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Chapter 1
Where do children learn a first language?
In this chapter, we examine the setting in which children first come to understand and produce language. We’ll begin with some general signposts along the way as children begin to master and then become more skilled in using language. We’ll also consider, briefly, some of the earlier views of this process, before we turn to some of the general issues we need to address in relation to the process of language acquisition.
Signposts
Very young children show initial comprehension of a few words somewhere around 8 to 10 months, and they typically produce their first words between 11 or 12 and 20 months. Next, they begin to produce longer utterances by combining gestures and words, and then producing two or more words together. This may happen anywhere between 14 and 15 months and 18 and 22 months. (There can be as much as a year’s difference in when particular children master a specific feature of language.) Once children begin to combine words, they also start to add word endings like the plural –s in English, and add in small words like the, of, or in as well. Again, learning where and when to use word endings as well as these small grammatical words (often called function words) takes time. In some languages, children master these elements in the language by around age 6. In others, some of these details may take them much longer, up to as late as age 10 or 12.
Once children can combine two or more words, they also start to do more complicated things with language. And when they can produce utterances with three or four words, they start using more complex constructions too. For example, they add information to distinguish among the people or objects they are referring to, as in the blue car, the man with the red hat, the girl who’s running. They start to talk about sequences of events: He ran outside and then he climbed the hill. They talk about causal events: They made the boat capsize. They talk about contingent events: If it rains, we’ll play inside. They start to express beliefs and attitudes: I think they like spinach, He wants to have a picnic. And they gradually learn how to do all sorts of things with language, from telling jokes – a favourite at age 5 – to persuading, instructing, managing, and cooperating in all sorts of activities, and also telling more and more elaborate stories.
Note: Typically a year or more’s variance in when a particular child reaches these milestones.
Some proposals about acquisition
People have long puzzled over how children come to acquire their first language, and a variety of proposals have been made at various times. Here we’ll briefly consider a few of these proposals, and why they fail as an adequate account of what goes on as children acquire language. In effect, many proposals that have been made present an unrealistic picture of how acquisition occurs, how long it takes, and the role adults play in it.
One view that arises from behaviourist approaches to psychology is that adults teach children their first language. They do this, it is proposed, first by approving of any babbled sounds that belong in the language, but ignoring any sounds that don’t belong. Sounds that are accepted, approved of, become shaped into sequences that constitute words. Adults don’t reinforce erroneous forms, so even if these were produced, they would be short-lived. The same approach is assumed to work for acquiring words and constructions.
However, parents actually appear to approve of every vocalization – and hence many non-native sounds – produced by babies as they babble. And they typically approve of any attempts to communicate, however defective. Young children start out with many elements ‘missing’ from their early utterances, and they make certain consistent, and often long-lasting, errors, retaining non-adult-like forms over weeks and even months. In doing this, they seem to be regularizing their language: they make irregular forms regular, as in sit with sitted as its (regular) past tense, or mouse with mouses as its (regular) plural form. So it is unclear what role adult approval (reinforcement) or lack of approval actually plays in the process of acquisition.
A related view here is that children simply imitate what they hear around them. But if they learn language by imitating other speakers, why do they begin with just one word at a time, and that only at 12–15 months of age? Why do they take such a long time to put two words together in an utterance? And why do they leave out word endings and small grammatical words like to, of, and the for so long? That is, their early utterances do not seem to be direct imitations of any adult model in their vicinity.
A rather drastic alternative to these views, proposed in the 1960s, was that adults play virtually no role in children’s acquisition. They provide no feedback and so never correct errors. Indeed, there is no need in this view for any feedback because the language itself – at least the grammar – is assumed to be innate. At the same time, proponents of this view agree that children do have to learn the sounds of a language, somehow. They also have to learn the vocabulary, which can amount to between 50,000 and 100,000 words by age 20 or so – hence, a massive learning task. But the grammar is there from the beginning, it is claimed, and, in this view, that is what is most important.
Yet children take time to settle on or identify properties central to the grammar of the language they are acquiring, and the process involved in going from innate grammatical categories to possible syntactic constructions in a language has yet to be fleshed out. Moreover, as we will see, adults do offer feedback as part of the conversational to-and-fro as they check up on what their children mean, and they do this for all aspects of the language being acquired. (And we will see how this plays an essential role in the overall process of acquisition.)
Finally, another position often proposed informally is that children learn language when they go to nursery school and kindergarten, hence from their teachers. But children arrive there already talking, often talking rather a lot. So they must already have been working on the early stages of what they need to do to learn a language in their first two or three years. The question is how much they already know by age 3 or 4, and how they got there.
In this book, we will focus instead on the kinds of interactions that adults and babies take part in from birth on, and the critical role these interactions play in the acquisition of language by young children. Children learn their first language from the speakers around them. Initially, these speakers will generally be the adults looking after them. But as infants get older, progress to walking, and start producing single words themselves, they also interact with older siblings and peers as well as caregivers. So it is the ambient language that young children acquire. How does their acquisition take place? Do adults tailor their language for young addressees?
Early adult–child interaction
Adults talk to babies from the start, even though they know that babies can’t yet understand any language. Despite this, parents and other caregivers interact with infants, and such interactions, the evidence suggests, are helpful and even crucial for the later acquisition of language. For example, parents rely on mutual gaze, looking at babies, catching their eye; they touch them, hold them, and use affective intonation to communicate comfort, soothing, play, and laughter. Two-way interaction typically begins as soon as small babies respond with smiles and mutual gaze. In these early ‘exchanges’, with little or no communicative content on the babies’ side, adults will treat a smile, a look, a burp, or a leg-kick as a ‘turn’ in an exchange. But both content and timing here differ from later conversational turns and actual turn-taking with language, with both larger gaps between turns and more overlapping of turns.
Parents engage 2-month-olds with smiles and eye-gaze. From the age of 3 months on, infants can participate with adults in what could be called passive joint engagement where the adult follows the infant’s gaze. When infants reach 4 months of age, adults can also get them to attend to objects they show to them. This is also about the time when infants also start watching hand motions intently, and motion in general, and actively track adult...
