Human Resource Management

3

Learning Language: How Children Do It

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to accomplish the following objectives:

• Cite the evidence for the view that children are “prewired” to learn language.

• Describe the role environment plays in language acquisition.

• Differentiate among the four major theories of language acquisition and the evidence for and against each.

• Explain what is meant by developmental forms and how they differ from errors.

iStockphoto/Thinkstock

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 53 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Pre-Test

Introduction

Sarah doesn’t yet know how to tie her shoes. In fact, even Velcro fastenings present a challenge for her, and even if they didn’t, she rarely gets her shoes on the correct feet. Right/left is a distinction she is still a couple of years from acquiring. She can count, but anything above the number two is pretty much a guess. She likes to play, but her attention to any one toy or activity is limited to a few minutes. Although she knows that she needs to hold the paper down when she is coloring, what she draws consists mainly of scribbles. She can’t yet draw a stick figure or stay within the lines in a color- ing book. She knows her body parts; she knows that she is a girl and not a boy. But she doesn’t know when to use she or her instead of he or him, and probably doesn’t see any compelling reason to.

Cognitively and intellectually, Sarah has a long way to grow. This 25-pound child who is less than 3-feet tall, plays alongside other children but not with them yet. She hasn’t quite mastered potty training, building sand castles, or the rules of tag, but this 2-year-old is already a very competent language learner.

In this chapter, we describe what Sarah and children like her accomplish in acquiring the first language, and the environmental factors that affect that learning. We also examine some theories about how they do it. We conclude the chapter by examining some of the “mistakes” children make as they learn language and what these mistakes tell us about what they are learning.

Pre-Test

1. Acquisition of language seems to be

a. exclusively due to environmental influences. b. based on inherent structures. c. time varied due to cultural differences. d. an unnatural and lengthy process.

2. Critical periods are

a. times in which individuals are more sensitive to environmental influences. b. prenatal for language acquisition. c. generally during adolescence. d. intervals during which individuals may lose skills acquired earlier in life.

3. Arguments against behaviorism as the best explanation for children’s language learning include all of the following EXCEPT that

a. adults tend to focus on the meaning as opposed to syntax of children’s speech. b. children are not exposed to all of the words that they use. c. children imitate and use the speech that they hear. d. making corrections to syntax rarely effect changes in speech.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 54 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Born to Talk

4. Developmental forms are

a. the papers that pediatricians fill out about milestones. b. the mismatch between adults’ and children’s use of language. c. the correct use of language by children. d. methods for measuring a child’s language development.

Answers 1. b. Based on inherent structures. The answer can be found in Section 3.1. 2. a. Times in which individuals are more sensitive to environmental influences. The answer can be found in

Section 3.2. 3. c. Children imitate and use the speech that they hear. The answer can be found in Section 3.3. 4. b. The mismatch between adults’ and children’s use of language. The answer can be found in Section 3.4.

3.1 Born to Talk

At age 2, Sarah speaks clearly enough to be understood, although there are still many sound distinctions she cannot make—the word piggy sounds more like kee-kee, for instance, which sounds pretty much the same as kitty. She has already acquired a substantial vocabulary, and she combines words into two- and three-word sentences in both her languages. At 20 months, she said clearly, “Want go down,” to tell her grandmother that she wanted to go downstairs to the playroom. Sarah was not sure she was making herself clear, since her grandmother hadn’t yet acceded to her request. So Sarah reiterated, “Ah-ah go down” (Ah-ah is her pronunciation of her own name). At age 2, Sarah’s vocabulary is growing at a rate that is almost too fast to count. Conservatively, her produc- tive vocabulary, or the words she has spoken, is between 40 and 50 words. Her receptive vocabulary, or those words she understands, is much larger, certainly in the hundreds. As a language learner, Sarah is a work in progress, but she has made a very impressive start. The sum total of all her physical, cognitive, and linguis- tic development in 24 short months constitutes compelling evidence that babies are born with brains “prewired” to acquire language, and that language is “the product of a well-engineered biological instinct” (Pinker, 2010, p. 6).

Renowned linguist professor Steven Pinker believes that children possess a strong biological instinct to acquire language.

