his environment at critical stages in his maturation, the child will never develop his biologically innate ability to acquire language, and the specific human language which the child does develop is determined absolutely and inexorably by his environment.
REFERENCES BLOOM L . (1970) Language Development, pp. 25, 27, 223. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts BOLINGER D . (1965) Aspects of Language, pp. 5-7. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York CHOMSKY C . (1969) The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10, p. i. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts CHOMSKY N . (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, pp. 25, 27, 30, 206. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts CHOMSKY N . (1972) Language and the mind. In lah'guage, ed. V. P. Clark et al., pp. 174, 179. St Martin's Press, New York DiNEEN F. P. (1967) An Introduction to General Linguistics, p. 358. Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc., New York FALK J. S. (1973) Linguistics and Language, pp. 232-240, 246, 261 GLEASON H.R., JR (1961) Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, pp. 4-5. Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc., New York JENKINS J.L. (1969) The acquisition of language. In Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, ed. D.L. Goslin, p. 679. Rand McNally, Chicago LANGACKER R . W . (1973) Language and its Structure, 2nd edn, p. 15. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., New York LANGENDOEN D . T . (1970) Essentials of English Grammar, pp. 2-3. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York LENNEBERG E . H . (1964) The capacity for language acquisition. In The Structure of Language, ed. J.A. Fodor & J.J. Katz, pp. 592, 594, 597-598. Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey MUSSEN P . H . et al. (1974) Child Development and Personality, 4th edn, pp. 235, 239, 241-242, 245-252, 254-257. Harper & Row, New York STONE J.L. & CHURCH J. (1973) Childhood and Adolescence, 3rd edn, pp. 54, 80,
219-220, 222. Random House, New York (1965) Transformational Grammar and the Teacher of English, p. 6. Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc., Nevv York WARDHAUGH R. (1972) Introduction to Linguistics, p. 201. McGraw-Hill Inc., New York THOMAS O .
Review: language acquisition in the normal child J O H N D. CORMICAN English Department, Utica College, Utica, New York 13502 Accepted for publication 20 November 1975 The debate over the process by which a normal child develops the ability to use language, like the processes by which any human being acquires any particular human characteristic, resolves itself into the customary naturenurture dichotomy. Of course, as is almost always the case, the process is influenced by both nature and nurture. The problem, then, is to determine the relative influence of both nature (biological inheritance) and nurture (environment) on the child's acquisition of language. Since no other species develops true language, it is obvious that one of the conditions for language development is biological inheritance. Noam Chomsky (1972) has theorized that language is 'a kind of latent structure in the human mind' and that 'acquisition of language is largely a matter of maturation of an
innate language capacity'. Eric Lenneberg (1964) views language acquisition as the result of 'an innately mapped-in program for behavior . . . with a rigid developmental history'. Neurological evidence shows that language development is contingent upon the maturation and changes, particularly specialization, within the neuromuscular systems (Mussen et al. 1974). Every normal child, then, as part of his biological inheritance should develop language as he matures physiologically. Indeed, even the biologically handicapped child, such as one with an IQ of 40, will normally develop language (Langendoen 1970). It is equally obvious that a child does not have as part of his biological inheritance a particular knowledge of French, English, Swahili, or any other language. What is inherited, according to Chomsky (1965), is a language acquisition device which includes: 1 A technique for representing input signals 2 A way of representing structural information about the signals 3 Some initial delimitation of a class of possible hypotheses about language structure 4 A method for determining what each such hypothesis implies with respect to each sentence 5 A method for selecting one of the (presumably, infinitely many) hypotheses that are allowed by (3) and are compatible with the primary linguistic data. 113
