Seen synchronically, at any one point in time, however, pro- duction and comprehension can be considered as comparable psycholinguistic tasks; the former involves the synthesis of + language structures while the latter involves their analysis. production of language demands the synthetic talents of an imagi- nary mental chef, who selects the appropriate ingredients, weighs he. 2 Acquisition: when I was a child, I spoke as a child them carefully, and then stirs them together into a creative new dish, The comprehension of language, on the other hand, requires the analytic skills of a cognitive chemist, who takes whatever is served up and meticulously breaks it down into its individual compounds and elements in order to understand it completely. These four major sub-fields of psycholinguistics collectively comprise the issues which will concern usin this book, Children area focus of attention and affection in all societies. The presence of an infant isa key to the hearts of strangers anywhere cn the globe. “What a cute smile’, they murmur, immediately transfixed by the child’s demeanor, ‘What's her name?" they inquire. ‘Docs she speak yet?” Because of their universally unique status, small children evoke a certain sociolinguistic farniliarity and directness not permissible with older children and adults. And if these encounters transpire in cross-cultural situations, for ‘example when a couple are touring a foreign country with their young child, along with these typical expressions of affectionate attention come cries of amazement when the youngster is enticed or provoked into speaking its native tongue. There is a natural wonder when the strange and difficult sounds of a foreign lan- guage appear to pour effortlessly out of the mouths of mere babes. It is no surprise, then, that the ability of children to pick up “their mother tongue so quickly and seemingly so easilly is the central concern of the first major sub-field of the psychology of language that we will review. Developmental: psycholinguistics examines how speech emerges over time and how childzen go : about constructing the complex structures of their mother tongue. The emergence of speech is not only an apt chronological stage to begin our reflections on the nature of the human mind, it isalso the stage where we can glean the least complicated elata. As ‘Tennyson puts it, our first efforts at speech are not words but cries: 6 survey ACQUKSITION 7iia 8 So runs my deeam, but what am I? ‘An infant crying in the night; ‘Aminfant crying for the light, ‘And with no language but a ery. So pervasive is the common perception that the crying of a baby ‘conveys some significant linguistic communication, that the early Romans believed it was the gift of a specific spirit, Vigitanus, and even Plato observed that the very first communicative distinction js besween comfort and discomfort, A common mistake of early students of developmental psycholinguistics was to assume that Childzen had no language until they uttezed their first word, usu- ally about the time oftheir first birthday. ‘uo language buta cry’ ‘Over the past forty years, there has been an increasing amount of research into the linguistic capacity of infants, and it seems the more we study them the smarter they become. What we have learned about crying is tha itis not only communicative itis also a direct precursor to both language (human symbolic communi- cation) and speech (spoken language). In-a sense, crying, atleast in the frst few months, is a kind of language without speech, because the child communicates different types of discomfort without using normal speech sounds, As the infant matures, cry- Jngshelps the child learn how to produce linguistic sounds, and so this earliest form of utterance is also a precursor to speech. During the first few weeks of a child's life, crying is largely an ‘autonomic response to noxious stimuli, triggered by the auto- nomic nervous system asa primary reflex. In brief, this means that the ceying response is hard-wired into the child, and crying is ini- tially a spontaneous reaction, unaffected by intentional control from the voluntary necvous system, which eventually evolves as the mover and shaper of most human behavior. Even at this rela~ tively primitive stage, however, cryingis@ direct preparation fora lifetime of vocal communication. As anyone can witness when observing a raucous infant in full voice, crying trains babies to time their breathing patterns so that eventually they learn how to play their lungs like bagpipes, with quick inhalations of air suRvEY followed by long, slow exhalations to fuel their vocal cords with prolonged wailing. This skill bf timed breathing is crucial for successful speech communication for the rest of the child’s life, and it is a direct result of a baby’s ability to learn to control the cies of birth. Crying initially is completely ieonie; there isa divect and trans parent link between the physical sound and its communicative intent. For example the hungrier a baby becomes, the louder and the longer the crying. It also increases in pitch. The degree of dis- comfort is directly proportional to the intensity of the acoustic signal. But in the first month or two of the child’s