The capacity for language acquisition in the very young is quite simply astonishing. In just a handful of years, most children in any culture around the world are capable of progressing from knowing nothing about any language to becoming fluent in their native language; proficient enough to make their speech understood in a grammatically acceptable way. While nearly every child does this, it is a feat that very few adults are able to duplicate, even when already familiar with one or more languages. When learning a second, or perhaps third, language, one must mainly concentrate on acquiring the syntax, semantics, and to a lesser extent phonology – or grammar, meaning and rules of sound – of that language. Children don’t have the advantage that would allow them to relate a new language to one already established, however, and must also learn the pragmatics, or socially acceptable contexts, and rules of sound from the beginning in conjunction with syntax and semantics. Despite these handicaps, children regularly outperform adults in language acquisition. Various theories have been proposed to explain this, from Eric Lenneberg’s “critical periods of development” to Noam Chomsky’s inside-out developmental theory, which proposes an innate linguistic ability in all humans, present from birth. These and others will be explored in the following pages along with what children do learn, linguistically, up to the age of five.
The age at which various linguistic boundaries, such as when the first word is spoken, varies slightly from infant to infant. Generally speaking, however, during the first year of life the infant is restricted to non-verbal communication, such as waving, tugging, and smiling, or commonly understood infant noises like crying and cooing. While children aren’t able to communicate in more advanced ways during this stage, evidence of their progress in learning their native language, whatever it may be, can be seen, if observed closely, in what they comprehend from others. Simple words or phrases, such as “bye-bye” or “food time!” often spoken by the mother in a high pitched voice with exaggerated intonations, are often understood near the end of this period. This form of language that is used exclusively with the infant is often referred to as ‘motherese,’ which has been found to hold the attention of infants much better than normal speech. This is perhaps due to the simple fact that this speech is out of the ordinary, and thus more interesting to the infant, but there may be other reasons as yet undiscovered.
Shortly after their first birthday, most infants begin to pronounce their first words.
After their first word is learned, children begin to rapidly broaden their vocabulary. Once children begin to associate words with objects, however, they run into a variety of problems involved with acquiring the correct definitions of words. One of these has been called the mutual exclusivity bias, which means that once one word is learned for one specific thing, the child resists learning more words that describe the same thing (Carroll, 273). It is likely that the child does this to avoid internal confusion. This makes it difficult to learn that feline, cat, Socks, animal, kitty, and mammal are all words that can refer to the household pet. Another set of phenomena that infants encounter in this stage have been termed overextension and underextension. In the latter, children mistakenly perceive, for example, that the word eat refers to eating, but only when done with a fork, spoon, and knife, or that dog only refers to the household pet. The former, overextension, occurs when children erroneously use the word dog for horses, cats, wolves, cows, and other four-legged animals. The infant typically singles out the similarities between the animals, in this case four legs, and assumes the name is the same for all of them. Occasionally the child will recognize that there must be a different word for a cow than for a dog, but he will overextend due to being ignorant of the word cow. If the parent recognizes this in her child, the proper word can be named and another word added to the child’s repertoire. Even while these problems present a stumbling block for the learning infant, they and others are eventually overcome. Learning progress in this stage through one-word conversations as well as independent babbling, which the child often performs when alone, until enough is known to progress to two word speech.
Speaking in two words as opposed to one is a milestone for infants, for when they begin to combine words, it quickly becomes evident that the infant is expressing complex thoughts that would, if spoken grammatically, take six or seven words to convey. It is between the age of two and three when children start using these two word phrases, in which they display their first understandings of grammar. It seems reasonable to balk at attaching ‘understandings of grammar’ to merely two-word phrases, but children do, at this stage, begin to understand the simplest grammatical ideas such as possessor and possession, action and object, agent and action, and more as Brown (1973)2 has discovered. These initial grammatical constructions, even when as simple as mummy dress, indicating that the dress belongs to mummy, or daddy hit, indicating that daddy has hit something, are the building blocks for later and more complex speech. During this stage of linguistic development, however, it is often observed that children are able to comprehend much more difficult phrases from their parents, siblings, or other care-givers than those which they themselves can produce. It shouldn’t be surprising that children at this stage understand much of what the hear, since their two-word utterances do convey much more than two-words worth of meaning, but it would be interesting to discover why children at this stage do not produce more complex phrases, since two-word phrases can be easily misinterpreted, when they obviously understand more complex phrases. Perhaps in this stage the semantic and syntactic abilities of the child progress faster than the phonetic ability, which is required to actually produce the sounds.
Soon after their stint of two-word speech, children begin forming multi-word phrases. This begins rapidly during the third and fourth years of life, with relatively amazing grammatical clarity, considering that the child was speaking merely two words at a time only a few months prior. As soon as children begin speaking in phrases, they become capable of having coherent conversations with others as well as giving their own narratives, since complete phrases are not as subject to the many different interpretations that two-word phrases are. At this point children will continue to progress semantically, syntactically, and phonetically, but the last area of linguistic development, pragmatism, which involves knowing when to and when not to speak in differing social contexts, and knowing when to listen, begins to come into play during the fourth and fifth year. Many parents struggle with teaching their child to not only not speak when someone else is, but to listen attentively, so that he or she may become capable of carrying on the conversation by making contributions that are related to what has already been said. However, even this is learned, to differing extents, along with the other three areas of language before the child begins her official schooling.