Associated Press

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 55 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Born to Talk

To say that Sarah’s language learning is instinctual in no way diminishes her achievement. Quite the contrary. Human children accomplish something as complex as language at a time when they struggle with learning things that, to the adult way of thinking, are much less complicated, such as figuring out how a smart phone or a computer game works.

The Complexity of the Task

As we know from the hundreds of thousands of volumes written on the subject, language is complex. Any adult who has tried to learn a new language has an appreciation for what children accomplish in acquiring their first language. Although adult learners of a new language have certain advantages (Chapter 4), because already knowing one language

makes learning a second easier. Human languages are alike in signifi- cant ways, and adults take advantage of the similarities. Adult learners, unlike infants, have advanced cog- nitive abilities and better memory, but still the task is daunting. What infants and children accomplish in learning a language is truly remark- able. Long before they can draw a recognizable flower or even a stick figure, children can understand the talk surrounding them and have begun to use language in meaningful ways to accomplish many purposes. Some children even manage to over- come major physical, environmental, and cognitive challenges to do so, as we shall see a little later.

Now that Sarah has celebrated her second birthday, it seems to her par-

ents that she was born talking. She wasn’t, but the work did start on that first day. Actu- ally, it began before birth as her brain formed with its particular propensity to learn lan- guage. We’ll talk more about the brain later in Chapter 5.

The Nature of the Task

Some people naively assume, as an entire branch of psychology once did, that a child’s task in learning language is to repeat parrot-like the language she hears around her. The theory is that children rely on memorization and mimicking, gradually refining their own speech until it eventually matches the adult models around them. This theory makes the process sound very easy. It would, however, be very difficult to learn language in this way

This boy knows the names of the colors he is using and the family members he is drawing. Understanding this is just part of the task of learning language.

Digital Vision/GettyImages

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 56 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Born to Talk

because of the huge amounts of language children would have to memorize. This expla- nation might be feasible at the word level—which requires remembering that the word horse, as opposed to duck or cat, refers to a large four-footed creature with a mane and pos- sibly a saddle. At the sentence level this theory of language learning is not very feasible. If children had to hang around waiting for an adult to utter the very sentence needed to express all of the meaning they might ever need to make, they wouldn’t do much talking at all in their early years. What children need to talk about is fundamentally different from most adult conversation. Moreover, as Meisel points out,

One of the most important insights of language acquisition research dur- ing the past decades is the finding that grammatical development proceeds through invariant developmental sequences, that is, that the acquisition of crucial grammatical properties follows an order which is largely the same across individuals. (Meisel, 2011, p. 241)

This finding, along with the sheer speed with which children learn sentence structure, argues strongly for the existence of an innate language learning mechanism. Other kinds of evidence come from the uniqueness of children’s utterances—children say things that they have never heard from an adult. A question that Chloe, age 3, asked her father illus- trates the point:

Daddy, are we going to your Ami today?

For several days before Chloe asked this question, her parents had been talking about an upcoming trip to visit Chloe’s grandmother, who lives in Miami. Chloe had parsed what she heard as “going to my ami.” In this sentence, she not only turned a statement into a question, she used the pronoun (your) appropriate to what she assumed the meaning to be. What Chloe showed us here is that language learning involves learning not random words and phrases, but the vastly complicated rule system that governs language. If language were random and not rule-governed, it would be impossible to learn. Although language does have rules, children do not pay much attention to learning structure—the way that language is organized, which we learned about in Chapter 2. For them, the sole business of language is to make meaning—meaning that accomplishes something they seek to accomplish. For adults trying to understand the process, however, it is easier to talk about how children learn the different components of language in terms of structure.

How Children Accomplish the Task

At the most basic levels, what is involved in the task of learning a language? Children need to figure out how to make sense of the continuous stream of sounds (those things that we, as adults, recognize as words and sentences). While it is our perception that there are spaces between words, that is only because we know the words. When we are listen- ing to a foreign language, it is not easy to know where the word boundaries are. Infants listening to adults speak have much the same problem. They have to figure out which

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 57 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Born to Talk

of those sounds can stand alone as words. In the previous example, Chloe shows us that children do not always get this right.