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This device allows the child to develop 'an internal representation of a system of rules (for a particular language) that determines how sentences are to be produced and understood' (Dinneen 1967). In essence, Chomsky (1965) is suggesting that that child inherits a linguistic theory biologically, and that the theory allows him to 'determine which of the possible languages is that of the community in which he is placed'. While it is impossible to verify the existence of either the innate language acquisition device posited above or the innate linguistic theory, some empirical observations suggest that they do exist. James L. Jenkins (1969) notes that there is overwhelming evidence that the child approaches language systematically although it is not clear whether he is testing alternative systems or choosing one system which he progressively differentiates and refines. Lois Bloom's (1970) study of language development in three children argues that the 'emerging grammars' of children as they approximate the adult language differ from each other because of different strategies that each child uses in approaching a language system. Although each child must devise his own grammar, it will be largely like everyone else's, but it will also reflect his own idiosyncracies based on the different varieties of the language he hears around him (Wardhaugh 1972). However, all linguists agree upon the importance of environment in the language acquisition of the child. No child can develop language unless he is exposed to people who speak a language. Feral children have never developed language before being found; indeed, they never develop a complete language at all if they are found after a certain maturational period has passed (Langacker 1973). Chomsky has written that 'the language-acquisition system may be fully functional only during a "critical period" of mental development or . . . that its various maturational stages have critical periods' (Chomsky 1965, p. 206). Nevertheless, reinforcement by the environment and imitation of persons around the child cannot completely explain the process by which the child acquires language (Mussen et al. 1974). Since 'normal speech consists, in large part, of fragments, false starts, blends, and other distortions,' the child's innate language theory must allow him to reject much of the speech around him as poorly formed, as he internalizes the grammar of a specific language (Chomsky 1972). Basically, what the child develops from hearing 'almost random and arbitrary linguistic data' is a linguistic competence that allows him to produce an infinite number of sentences, many of which, obviously, he could never have heard anyone else say (Owen 1965). Parents sometimes wonder what they should be doing to help their child develop language. Yet tests have shown that the grammatical knowledge of
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children under the age of three and a half years has not been increased either by modelling (providing well-formed examples of speech) or by expansion (filling in the missing parts of the child's 'telegraphic' sentences) (Mussen et al. 1974). It would also be impossible for a parent to develop a radonal, ordered plan to teach a child the grammar of his language because 'no adult "knows" how he generates new grammatical sentences' (Lenneberg 1964). However, it is often said that class differences in language ability of children result in lower class children, whose less educated mothers teach them a restricted linguistic code 'which emphasizes authority and tells the child how to behave without giving him the reasons', performing more poorly on verbal problem solving tests than those middle or upper class children, whose educated mothers teach them an elaborated code 'which tries to explain how things are and why certain courses of action are desirable' (Stone & Church 1973). However, researchers have pointed out that performance is not competence, and some evidence shows that lower class children can perform in an elaborated code when they are motivated to do so, meaning that their internalized knowledge (competence) of the language does not differ from those children who might more frequendy perform with an elaborated linguistic code (Mussen et al. 1974). In reality, a person's speech does not show what a person knows about language. An adult may comprehend sentences that he himself would never say. Similarly, 'children appear to comprehend utterances before they are able to produce such utterances for themselves' (Falk 1973). Before the child is a year old and before he begins to use words himself, he understands 'simple commands and requests' as well as 'cue words and phrases for familiar games and routine activities like bathing and eating' (Stone & Church 1973). Julia Falk (1973) discovered that her daughter who could not say spoon IspunI acted as if she did not understand adults who used her childhood pronunciation of spoon as /sun/ or /pun/; this was interpreted as indicating that her daughter knew the correct form of the word although she could not articulate it yet herself. Since language development depends upon maturational development (Lenneberg 1964), it seems obvious that the biological components used in cognition mature at a more rapid rate than those used in articulation. The constant order of language development may also be considered 'an indirect cue for the deepseated nature of language predisposition in the child' (Lenneberg 1964, p. 597). This constant order of development of language as the child matures physiologically can be shown by examining the order of development in the three components of language according to the structuralists' analysis. 'The structural aspects of language consist essentially of the sound system
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(phonology), rules for formation of words from sounds (morphology), and rules for word combinations (grammar or syntax).' (Mussen et al. 1974, p. 235).