development, crying becomes more differentiated and more symbolic. This means that itis not directly related to the child’s sense of discom- fort; rather, the cries are subtly, indirectly, and almost randomly associated with its needs. As most mothers realize intuitively, and as recent studies have suggested, the baby may not cry to express discomfort or pain, but rather to elicit attention. So even at this rudimentary stage of linguistic evolution, there is a significant ‘transformation from using sound as an iconic or direct reflection of an internal state to using it as a symbolic, indirect manifesta- tion of increasingly complex internal feelings. Later, we will learn that this transition also represents a major difference between the communication found in most animals and the way humans use language. Even at this earliest and most primitive stage of psycholinguis- tic development, we cannot simply pretend that the baby exists alone and evolves independently. Humans are born at an early stage of development in comparison with most mammals. Even when we are born after our natural full term of nine months, we are physically so weak and underdeveloped that we are com- pletely dependent on our caretakers for several years. This forces and forges an enormous degree of carly bonding and socializa- tion, After several weeks of extensive interaction with its care- taker, the child starts t0-co0, making soft gurgling sounds, seemingly to express satisfaction. Crying and cooing affect, and are affected by, caretaker behavior. It is difficult to surmise Whether the coos and gurgles of a just-ed baby reinforce the ‘mother's contentment in caring it, or whether the mother’s sounds of comfort when nurturing her baby reinforce the child's ACQUISITION,attempt to mimic the contentment it perceives. In a statistical study of the interactions between the sounds that ten Japanese mothers and their babies made when together, Nobuo Masataka -showed that there was a clear similarity becween the sounds = made by mother and child which had emerged by the time the infants were only five months old. Most likely then, a baby's early vocalizations, and the constant responses of the caretaker, mutu- ally reinforce each other. Obviously then, even these earliest astempts at communication underscore the importance of social he acquisition of human language. tage emerges at about two months of age but is rhen the child is about six months old, by a babbling stage. Babbling refers to the natural tendency of children of this age to burst out in strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters, almost as a kind of voealic play. Some psycholinguists distinguish beeween marginal babbling, an early stage similar to cooing where infants produce a few, and somewhat random, consonants, and ‘canonical babbiing, which usually emerges at around eight months, ‘when the child’s vocalizations narrow down to syllables that begin to approximate the syllables ofthe caretaker’s language. Interestingly enough, when infants begin to babble consonants at the canonical stage, they do not necessarily produce only the consonants of their mother tongue. That is, their earliest acquisi- tion is not of the segmental phonemes (the individual consonants and vowels) that go to make up their native tongue. In fact, children seem to play with all sorts of segments at this stage, and frequently produce consonants that are found in other languages, not just the language by which they are surrounded. Hence we find the first of several psycholinguistic ironies. A six-month-old infant, raised by English speakers, may very well babble a sound that is notin her mother tongue—say the unaspirated /p/ sound in Spanish pico (‘beak’), which sounds more similar to the English ‘bl in “by" than the aspirated English /p/ in ‘pie.’ But this same child, when trying to learn Spanish words twenty years later, may have great difficulty producing this same unaspirated Spanish /p/ sound she babbled with ease as a baby! Since infants may babble vowels and consonants which are not. part of their mother’s native repertoire, babbling is not evidence that childsen are starting to acquiring the segmental sounds of their mother tongue. But recent psycholinguistic research, sup- ports earlier assumptions that children are beginning toHearn the suprasegmental sounds of their mother tongue at this stmge. The term suprasegmental refers, to-the musical pitch, chytiom, and stress which accompany the syllables we produce and which play such an important role in marking grammar, meaning, amd inten tion. Bight-month-old babies reared in English-speaking #amilies begin to babble with English-sounding melody; those of m similar age who are brought up in Chinese-speaking homes Begin to babble with the tones and melodies of Chinese. Babbling is the first psycholinguistic stage where we have strong evidemce that infants are influenced by alll those many months of exposure to their mother tongue. Up to this stage, there is very little difference between the speech production of a normal child and that of a baby born profoundly deaf. Both infants will progress through the crying and cooing stages with litele overt manifestation of the significant difference