Child Language

Acquisition and Development

Matthew Saxton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526421883
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is the best book on the market for taking students from 'how children acquire their first language' to the point where
they can engage with key debates and current research in the field of child language. No background knowledge of linguistic theory is assumed and all specialist terms are introduced in clear, non-technical language.

It is rare in its balanced presentation of evidence from both sides of the nature–nurture divide and its ability to make this complicated topic engaging and understandable to everyone.

This edition includes

• Exercises to foster an understanding of key concepts in language and linguistics
• A glossaryof key terms so students can always check back on the more difficult terms
• Suggestions for further reading including fascinating TED Talks that bring the subject to life
• Access to Multiple Choice Quizzes and other online resourcesso students can check they?ve understood what they have just read

1 Prelude: Landmarks in the Landscape of Child Language

Contents

• From burping to grammar in the pre-school years 2
• Levels of language 4
• Listen in mother 5
  • The cat in the hat in the womb 5
  • Some conclusions on sound 7
• Word learning: From 0 to 14,000 in five years 7
  • Say ‘mama’ 7
  • Estimating vocabulary size 8
  • The gavagai problem 9
• Morphology: Bits and pieces 10
• Syntax: Putting it all together 13
• Language in context: Perceptual, cognitive and social development 16
• The study of child language 18
• The lie of the land 22

Overview

By the end of this chapter you should have some appreciation of the challenges facing the newborn infant in the acquisition of language. Major landmarks in language development are presented at each of the following four levels of linguistic analysis:

• phonology (the sound system)
• vocabulary
• morphology (parts of words, especially those parts used for grammar)
• grammar

We will consider some of the philosophical problems facing the child (for example, how does the child know what a word is, or what it might refer to?). And we will introduce the nature–nurture problem: to what extent do genetic factors determine the development of language? To set the child’s language learning achievements in context, an overview is provided of the child’s achievements in other developmental domains (cognitive, perceptual–motor and social), before sketching out the contents of the chapters that follow.

From burping to grammar in the pre-school years

Have you ever had a chat with a toddler? A rather precocious two-year-old, known as Eve, came out with the following one day, while in conversation with her mother:

• (1) Eve aged two years (Brown, 1973):
  • he go asleep
  • want more grape juice
  • putting sand in the pail
  • I have get my crayons
  • where other baby?

We can see straight away that Eve is fairly savvy about a number of different topics. But however impressed we are by Eve’s knowledge of crayons, sand and juice, it is clear that not one of the sentences would pass muster if they were uttered by an adult in the same setting. If nothing else, this reminds us that language develops.

As we shall discover in this book, though, Eve has already come a long way by the age of two years. A typical newborn is capable, vocally, of no more than reflexive crying and fussing, plus a small repertoire of vegetative sounds, principally, burping, spitting up and swallowing (Stark, 1986). This repertoire is lent some charm at about eight weeks, with the emergence of cooing and laughter. But if we fast forward to the typical five-year-old, then we suddenly find ourselves in the company of a linguistic sophisticate, someone with an extensive vocabulary who is able to put words together in interesting, complex sentences that, for the most part, are perfectly well formed.

• (2) Ross aged 5;1 (MacWhinney, 2000):
  • I had the worst dream of my life
  • I wish I could let you in here, but there’s no room
  • You thought he couldn’t go to school because we didn’t have the medicine

Box 1.1 Notation for the Child’s Age

There is a standard convention for denoting a child’s age in the child language literature. A child aged two years, three months would be recorded as 2;3. The child of four years, six months appears as 4;6, and so on. Note the use of the semi-colon to separate years from months. When even more fine-grained analyses are required, we can also add the number of days after a period (.). For example, 1;9.10 is read as one year, nine months and ten days.

This shorthand, in which we note months as well as years, is very useful. Things can move fast in child language and important distinctions might otherwise be lost. For example, take two children, both aged one year. The first child, aged 1;0, might not yet have produced her first word, whereas the second child, aged 1;10, might already be stringing multi-word utterances together.

Eve aged 1;10 (Brown, 1973):

Sue make some

oh my Graham cracker broke

here Fraser briefcase

have to drink grape juice first

The acquisition of language is a staggering feat. It is all too easy to overlook the monumental nature of this achievement, because language learning seems to come so easily to all typically developing children. Perhaps we take the miracle of language learning for granted because, as adults, we typically take the possession of language itself for granted. Every cognisant reader of this book has an extensive, complex, rich knowledge of language. But this knowledge is such universal currency – so very much part of everyday life – that we often fail to notice or appreciate the great gift it affords the human species. Exercise 1.1 (below) throws a spotlight on the position of language in human society.

Exercise 1.1

Imagine a world without language. Consider the world we live in and consider the ways in which we depend on language. In some ways, this is an incredibly easy task. In others, it is quite overwhelming. Once you begin, there seems to be no end to the ways in which we rely, either directly or indirectly, on our ability to communicate with language. Write down two or three topics that characterize some aspect of the human experience (I provide a few suggestions below, but don’t feel restricted by these). Consider the ways in which they depend on language for their existence.