Identifying the words of the language is only part of the puzzle. Children also have to learn which sounds matter and which do not. In any language, there is only a finite number of meaningfully dis- tinct speech sounds (the phonemes described in Chapter 2). However, in actual speech each of these sounds has a variety of pronunciations. It is not easy to figure out which are important and which are not. For example, the phoneme /k/ has different pronunciations depending on the vowel that follows it. If the vowel is the one in kit or key, the /k/ is pronounced further forward, right at the hard palate. If the vowel is the one in cat, the /k/ sound is articulated a little further back, but not as far back as it is articulated in the pronun- ciation of comma or cause. For adult speakers, the differences aren’t noticeable, but children do not yet know what we know. In the process of learn- ing the sound system, children sort out whether the differences between the pronunciations of /k/ are more or less significant than the differ- ence between the pronunciation of /k/ and /g/ or /t/. At the same time that children are sorting out these differences, they are learning to produce the distinctions themselves. As their control over their vocal apparatus improves, they come closer and closer to the adult pronunciation. Consider how Chloe progressed from wahwoo to yellow:

wahwoo (/wæwu/ (24 months)

lalo (/lelo/) (34 months)

lalo/yewo (/lelo/, /yεwo/) (40 months)

yellow (yεlo/) (49 months)

Notice that at 40 months, she alternated between her younger form and a new one that was even closer to the adult pronunciation, providing clear evidence that she was making progress.

This boy may know that the umbrella he is holding is yellow, but saying the name of the color presents more of a challenge at this age.

amanaimages/Corbis

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 58 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.1 Born to Talk

Chloe did not expend all her language-learning efforts mastering the pronunciation of yellow. In fact, she was perfectly happy with her own version at each stage, although she would object if an adult said lalo for yellow. She was able to hear the distinction before she could produce it. At the same time, she was busy learning how to combine sounds into syllables, morphemes, and words, and expanding her vocabulary at an impressive rate. By the time they are 2 years old, most children have begun to produce two- and three- word sentences, usually with the correct word order, showing that they are well on their way to learning the complex rules of syntax. Consider these early sentences from Sarah:

Ah-Ah nana. (19 months)

Want go down. (20 months)

No go in. (24 months)

Each utterance represents a different syntactic structure conveying the meaning that Sarah intended. In the first, the adult equivalent would be Sarah wants a banana. Note that she had mastered the basics of subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, although the verb was not present yet. She did not yet have the personal pronoun or the article, but these are arguably “frills”—using her own name and the name of the object she wanted accom- plished the communicative intent. Just one month later, however, her Want go down with its adult equivalent of I want to go down, illustrated more complexity. At this stage of devel- opment, she could not produce sentences longer than three words, but once more, she got in the essentials. The subject, or who wants to go, was perfectly predictable in the context, so she concentrated on the verb, want go (to is another of those frills she needn’t bother with), and the place, down.

At 24 months, Sarah’s three-word sentence revealed even more complex structure, but still she reduced it to the minimal structure required for her meaning. The adult equiva- lent I don’t want to go in is perfectly rendered within the situational context in No go in even though she omitted the subject and much of the verb. None of her utterances indicated verb tense, but again, the situations made it unnecessary. What is impressive in these utterances was that Sarah found exactly the right words for expressing her meanings. She got them in the right order, and she made herself understood. She also demonstrated that she was well on her way to mastering sentence structure.

Mastering the complex rules of the language seems a daunting task from the adult per- spective (see Learning the Present Tense: A Linguist’s Perspective for an example from a lin- guist’s point of view). From the child’s perspective, however, great concern with language structure is highly unlikely. For the child, language is all about meaning and communica- tion. Learning the components and the rules for combining them merely gives children the tools to accomplish the real purpose of language. Children also have to learn how and what to communicate to the different people in their lives. They have to learn all the conventions of conversation—turn-taking, staying on topic, how to shift topics, meaning confirmation, and so forth. They also have to learn what kinds of talk are appropriate in various settings—why screaming “No way!” might be acceptable with a playmate or sib- ling but probably not with a preschool teacher or grandfather.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 59 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Environmental Influences