between them in hearing ability. However, as the babbling stage begins, a half a year into life, the Zack of suprasegmental accuracy in the babbling of a deaf baby is often the first overt signal of che child’s disability, - Firstwords (2/43 month After crying, cooing, and babbling, we come to the culmination of a child’s early language development—the first word. A. child crosses this linguistic Rubicon at about one year old, although there is a wide range of latitude as to when the frst word exnierges and as to what constitutes a-‘word’. For one thing, it seems that children often use idiomorphs, words they invent when they first catch on to the magical notion that certain sounds have a eanique reference. For example, one psycholinguist recorded that when his daughter was about one year old, she came up with ‘ka ka’ as, the word for ‘mill’. But just as frequently, youngsters begin to learn the vocabulary of their mother tongue straight away... sur- vey of the words children first learn to say shows that they tend to be those which refer to prominent, everyday objects, and usually things that can be manipulated by the child. Thus, ‘mama’ and ‘dada’ (of course), and ‘doggie’, ‘kitty’, but also ‘milk’, ‘cookie’, arid ‘sock’. Even at this most rudimentary stage of vocabulary ACQUISETION D nriit wey development, we can sce evidence for what Piaget cals egocentric’ | pooch, Children, quite naturally, want to tlk about what sur- |] Founds chem, at life's beginnings, they are the center of their uni- ‘Verse. If the child cannot manipulate the object during this early period of physical development, it does not appear to be wort! paming, Pazents spend a lot of time putting diapers on and taking them off their one-year-olds, but because babies themselves (quite fortunately!) don’t handle them, ‘diapers’ or ‘nappies’ do not become part ofa child's early linguistic repertoire, Parents fuss a great deal over thei child’s first words this, and the first step, rank as singular benchmarks of maturation. The first cry, the first coo, or the first babble is often ignored or unrec- ognized, but the firs substantive evidence of vocabulary acquis: tion, even ifindistinguishable from a controlled burp to outsiders, is often duly recorded and dated by proud parents. Just asthe first steps are symbolic of the evolution of man from ape-like animal to biped, the first few words, whether idiomorphs or words from the parent’s native language, demonstrate t0 the mother and father that their child has successfully made the transition from an iconic creature to a symbolic human being. "The Miracle Worker, the compelling drama about the early life of Helen Keller, saves this marvelous moment for its powerful Conclusion. Annie Sullivan, the teacher hired to transform the blind and deaf, asocial and non-communicative young Helen, has been laboring throughout the play to get Helen to communicaré by Singer spelling, but now, with Annie's contract almost up, all seems hopeless. Helen remains entrapped in an iconic world with- 4 ‘out speech or language. But as they stand in the well-house, next to the warer pump, where Annie has led Helen for her daly choré of filing the pitcher for dinner, the water spills accidentally om. Helen’s hands and the miracle unfolds. Helen seizes Annie's hand and finger-spells what Annie has written so many times oa. Helen’s hand, apparently without success. W-A-T-E-R. From this ‘moment on, words cascade onto Helen's fingers like the watet which is accidentally spile at the well; and from this moment comes an explosion of linguistic learning, so that Helen is event ally able to write aboue the experience in her own words. SURVEY ‘That living word awakened my soul, i a al, gave it light, hope, jo sett free... Tleft the well-house eager to ae Boe hada name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. (from Helen Keller. 1903. The Story of My Life. Dou! fom y Life. Doubleday, ‘More remarkable than the drama, and the actual bi e : jiographi- cal anecdote it depicts, is that most of us have experienced a similar moment when, at about the age of one, we too suddenly tscognized ‘the mystic harmony, linking sense to sound and sight, and entered the sentient and symbolic world of human communication. Once the first few words are acquired, there is an exponential growth in vocabulary development, which onl begins to taper at abous the age of sx, when, by some estimates, the average child has a recognition vocabulary of about 24,000 words. It is no wonder then that parents are excited by their Chl’ ist word: itrepresentsa ep into symbolic communica tion, and it signifies the start of the rapid vocabul ton id vocabulary growth th which thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, as well as other areas of linguistic development, are framed. The birth of grammar re wall ove Gonna 80 arn otoed chatter children 0 use single words as sentences. In x877 Chacles Darwi for example, recorded in the journal that a ‘ition of language thatthe single word ‘milk’ could some- 1s be a statement or a request, of, if his son had accidentall copped his glass, an exclamation. This use of single words a tktletal sentences. is referred to as the holophraste stage, and though there is