During the first five years, then, a great deal of linguistic knowledge is gained by the child. Theories regarding how this information is learned in such a short amount of time, and why it seems that only children are universally capably of the feat, are numerous. One of the more notable ones is Eric Lenneberg’s theory of critical periods. Lenneberg, and many later psychologists, believe that one must be exposed to language, in varying degrees, during specific stages of life or the potential for full linguistic development is lost. There is a great deal of evidence supporting this view. Sadly, nearly 35 years ago, a thirteen year old child, given the name Genie, was discovered who had been deprived of human contact and language until this time. Psychologists and linguists endeavored to both care for her as well as, justly or not, experiment with her to learn what they could about linguistic development. Her story is vast, but eventually her teachers succeeded in teaching her large amount of vocabulary, and she became relatively competent at conveying messages, but Genie never developed the ability to converse in a grammatical way. It can’t be known if Genie was born mentally retarded from birth or not – although, indeed, mental retardation may occur as a result of extreme human-contact deprivation – but her case is telling none the less, for even most mentally handicapped individuals can make some sense of grammar. Her case suggests, but does not confirm, that there is a critical period of development for the learning of syntax, if not semantics, phonology, or pragmatics.
Finally, there is a debate that is worth noting between two theories of how children learn language. One side, championed by psychologist Noam Chomsky, argues that children have innate knowledge, acquired prior to birth, and that this inborn knowledge aids them while they learn their first language. This reasoning has been characterized as an “inside-out” theory of linguistic development (Hirsh-Pasek, 17). The other side favors the social and cognitive aspects of learning language. Proponents of this thinking, termed “outside-in,” believe that children construct the language as they grow, learning solely from their social surroundings (Hirsh-Pasek, 17-19). Realistically, however, the two theories must be combined. While lacking scientific proofs, it is not difficult to see that some kind of innate ability must be within a child to learn so much so quickly, especially since only children are capable of doing this. On the other hand, however, no child could learn without social linguistic stimulus, as we can see in the Genie case. The fact that the two theories are best used when combined can be further illustrated by simply observing how children actually do learn. Typically between the age of two and a half to three, children start to use irregular verb forms. At first, they use them correctly. For example, a child will say went when she wants to use the past-tense form of the verb to go. This apparently immediate understanding falls in line with the inside-out theory, language being to some extent innate. Later, however, most children realize that the rule for making verbs, in English, past-tense is to simply add the suffix -ed onto verbs, and they tend to attempt to make irregular verbs regular. The same child who previously used went correctly would now say goed. This later phenomenon alone seems to agree with a more outside-in biased theory of language acquisition, as children have constructed the rule to add -ed for past tense verbs from learning in their social environment. Children then gradually re-learn, as it were, the irregular verbs and use them correctly, while maintaining the general -ed rule. When both of these phenomena are observed together in the same child, which is often the case, one must realize that the better course of action is to agree that the two theories are not counter-intuitive.
The manner in which a child learns her first language is very complex. Much is still left unknown. We do know, however, thanks to careful and painstaking observations done by many psychologists and linguists, how much children learn over their beginning years of life and when they tend to learn specific things. We know that children learn about semantics, syntax, phonology, and pragmatics all in their first five years, and we can speculate that syntax must be learned during some time during early childhood if it is to be learned at all. Finally, we cannot restrict ourselves to one theory of linguistic development, simplifying the means by which language is acquired is not feasible. Researchers who take both of these theories into consideration when planning and enacting their studies are bound to make further intriguing discoveries in the field of language acquisition.
Bibliography
Bloom, P. (ed) (1993) Language Acquisition: Core Readings. Harvester Wheatsheaf 3:1. The notion of source in Language Acquisition, Clark, E.V., & Carpenter, K. L. pp 251-283
Carroll, D.W., (1994) Psychology of Language (2nd ed). Pacific Grove, CA: Books/Cole Publishing Company. Ch 10 Early Language Acquisition pp 253-286; Ch 11 Later Language Acquisition pp 287-318.
Fletcher, P., & MacWinney, B. (eds) (1995) The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Ch 13 Early Lexical Development, Barrett, M. pp 362-373.
Harris, M., & Butterworth, G. (2002) Developmental Psychology: a student’s handbook. Hove: Psychology Press. Ch 7 The Beginnings of Language Development pp 142-160.
Hirsh-Pasek, K. (1996) The origins of grammar: evidence from early language comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ch 1 Introduction pp 1-10; Ch 2 Theories of Language Acquisition pp 11-51.
Smith, P., Cowie, H., & Blades, M. (1998) Understanding Children’s Development (3rd ed). Oxford: Blackwell. Ch 10 Language pp 299-324.