The first two stages in the child's production of sounds are unrelated or related only peripherally to the sound system of any language. After initially just making crying noises, the child usually adds cooing noises during the third month after birth. These cooing sovmds are primarily high vowel sounds like /i/, /E/, and /u/ (the vowel sounds in beet, bet, and boot respectively) and back consonants like /k/ and /g/ (the first sounds of coat and goat respecdvely) (Falk 1973). Children make these sounds regardless of the language they hear in their environment; in fact, even deaf children coo the same way (Falk 1973). The babbling stage in the fifth or sixth month also falls short of true language (Stone & Church 1973). During this stage, environment again plays no part. A child in an English-speaking environment may produce many of the sounds, rhythms, and pitch patterns used in the English language, but he also produces sounds, rhythms, and pitch patterns never used in English words or sentences (Langendoen 1970). It has been said that children in the babbling stage 'produce all the sounds that form the basts of all languages including German gutterals, French trills, and Hebrew ch sounds. The early babbling of an Indonesian baby cannot be distinguished from that of a Russian or English infant.' (Mussen et al. 1974, pp. 241-242).
Although babbling at its later stages gradually mixes with true speech, it is not clear that 'babbling plays any true role in the acquisition of language'.
The child has made /k/ sounds throughout the cooing and babbling stages, but when an English-speaking child begins to speak, he may not make /k/ sounds in cookie /kuki/ but say /tuti/ instead (Falk 1973). On the other hand, the common baby talk words in many languages for mother and father, ma-ma and da-da, may have developed from two standard babbles the world over; how does one know when the child has stopped babbling and started reacting to his parents ? (Stone & Church 1973). Similarly, the babbling of a ten-month-old child will reflect the basic intonation patterns of the language in his environment, i.e. the babbling of a child who will speak Chinese sounds different from that of a child who will speak English. Specifically, some of the utterances of a child in an English-speaking environment will sound like statements with a falling final intonation contour, and others will sound like questions with a rising final intonation contour (Falk 1973). The child's first true speech sounds are basically the same, regardless of the language he hears regularly in his environment (Mussen et al. 1974). The child is said to have spoken his first word, usually from eight to eighteen months of age or older, when he produces a sequence of sounds that are more or less similar to the sequence of sounds that an adult would produce with the
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same meaning. The word will normally consist of the first vowel /a/ (as in hot), a low back vowel, and a bilabial consonant like /p/, /b/, or /m/ produced with a complete closure of the mouth with the two hps. Having begun with soimds that differ maximally from each other, the child then gradually makes finer distinctions until all of the sounds of his language are learned. The vowels that differ most from /a/ are learned second and third; for example, /i/ (as in heat) and /u/ (as in boot) which are both high vowels are learned next because they differ maximally from /a/ by being high vowels and from each other maximally because /i/ is the highest front vowel and /u/ is the highest back vowel. Mid vowels like /e/ (as in wait) and /o/ (as in go) are learned later, and vowels involving secondary articulatory activity like French nasalized vowels are learned only after the corresponding vowel produced only by primary articuladon, i.e. position of the tongue in the mouth, are learned (Falk 1973). Similarly, since the child began by producing stopped consonants formed by a complete closure at the front of the mouth like /p/ and /b/, he next produces stopped consonants formed by a complete closure at the back of the mouth (/k/ and /g/) and in the center of the mouth (/t/ and /d/). The stopped consonants are learned before the fricative consonants like If I and /v/ because it requires less articulatory control to block the air stream completely than it does to position the speech organs to allow the air stream to come out of the mouth impeded, i.e. passing between the organs of ardculation with friction. The fricatives are learned before affricates like /c/ (the first sound in child) and /]/ (the first sound in gentle) because affricates are produced by combining the procedures for producing stopped consonants (a complete closure) and for producing fricatives (a partial closure with the air forced between two organs of articulation). Liquids like /I/ and /r/ which are produced by combining the procedures for producing vowels and the other consonants as well as adding their own special tongue movements