some debate about its verfabilty, most psy- elingiss believe that che intonational, gestural, and contex- hal lues which accompany ‘holophrases ‘make it clear Se children are using single-word sentences, exactly as adults ain do in conversation, ‘Milk? is often used as the truncated carat ‘Do you have any mill?” but, given the appropriate PeRAS, Mik? is just as obviously an abbreviated version of inielte Some milk’. Recall chat from the very beginning, ts are seared and nurtured in a world where virtually all ACQUISITION14 communication evolves through intimate social interaction, and so itis entirely plausible that a child’s earliese form of grammar should manifest itself in the same highly contextualized holophrastic utterances which adults use when conversing with each other in familiar social settings, Holophrasti¢ speéch is the bridge which transports the child from the primitive land of cries, words, and names across into the brave new world of phrases, clauses, and sentences. Of all the areas investigated by developmental psycholinguists, the acquisition of grammar has been studied the most intensively. Much of this can be elated to the development of Transformational- Generative (16) grammar, the most influential school of linguistics to affect the study of language over the past four decades. Although TG grammar has evolved and devolved into many dif ferent sub-schools, it has always been involved most centrally with the study of sentences, Another reason why people invest gating child first language acquisition are inclined to focus on the attempts of children to acquire grammars that the data is easy to obtain. Unlike the tape recordings of cooing, babbling, and burp- ing babies, where the acoustic signals are fuzzy and the gathering of data a laborious and indeterminate task, the gleaning of infor- mation on how children create sentences is manageable, discrete, and can be done while caring for the child. No wonder that so ‘many studies are done on the acquisition of grammar by toddlers as they converse with their parent/inguist parent at home. The transcripts recorded often reveal the amazing ability of young- sters to acquire their mother tongue fluently and, at the same ‘ime, create novel expressions. : Father/Linguist Supervising daughter getting dressed): ‘Tthink you've got your underpants on backwards.” Daughter (Age 3 [yrs] 9 [months}}: “Yes, Ithink so.” Father/Linguist: “You'd better take them off and put them on frontwards.” Daughter (Taking them off and turning them around): Is, this the rightwards?” (from Peter Reich. 1986. Language Development. Prentice- Hall, page 142) Even at an earlier age, a child’s acquisition of syntax displays a SURVEY subtle but definitive understanding of universal progverties of human language. Roger Birown and his colleagues, irs the firs, elaborate chronology of kiew children acquire English gxcammar, published in x975, demoasserated that children progress through different stages of grammatical development, measured largely by the average number of words occurring per umterance. Although individuals diffexc, especially at very young ages, in the speed with which they mawe from one stage to another:, all chil- deen begin to create senteszces after the holophrastic stage, first swith two words, and subsexquently with more. The mary studies conducted of the early twe-word stage reveal that, eveza within these limitations, childrem demonstrate a surprising amount of grammatical precocity. Tiuey do not randomly rotate words between first and second position, for example; certaiza words (pivots) tend to be-used initsally or finally, and other words then can be used to fill in the slore either after or before these so-called pivots. The order of the wards in these two-word utterances tends to follow the normal word exrder of the expanded version: used by adults in longer sentences, which indicates that children are already sensitive to the weord order of their mother tongue. Finally, it is quite rare for youngsters to repeat the sarrae word twice in forming their litle Sentences; children are parsizmonious with their language and make each word count. Atelling indication of ust: how much children have acquaied by the time they are approximately two years old, and have fnegun to use two-word sentences comsistently, is to contrast exasmples of their grammar with the ouput collected from one of eEe most prominent experiments to teach a human language to: «a chim- panzee, The chimp examples below come from a project which attempted to improve upom previous attempts to teach a form of human sign. language (Amerdean Sign Language or ASt) tc young chimpanzees. ASL has become a popular human langusage to teach to these animals becatase, due to the anatomical differences between human and simian vocal tracts, chimps cannot xmake the sounds of a human language. In this project, the researchers’ young pupil was ‘Nim Chimsky’, named, of course, after the father of TG grammar, Noam Chomsky. The exampless below contrast utterances by a two-year old human child witin Nim’s longest attempts to sign in ASL. Even though this compasrison is ACQUESITION 1a 16 already skewed in Nim’s favour—two-word utterances by the child are contrasted with fous:word phrases by the chimp—it is clear that in terms of conveying meaning, the child's language is far more developed. ‘Two-word utterances by a human child (from. D. 5. Braine. 