Learning the Present Tense: A Linguist’s Perspective

Children by the age of three or three and a half have largely mastered the present tense inflection, producing runs, walks, eats, etc. correctly. Linguist Steven Pinker has pointed out that this inflection is actually a remnant in modern English—something that may be of historical significance but has little relevance in Modern English. He notes that “if it were to disappear, we would not miss it, any more than we miss the similar -est suffix in Thou sayest. Even though that little -s is a grammatical frill, children have to know and keep track of quite a lot of detail to produce it correctly. They have to know

• whether the subject is one that requires an -s ending or not (i.e., whether it is in the third person—he, she, or it—as opposed to I or you;

• whether the subject is singular or plural; • whether the action is present tense or not; and • whether the action indicated by the verb is happening at the moment of speech or is habitual

(She runs for president every four years vs. She is running for president).

All this presupposes that they already know the suffix. In order to learn it in the first place, a child must

• notice that verbs end in -s in some sentences but not others; • start to try to figure out the relevant causes of this variation (i.e., figure out the grammatical

“why”); and • not rest until all the grammatical factors—”tense, aspect, and the number and person of the sub-

ject—have been sifted out of the ocean of conceivable but irrelevant factors (like the number of syllables of the final word in the sentence, whether the object of a preposition is natural or man- made, and how warm it is when the sentence is uttered).”

The question is, why do young children bother?

Source: Adapted from Pinker, 2010, pp. 32–33

Despite all there is to learn, children do so with astonishing speed, and they begin at birth. Research has shown that even newborns are more attentive to speech sounds than to other sounds, pay more attention to people than to objects, and are able to identify relevant sound distinctions in their native language within the first three months of life (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971; Plunkett & Schafer, 1999). How do they do it? Lin- guists and child psychologists do not have definitive answers, but more than a century of research has provided us some reasonable theories. Before examining these theories, let us look at the different environments in which children learn language.

3.2 Environmental Influences

There is no single environment in which children learn language. Nor is there a “best” environment for language learning, although there are some that are less than ideal. First-born children born to quiet, studious parents; children born into a large fam- ily of “talkers”; children who are confined to a medical facility at birth because of health problems; or even children who are emotionally or physically traumatized—they all learn to talk. That children persevere and learn language, sometimes in severely abnormal

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 60 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Environmental Influences

circumstances, constitutes compelling evidence that they have a genetic predisposition to do so (i.e., that at least some portion of language acquisition is innate). In the following sections, we examine the accomplishments of children in some of those environments. Then we examine some of the theories that attempt to account for those accomplishments.

Abnormal or Impoverished Environments

First, a caveat: The terms abnormal and impoverished refer only to the environment from the perspective of language acquisition, meaning that children in such environments are not exposed to normal oral language use during the early years of life. None of these terms refers in any way to socioeconomic, cultural, geographic, physical, or any other condi- tions not directly and significantly related to exposure and opportunity to use language. Some of the most dramatic cases of impoverished environments come from accounts of feral children, or human children who have lived in relative isolation, apart from or only marginally exposed to human society. While it is unlikely that any of us will encounter a feral child, the examples that follow are useful for understanding the relative importance of environment and children’s predisposition to learn language. The cases of Isabelle and Grace represent two points on a continuum from extreme linguistic deprivation to a rela- tively normal communicative situation.

Isabelle was discovered in 1937. Some reports place her age at around 5 and others at 6 and a half. Isabelle’s nonspeaking mother had been deaf since the age of 2, and both mother and child had been kept in isolation by the child’s grandfather. There is no evi- dence that Isabelle had been mistreated in other ways. Shortly after she was discovered, Isabelle was tested and found to have the mental age of a 19-month-old child. Her oral language consisted of croaking. After working with experts at The Ohio State University for two years, her intelligence and language ability were judged to be completely normal for a child her age. She could tell stories and recite nursery rhymes and had an estimated vocabulary of between 1500 and 2000 words (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011, p. 315).