are learned much later than the other sounds of a language (Falk 1973). The order in which the significant sounds or phonemes are learned can be used to support the argument for language being an innate inherited feature of man. The order of acquisition corresponds roughly to the frequency of occurrence of these sounds in languages in the world; /a/ appears in all languages in the world, for instance, and almost all languages which have three vowels or more have /i/ and /u/ as well. Similarly, the first consonants that a child learns are those that appear most frequently in world languages, and those that are rarer like /0/ (the first sound in thin) and /O/ (the first sound in then) are learned relatively late (Falk 1973). When the child first begins to speak, his 'sentences' have neither mor-
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phology nor syntax. At the holophrastic stage, the child uses one word to stand for a thing, but the thing 'may be a single object called mama or a whole situation called mapank. The parents will interpret the latter as a sentence— Mama spank—but to the child it is a word. He has no basis for dividing it.' (Bolinger 1965). The holophrastic period may last from only a few days (for those who enter it late) to a year, but the common range is from three to nine months (Falk 1973). During this period, there are no morphological markers like noun plural inflections or verb tense infiections, and, of course, there are no function word morphemes like articles or prepositions (Stone & Church 1973). However, since children at the holophrastic stage consistently use 'words in appropriate grammatical and situational contexts', they may know more about syntactic relationships than their performance devoid of morphological markers and words in series would indicate. The absence of complex syntactic structures may also be only the result of the child not having mastered the phonology of his language sufficiently to produce longer utterances (Falk 1973). At the second or analytic stage, the child recognizes the different elements in his holophrastic sentences so that papank (when his father spanks him) may occur along with mapank. At this stage mapank is a sentence composed of two parts and 'will probably be modified to Mama pank' (Bolinger 1965). This stage usually begins at from eighteen to twenty-four months (Mussen et al. 1974). Once it is reached, the combining of new words seems automatic, and the child may combine words that have not been given to him for repetition such as 'eat cup' meaning 'the dog is eating out ofthe cup' (Lenneberg 1965). These first sentences suggest that the child is aware of syntactic relationships since an English-speaking child will speak subject and predicate or verb and object in the proper English word order (Mussen et al. 1974). 'Once a child has produced a combination, he usually follows up by producing several more that contain one of the words in his first combination . . . . The word that occurs over and over again in such two-word sentences is often referred to
as the pivot word.' (Falk 1973, p. 239). The pivot words are usually words that are also used alone quite often, and the phenomenon occurs not only in English but also in Russian and Spanish and probably in other languages as well (Falk 1973). Pivot speech has been described as 'the child's attempts to apply a single form with invariable grammaticalfunction in different formal contexts' in contrast to telegraphic speech which is 'the child's attempts at manipulating substantive forms with various grammatical meaning' (Bloom 1970, p. 223). Telegraphic speech expresses a broad range of syntactic relationships as has been shown by analysis of children speaking German, Finnish, Russian,
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Turkish, and Luo (spoken in Kenya) as well as English, and it includes questions and commands (Mussen et al. 1974). Telegraphic speech involves no grammatical morphemes like articles, prepositions, or noun and verb inflections; instead, it is made up of what adults would consider nouns, verbs, and adjectives without the inflections that adults would add to them (Falk 1973). The earliest part of this stage is sometimes called the syntactic stage because the child has determined classes of words which are the same, like nouns and verbs, and recognizes that different combinations of the same words reflect different situations, i.e. Mama spank and Spank mama (Bolinger 1965). Of course, the child has no name for these classes of words which he considers the same type of word, but the fact that this 'associative clustering' may occur as early as two years of age lends credence to the idea 'that language may exist for the child in an organized way almost from the beginning' (Stone & Church 1973). The last two sentence stages last for longer periods of time than the flrst three. The structural stage involves combining sentences from the syntactic stage together by the process of embedding. Initially