1963. The ontogeny of English phrase structure: The first phrase. Language 39:2~13) itball seeball getball_thereball want baby itdoll seedoll getdoll_theredoll == wantcar itchecker seeSteve get Betty theremomma want do itdaddy there doggie wane get itboy there book want up Four-word phrases in ASL by a chimp (fromH. S. Terrance. 1979. Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language. Washington Square Press, page319) (1) eatdrink eat drink (6) grape eat Nimeat (2) banana Nim banana Nim (7) banana eat me Nim (3) eat Nim eat Nim (8) banana me eat banana (4) Nim eat Nim eat (6) play meNim play (5) banana me Nim me (10) drink Nim drink Nim Even in this sparse amount of data, there are obvious differ- ences in performance. The child displays great lexical diversity (19 items): the chimp seems confined to a small stock of words (7 items), The child displays very little repetition. The chimp seems to find it impossible o sign a single sentence without refer ring to either ‘Nim’ or ‘banana’. The child appears to have & sense of syntax: two-word sequence is introduced by a pivot word like ‘i’ o¢ ‘want’, whichis followed by a slot filed by a wide variety of lexical items. The chimp, on the other hand, isa prolific producer of permutations: he can clevedy churn out random sequences 4 of signs, but there are no fixed pivot words around which predictable slots can occur. In sum, the child’s output can be 4 symbolized by a simple set of phrase structure rules, grammatical rules which demonstrate that a series of words form a structured 3 phrase or clause and are not simply a list of unconnected items. ‘The child's sequences appear to be more like words in a sentence. ‘The chimp’s sequences, on the other hand, seem to be much less SURVEY like sentences and more like a grocery list. Thus they are mach. lore difficult co deScribé by rules Notice that the child has a simple set of rules which are vey powerful; they generate a large number of diverse utterances. Each rules a logical linguistic extension ofthe previous rule. This capacity to generate new utterances has long been observed as an essential and universal characteristic of human language. In tlhe: cighteenth century, the German philosopher Leibnitz observed that ‘human language uses finite resources to create infinite atten ances’, and two centuries later Chomsky founded the TG school of grammar on the same insight. Note too that the child's rules srez clegant and simple, the two criteria most valued by grammarians. logicians, and theoretical mathematicians. In contrast, the chimp’s ‘rule system’, if we can be so generous 8 to call it such, is not nearly so tidy; indeed, these ‘rules’, like the. ‘actual data they attempt to reflect, are an ungainly sequence of random collocations. Nim's ‘grammar’, fic can be called a gram- ‘mar, is unable to provide rules which can be used to describe many different sentences. ; In comparing these two sets of data, we are led to the jnescapable conclusion that even ata very young age, before they have any conscious awareness ofthe difference between parts of speech such as nouns and verbs, young humans very rapidly jequite the notion that words do not combine randomly but fol- low a systematic pattern of permissible sequences. Even at the Stage when they are still producing two-word utterances, this ‘ystem allows young children to generate a wide range of linguis ff Permutations. Chimps, on the other hand, do not appear to have even an inkling of any pattern or system, bue randomly {htow signs together in a haphazard fashion. ‘At best, Nias ‘Erammar’ seems to tell him something like ‘throw any four signs etter from any category, and the nice man will give me a banana ora grape!” Evidence for innateness The example we have just reviewed is only one measure of the ‘fight of evidence for innateness, which is the belief most psy- holinguists now hold that the acquisition of human language is ACQUISITION18 not based solely on the external influence of a child’s environ. ‘ment. If linguistic stimuli from a child’s or chimp’s surroundings were indeed solely responsible for language acquisition, we would not expect sucha glaring discrepancy between the perfor- mance ofthese two primate species. In fact, we might even expect [Nim to be the better of the two performers because he was con- stantly bombarded with signs and was continually rewarded and reinforced whenever he attempted to use them to communicate with his handlers. And although human children also receive ‘an enormous amount of linguistic input on any given day, they are infrequently rewarded just for speaking up, indeed they are sometimes encouraged to be ‘seen but not heard’. There are even cultures (for example some of the Native American tribes of Arizona and New Mexico) which discourage young children from engaging adults in prolonged conversation. This kind of argument led Chomsky and a whole generation of developinental psycholinguists to claim that a sizeable part of early linguistic learning comes from an innately specified language