• bridges
• governments
• a family meal
• travelling from London to Paris
• football
• laws
• taking a shower
• gardens

Levels of language

In this section, we will try to get a sense of the magnitude of the task facing the newborn child. The first thing to note is that the child is battling on several different fronts at once. Language has different components, or levels, each of which must be tackled.

The Big Four levels of language:

phonology: concerned with the sounds of speech

vocabulary: the storehouse of meaning (words)

morphology: bits of meaning encoded in the grammar, like the plural ending, -s in dogs

grammar: the rules dictating how words are put together into sentences

By way of hors d’oeuvre, the current chapter will sample from each of these key areas of language, to get some flavour of how the child tackles them.

Our division of language into four levels stems from linguistics, the study of language. In academia there are typically many different ways to dissect an issue in analysis. It all depends on one’s theoretical perspective. For example, we could add pragmatics to the list above, if we believe that the way language is used is especially important (see Chapter 4 for more on this). Or we might reduce our list to just two factors: meaning and sound. We know that language is used to communicate meanings. And we know that, typically, the human vocal apparatus is used to transmit those meanings via sound. The study of language (and also child language) could thus be reduced to working out how meaning and sound are connected (Chomsky, 1995). From the perspective of child language, our problem is not just one of deciding how to cut up language into its component parts (see Chapter 2). It is also one of working out how they interconnect and influence each other.

Highlighting different aspects of language is useful. At the same time, though, there are times when the divisions seem artificial, especially if we focus on one level at the expense of another. For example, we could examine the development of phonology in isolation. How does the infant come to distinguish one sound from another in the torrent of speech assailing their ears? This is a big question. But if we concentrated solely on the problem of phonology, we would fail to notice that the child is also learning something about words, and even grammar, in the first year of life, long before they ever produce speech of their own (see Chapter 5). Unfortunately, research has tended to consider each level of language independently, as though the child had a series of different boxes to tick off in a particular order. Traditionally, this has been seen as phonology first, followed by words and then morphology and finally, grammar (Bates & Goodman, 1997). We can still examine each level of language in its own right (and the chapters in this book follow that general pattern), but we will be mindful that the levels of language do not comprise the rungs of a ladder for the child to ascend. Simultaneous development and mutual influence are more characteristic of language acquisition.

Listen in mother

Imagine what it is like to hear language for the first time. No, really: imagine.

Did you picture yourself in a crib listening to your mother? Understandable, but think again. We hear language before we are even born. As you will know from those noisy neighbours who drive you mad, sound passes through solid barriers – not just the walls of houses but also through the wall of the womb. And it has long been known that the human ear begins to function several weeks before birth, in the third trimester (or third) of pregnancy at about seven months (Sontag & Wallace, 1936). The foetus can respond to the sound of bells, and can even discriminate between different tones. But sensitivity to sound is not the same as sensitivity to language. Can the foetus distinguish noises, like a power drill or the banging of a door (those neighbours again), from the sound of their own mother’s voice? Remarkably, the answer is ‘yes’. Moreover, the foetus has already begun to recognize the distinctive properties of their native language (May, Byers-Heinlein, Gervain & Werker, 2011). The brain responses of newborn infants (0–3 days old) differ when they hear a foreign language (in this case, Tagalog from the Philippines) versus the language heard in the womb (English). Even more remarkable, the unborn baby can learn to recognize the telling of a particular story.

The cat in the hat in the womb

In an ingenious experiment, DeCasper & Spence (1986) asked women in the later stages of pregnancy (7½ months) to make recordings of three different children’s stories. One was the first part of the classic 1958 Dr Seuss story, The cat in the hat. The second story, The dog in the fog, was created by adapting the last part of The cat in the hat, including, as you can see from the title, some changes to vocabulary. The third story, meanwhile, The king, the mice and the cheese, was unrelated to the first two, but all three stories were of very similar length, with equal-sized vocabularies. Even a good proportion of the actual words in all three stories was shared (about 60–80 per cent of the total, depending on which two stories are compared). But note, The dog in the fog shared the rhythmic properties of The cat in the hat, while The king… story did not. The influence of rhythm was thus controlled for in a study that, in many ways, provides an excellent model of well-designed research.

The pregnant women were asked to read just one of the three stories out loud twice a day which meant that, on average, they recited their particular story 67 times prior to giving birth. At just three days old, these neonates displayed a clear preference for the particular story they had heard in the womb. You might wonder how a newborn baby tells you which story they want to hear. Infant interest was measured via their sucking behaviour on a nipple, with high rates of sucking being taken as a sign of increased attention (see Box 5.1, Chapter 5). For example, babies exposed in the womb to The cat in the hat sucked more fervently when they heard this story played to them than when either of the other two stories were played. The same result was found irrespective of the story: newborns prefer the particular story they have already heard in the womb. This finding is remarkable, but what can we conclude about the linguistic abilities of the foetus? No-one would claim that these infants knew anything about the characters in the story or...