at this stage, structures like baby chair and Daddy sit chair may be combined to produce Daddy sit baby chair. This stage ends when the child starts subordinating one whole sentence to another: If I go, will you stay may result from the subordination of a statement like I go to a question like Will you stay ? (Bolinger 1965). It is obvious from the examples above that, despite the customary structuralist hierarchy of language analysis going from phonology to morphology to syntax, the child actually learns many syntactic relationships before he learns grammatical morphemes. It is at the structural stage that many of the grammatical morphemes are learned, however, and usually in a flxed order. The flrst grammatical morphemes that an English-speaking child will learn are a few prepositions like in and on, articles like an, forms of the linking verb like is or are, noun plural and possessive inflections, and some verb inflections like the past {-ed} and the present participle {-ing}, although it may take a year or two before the child uses them consistently the way adults do. Studies show that the use of in and on, {-ing}, and noun plurals normally precedes the use of {-ed} and of forms of be like is (Mussen et al. 1974). Roger Brown has pointed out that those grammatical morphemes which involve only one concept like went which only involves past tense are learned before those that reflect two concepts like were which involves plurality as well as past tense; this suggests that grammatical knowledge is linked to 'cognitive and intellectual' maturation. Similarly, grammatical concepts that are expressed relatively simply in a particular language's structure are learned before those
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that are expressed complexly at the morphological level. For instance, English noun plurals which are manifested phonemically as suffixes to nouns (usually /s/ as in cats or /z/ as in dogs) are learned much earlier than are the noun plurals in Arabic whose pattern is more complex. Bilingual children who speak both Hungarian and Serbo-Croat learn to express the relationships shown by into, out of, and on top of earlier in Hungarian than they do in Serbo-Croat because the relationships are expressed more simply at the morphological level in Hungarian. Similarly grammatical concepts reflected in morphemes that are suffixed to nouns and verbs or which occur after nouns or verbs are learned at an earlier age by the child than those same concepts that are reflected by morphemes which are prefixed to noims or verbs or which appear in normal word order before nouns or verbs (Mussen et al. 1974). The final stage of sentence development is the stylistic stage. At this stage, the child has several constructions at his command in order to express the same primary information and is able to pick the right one for a particular emphasis. For example, Give the bone to Dingo and Give Dingo the bone convey the same primary information, but the second form is more appropriate if someone is about to give Dingo (a dog) the liver that is supposed to be for the family cat (Bolinger 1965). Even at the stylistic stage, however, 'the grammar of a child . . . differs in a number of significant respects from adult grammar' (Chomsky 1969). For example, the child of five or six who speaks English will not yet use the auxiliary morpheme have the way adults do, will seldom comprehend a passive form and almost never use one, will use because and therefore like then only to express time relationships rather than causal ones, and will not understand sentences in which the surface subject of a sentence is diflFerent from the deep subject like Lucy was impossible to see (Mussen et al. 1974). Children up to the age of nine are still likely to misinterpret the subject of the embedded sentence in Promise the teacher to sit down to mean that the teacher is to sit down rather than themselves (Falk 1973). Just as the child develops the phonology, morphology, and syntax of his language in an ordered fashion tied to his own physical maturation, he also develops the semantic specification of the words he uses systematically. Initially, he may overextend the meaning of a word to include more than the word means in adult language. For example, car may at first mean a large object that moves on the street and be used to refer to a bus or a truck as well as car; gradually then, the meaning of car is restricted as the child learns the words bus and truck (Falk 1973). Conversely, between the ages of two and six, the child may underextend the meaning of a word to exclude familiar things like a dog from the general class of animal and to exclude atypical