ability in ‘buman beings. In other words, learning your mother tongue is a very different enterprise from learning to swim or learning to play the piano. No one would argue, not even the most radical rationalist, that humans have innate areas of their brain genetically programmed to help them swim the back stroke, or play a tune on the piano. Environmental conditioning is crucial for these and many other human activities, and among the plethora of arguments in sup- port of this fact is the simple observation that huge numbers of people never learn to swim or to play the piano at all, yet it is exceedingly rate, as we shall discover in Chapter 5, to stumble across anyone who has never learned to speak. Chomsky has argued that just as humans have some kind of genetically deter- mined ability to ‘learn’ to stand upright or to walk, so t00 do they [POSSESS an LAD, 2 ‘Language Acquisition Device" (now replaced with the more linguistically accurate UG or ‘Universal Grammar’). Chomisky’s position is accepted by a great many contemporary psycholinguists and is most articulately and assiduously defended in Steven Pinker’s popular book, The Language Instinct. In sum- mary, to return to humans and chimps, most psycholinguists ageee that an ape like Nim will never be able to ape his human suRvEY namesake, nor any one of as, without the human DNA. smolecules that account for so much of our collective behavior: and our ‘unique humanity. Childish creativity ‘There is another way in vedbich child language acquisitiom is rela tively independent from emvironmental influences, despiztz the dis- tinct control that the lamer exercise on the course of our first language development. Of5viously, a child’s linguistic searround- ings determine its mother: tongue: children raised in Sthandong, China, grow up speaking Mandarin; children raised in Bedfordshire, England, grow up as native speakers. of English; and children, like your aurfaor, who grow up in Shandomg, bur are reared by native speakers: of English, usually acquire Bilingual proficiency in both of these rongues. But despite the: obvious impact the environment hass on the choice and general direction of mother-tongue learning, children are prone to come up: with all kinds of words and expressions which they have never Sheard in their niono- or bilingual environments. Children are: creative ‘wordsmiths, as evidenced in the following exchange between a friend and her two-year-old. Daughter: Somebody’s at the door. Mother: There’s nobsody at the door. Daughter: There's yesBody at the door. (from P. Reich. 1986. Language Development. Prentice-Hall, pager42) : From about two to four, children produce all kinds o€ expres- sions like this which they have never, or rarely, heard in th cavironment, but which they create on their own in their attempts to construct, or reconstruct, their mother tongue. Corrumon at this age are regular plurals for isregular ones (mans, knifes, sheeps), regular past-tense endings for irregular verbs (goed, singed, eated), and even ‘double tensing’ when children seem to be caught in transition between recognizing an irreguilar verb and yet reluctant to jettison the regular past-tense endling that they have acquired. This kind of tuning, to use a term to udescribe ‘one type of cognitive processing, usually shows that the child has, ACQUTSITION |progressed to a slightly more advanced linguistic stage of lan- -guage development. ("Yesterday, we wented to Grandma's.) ‘Overgeneralizations like these are very common in the mother tongue learning of young children and are, perhaps mistakenly, referred to as ‘false’ analogies. One could make a convincing case thatitis not the child who is in error but the language, since it fails to adhere to the symmetry of its own grammatical patterning, This process of ereative construction is yet another example of the relative autonomy of the child’s developing linguistic system in relation to the adult version of the language. Children are not chimps, and are definitely not parrots ot tape recorders. They are a bit more like well-programmed computers, who make creative, but often inaccurate guesses about the rules and patterns of the language they are acquiring. Even at this early age, children can sometimes display a pro- found understanding of the syntactic machinery of their mother tongue. There is some irony inthe fact that, through theic creative syntax, they reveal linguistic rules or patterns which might well have escaped the grammatical ken of their highly educated par- ents. One three-year-old child, upon spying a family friend approaching for dinner, exclaimed: ‘There Carlos is? Te took con- siderable effort on the father’s part to figure out why this sentence ‘was ungrammatical, but why it also sounded almost acceptable. The child was probably overgeneralizing from Patterns A and B t0 form the close-but-not-perfect C (marked with an asterisk * to indicate its ungrammaticality) Pattern A: There's Carlos! [There's/Here’s + Noun] Pattern B: There heis! [There/Flere Pronoun + is] Pattern C: *There Carlosis! — [There/Hlere + Noun + is} Readers alfficted with a pathological addiction to grammar 7 might want to consider how complex this particular paradigm really is, as well as how clever a linguistic puzzle solver this obsex- vant child had become. Sometimes, children’s creative constructions reflect their apparently inborn sensitivity tothe syntactic structures of the lan- ‘guage they are acquiring. Consider the following two examples of the creation of two-word verbs using up by two different fve- year-olds, 3 SURVEY AK: Ben’shicking up. He's hicking up. Adults What? ae AK: He's got the hiccups. (from. A. Kuczaj Il. 1978: Why do children fail to over- generalize the progressive inflection? Journal of Child Language §: 167:710) Father: Don’t interrupt. Child: Daddy, you're interring up! (from C. Hockett. 1968. The State of the Art. Mouton, pagers) There is nothing wrong with the hearing of these two children, In the first example, hiccup and ‘hick up” are ‘phonologically indistinguishable. In the second, given the fact that final conso- nant clusters in English (as ia the cluster /pt/ of interrupt’), espe- cially when they are voiceless, are usually not fully pronounced, the difference between the final syllable of ‘inter up’ vs. “internapt* would be consistently dificult to perceive in normal conversa- tion, even for an adult. So the children’s ‘errors’, if we wish to label chem such, are not mistakes of the ear, and since, of course, these children have not yet learned to read, neither are they slips of the eye. Rather, they are another example of how children cre- atively construct their grammars based on what they have leamed and on what they can plausibly assume. Indeed, their assumption about the structure of English in these examples appears to reveal an uncanny awareness of a growing grammatical trend. Compared to most other languages in the world, including its cousins from Europe to South Asia, contemporary English has become very much a ‘prepositional’ language, and one indication of this tendency is the growing profusion of ‘two-word? verbs— verbs plus prepositions such as turn on or look over. The point is that children are not only active and creative participants in the acquisition of their mother tongue; even their ‘errors’ often indi- ate that they are remarkably sensitive to the subtle but inherent srammatical characteristics of the language they are learning. ACQUISITION ar‘Stages of linguistic development ‘The study of child first language acquisition has now become an autonomous and growing discipline with its own texts, journals, and national and international conferences. Itis difficult to pre. sent a concise summary of such a massive amount of research, even limiting our curiosity to just the acquisition of English as a mother tongue. Another large and equally burgeoning subdisci- pline of developmental psycholinguistics is the area of bilingual- ism and its ancillary—and often politically controversial branch devoted to bilingual education. Adding to the scope of this body of knowledge is the extension of first language acquisition research to older ages of childhood in order to investigate what kinds of complex linguistic structure are acquired by elementary school-aged children and, equally important, what possible age constraints on mother-tongue learning might reveal themselves when children turn into teenagers, For example, the emergence of “foreign accents’ in the speech of bilingual children at about the age of twelve suggests to some psycholinguists that there exists a critical period for first language learning which is biologically determined. To conclude this brief summary of an ever-expanding field, let us take a look at one universal and pervasive phenome- non that has been discovered at all ages of child language learn- ing, with virtually every type of linguistic structure, and in all of the scores of world languages where child development has been intensively investigated. What most typifies first language acquisi- tion isthe fact that it invariably occurs in stages. ‘We must preface this brief description of the stages of language acquisition with the admission that there is dnd always will be individual differentiation. In all biological populations, there are always exceptions which fall on either side of the normal struc- ture or behavior that defines a particular species, and this individ- uality is very conspicuous among Homo Sapiens. In one of the earliest pieces of research on the acquisition of a mother tongue by several child subjects, Roger Brown discovered that there was 2 glaring difference in the rate of language learning among the three children that he and his co-workers researched over a period of several years. Indeed, at about three years of age, one of the three children studied was linguistically already a year ahead of SURVEY the other two. This shouldimot be surprising, given the ditHferences which exist in all animal species, and the great diversity =f genetic and early environmental backgrounds that are found im even the _most seemingly homogenoms human populations. This diifferenti- ation can be seen in the saypernormal performances of tihose rare children who burst forth from their peers with a geniuss for lan- guage, music, art, or sport. Consequently, these prodigies are becoming increasingly studied by psychologists because: of their very individuality. But