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things like caviar from the general class oi food until his concept of the category becomes broader (Mussen et al. 1974). A common type of overextension, as Piaget has observed, involves words like brother and sister which may initially be considered by the child as synonyms for boy and girl. Gradually the child adds the semantic specification to brother and sister that the terms mean that other siblings are present in the family and finally that the terms involve a reciprocal relationship among siblings. Classic examples of a special kind of underextension involve 'double-function words' like bright, hard, sweet, and cold whose original physical meanings are seldom broadened to include the metaphorically extended psychological meanings as applied to people, before the child reaches the age of seven (Mussen et al. 1974). There is some evidence that the semantic specification of words which involve universal polar dichotomies are learned by the child before those words whose semantic specifications are not innate but culturally determined. For example, although colour words are used with high frequency in English, the child learns to use them correctly much later than he learns big and little, hot and cold, wet and dry, or light and heavy. Kindergartens in America have to include special training in learning colours (Lenneberg 1964). The reason for this difficulty in learning English colour words, despite the feeling that an English-speaking adult has that our way of dividing colour spectrum is 'natural', is that colour words are arbitrary and that divisions of the spectrum vary from language to language. For example, Shona spoken in Rhodesia has only three words to divide the spectrum: dcena covers the same range as English yellow and green (except bluish-greens) as well as white; citema covers bluish-green and blue (except the blues approaching purple) as well as black; and cips'^uka encompasses purplish-blue, purple, red, and
orange on the spectrum. Bassa spoken in Libera has only two colour words: hui which covers the spectrum from green through purple and ziza which includes red through yellow (Gleason 1961). As was pointed out in the first paragraph, then, the child acquires language through the confluence of both biological and environmental factors. The parts of the acquisition process that have been detailed above show the clear influence of biology or nature. The child clearly inherits as part of his biological constitution the innate ability to develop language, but not language itself. Although it is not necessary to subscribe to the existence of Chomsky's language acquisition device, it is clear from the systematic way that the child develops phonology, morphology, and syntax that these processes are contingent upon the general rate of physiological development and maturation. However, the influence of environment or nurture is equally
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clear. Without being exposed to language in his environment at critical stages in his maturation, the child will never develop his biologically innate ability to acquire language, and the specific human language which the child does develop is determined absolutely and inexorably by his environment.
REFERENCES BLOOM L . (1970) Language Development, pp. 25, 27, 223. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts BOLINGER D . (1965) Aspects of Language, pp. 5-7. Harcourt, Brace & World, New York CHOMSKY C . (1969) The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10, p. i. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts CHOMSKY N . (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, pp. 25, 27, 30, 206. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts CHOMSKY N . (1972) Language and the mind. In lah'guage, ed. V. P. Clark et al., pp. 174, 179. St Martin's Press, New York DiNEEN F. P. (1967) An Introduction to General Linguistics, p. 358. Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc., New York FALK J. S. (1973) Linguistics and Language, pp. 232-240, 246, 261 GLEASON H.R., JR (1961) Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, pp. 4-5. Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc., New York JENKINS J.L. (1969) The acquisition of language. In Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, ed. D.L. Goslin, p. 679. Rand McNally, Chicago LANGACKER R . W . (1973) Language and its Structure, 2nd edn, p. 15. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., New York LANGENDOEN D . T . (1970) Essentials of English Grammar, pp. 2-3. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York LENNEBERG E . H . (1964) The capacity for language acquisition. In The Structure of Language, ed. J.A. Fodor & J.J. Katz, pp. 592, 594, 597-598. Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey MUSSEN P . H . et al. (1974) Child Development and Personality, 4th edn, pp. 235, 239, 241-242, 245-252, 254-257. Harper & Row, New York STONE J.L. & CHURCH J. (1973) Childhood and Adolescence, 3rd edn, pp. 54, 80,
219-220, 222. Random House, New York (1965) Transformational Grammar and the Teacher of English, p. 6. Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc., Nevv York WARDHAUGH R. (1972) Introduction to Linguistics, p. 201. McGraw-Hill Inc., New York THOMAS O .