in spite of these individual differences, per- haps the most consistent finding in all of developmeratal psy- cholinguistics has been thar there are universal stages of language learning. All children, no matter how rapid or how pecdestrian * their rate of acquisition, proceed systematically through the same earning stages for any particular linguistic structure. ‘An early example of this: is found in the work of Brown's col- leagues, Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi, who proved that chil- dren learning English produce two different types of WH questions before they evensually come up with the cormect adult version. They identified three distinct stages. Stage x (use of WH word but no auxiliary verb employed) What Daddy doing? ‘Why you laughing? ‘Where Mommy go? Stage2 (use of WH word and auxiliary verb after subject) ‘Where she will go? ‘Why Doggy can’t see? ‘Why you don’t know? Stage 3 (use of WH word and auxiliary verb before subject) ‘Where will she go? ‘Why can’t Doggy see? ‘Why don't you know? (ES. Klima and U, Belluggi. £966 ‘Syntactic regularities: in the speech of children’ im J. Lyons and RJ. Wales (eds.}= Psycholinguistic Papers. University of Edinburgh Press Pages 183-208) ACQUISITION24 All children begin with Stage x utterances before proceeding to Stage 2 examples.several months later. Eventually they end up ‘with the linguistically appropriate target examples at Stage 3. No matter how precocious the children are, that is, no matter how fast their rate of progress through these stages, they do not skip ‘over any of them; no child goes from Stage r immediately to Stage 3 without at least some examples of Stage 2 structures, Rates ‘vary stages don't ‘Another example of developmental stages is seen in the acquisi- tion of English negatives, again originally described by Brown and his colleagues in their study ofthe language learning of three young children. Brown divided their grammatical development into periods of ‘Mean Length of Utterances” (MUU, showing that as the children progressed in the acquisition of their mother tongue, their MLUs grew from a minimum of about two words to about four. Recall that even when children are not yet two years old and are just beginning to string two words together, they seem to notice that words are not simply piled on top of one another like bricks. Certain words act as mortar and seem to hold words together ina certain order. Iti thi sensitivity to word choice and structure that allows children to create grammatical sentences, and itis the lack of this syntactic sense thet appears to prevent chimps from creating sequences resembling human language. ‘One example of young children’s acquisition sensitivity to syntax is inthe way they learn negation in English. Note how the primi- tive negatives found in Stage 1 (with an MLU of 1.75 words) eventually evolve into the adult-like forms of Stage 3 (where the MLUsare from 3.5 to 4 words). Stage x (use of NO at the start of the sentence) No the sun shining No Mary doit. Stage 2 (use of NO inside the sentence but no auxiliary or BE verb) ‘There no rabbits Tno taste it. SURVEY } Stage 3 fuse of NOT with appropriate abbreviation ofauxiliary or BE) - Penny didn’t laugh. Is not raining. (ES. Klima and U. Bellugi. 1966 ‘Syntactic regularities in the speech of children’ in J. Lyons and R.J. Wales (eds. Psycholinguistic Papers. University of Edinburgh Press. Pages 183-208) ‘There may be some argument over the exact number of stages, for a given structures some researchers have suggested that there are four, not three, stages represented in the two grammatical examples illuscrated here. However, starting with these examples taken from Brown's early fieldwork, there has been continual confirmation of the existence of sequential staging for many of the grammatical patterns acquired by children learning their first language, and of the finding that all children proceed immutably from one stage to the next. One especially insightful development in this research on acquisition stages has been the discovery that similar stages and staging is found in adule second language learn- ing. Research pursued by applied linguists for several decades demonstrates that, like little children, adolescent and adult for- eign language learners also differ a great deal in their rate of language acquisition but not in the stages through which they progcess. This finding has several implications, but one of the most obvious is the possibility that the process of language acqui- sition is a common psychological challenge for both the young, maturing child, and the older, experienced adult. Whea it comes to the human mind, age differences tend to evaporate, and we witness one common cognitive process when the minds of either Youngsters or their older counterparts are confronted with a simi- lar task, for example the tremendous challenge of picking up a completely new system of symbolic communication—in other words, learning a language. he inquiring and acquiring mind is the common denominator forall areas of psycholinguistics and is, perhaps, an apt topic with Which to conclude this discussion of first language acquisition and to begin to contemplate language production. ACQUISITION a5