Piper (2007) provides an account of Grace, a child raised in a healthy but relatively iso- lated environment by two deaf, nonspeaking parents. The nearest neighbors were almost a mile away, and Grace remembered having only limited contact with them. She recalled going with her mother to deliver home-grown vegetables and the occasional pie or cake to them, and she remembered them speaking to her. She also recalled aunts and uncles who visited once every summer, and she learned a few words from them. Her main source of spoken English, however, was her brother George, who was three years older. So from the age of approximately three, she had one speech model, on a regular basis, in her brother. Still, she was very clear in her recollection of the language she learned; her first language was sign language, and her second, oral English, was limited until she began attending school in first grade. Once there, she rapidly developed oral and written English abilities. According to her own report, 50 years later, she struggled through the first few months, but by the end of the year, she had no problems keeping up with her class. She went on to complete elementary school and attended two years of high school before dropping out to work in a factory during the Second World War. She was adamant that she liked school and was good at it. The report cards she happily offered as evidence attest to the fact that she was an able student.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 61 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Environmental Influences

Both Grace and Isabelle were able to acquire normal language ability in a relatively brief time, although their circumstances were quite different. Isabelle had very little exposure to speech, but she did have interaction with her mother who had developed a rudimentary method of communicating with gestures. Grace, while having little exposure to spoken language, had a fully developed communication system and enough exposure to oral lan- guage to develop normal pronunciation. These two cases, taken together, illustrate a great deal about the importance of environment and provide some insights into the degree to which language acquisition is innate. One of the most compelling cases for innateness, however, comes from a group of children in Nicaragua who created for themselves a lin- guistic form of communication, specifically a kind of sign language, initially outside a linguistic environment.

Until the 1970s, there were no formal education programs for deaf students in Nicara- gua. In fact, deaf people were isolated from the general population and developed idio- syncratic systems for signing at home. Called homesigns, these systems tend to be very rudimentary. Typically, they do not have a syntactic system and consist only of a limited lexicon for indicating common objects and activities. Then, in 1980, a school for deaf ado- lescents was opened in Managua. Initially, staff at the school emphasized spoken Spanish and lip-reading, and sign language was limited to finger spelling. This approach resulted

in little success in the class- room. What happened on the playground, streets, and buses, however, was a different mat- ter. Outside the classroom, the children developed a system of communication combining gestures with elements of what- ever homesigning systems they knew. What emerged was a pid- gin, a simplified language with elements taken from local lan- guages, used for communica- tion between people who do not share a common language. Sub- sequent children at the school developed the pidgin further into a creole, a language with more of the properties of natu- ral language that has its origins in a pidgin:

After the pidgin was created by the first students at the school, younger children came and were exposed to the pidgin. Without instruction, and based only on their exposure to the pidgin used by their older peers, these younger children created Idioma de Signos Nicaragennse (ISN), which is a full-fledged language with a complex system of grammatical rules.” (Mihalicek and Wilson, 2011, p. 316)

These deaf Nicaraguan children are signing using Nicaraguan Sign Language. What do you think the development of this language means to language acquisition theories?

Reuters/Corbis

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 62 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Environmental Influences

These children effectively invented their own language, something that was discovered when staff, believing that the children’s gesturing was mime and represented a failure to acquire Spanish, asked for outside help. The Nicaraguan Ministry of Education con- tacted researchers from MIT who analyzed the language and uncovered the complexity of the invented grammar. Linguists have differing interpretations of what the existence of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) means for theories of language acquisition, but Steven Pinker asserts that it is a unique event in human history that provides strong evidence that the human brain is hard-wired to acquire language (Pinker, 2010).

Hard-wired, yes, but these cases all provide evidence that there might be a limit on what children in impoverished linguistic environments can attain and that this limit is largely influenced by the age at which acquisition begins. In other words, children are born with the capacity to acquire language, but there is a time stamp on that capacity in the sense that the ability atrophies if it is not used by a certain time. In tandem with the innateness hypothesis (Chomsky, 2006) that humans are predisposed to learn language, then, is the critical period hypothesis. With regard to human language learning, the age span, or critical period, is usually described as lasting from birth to the onset of puberty, the argu- ment being that it is easier to acquire language before puberty, and that after that, there are limitations on what can be learned. The assumption is that if children do not have exposure to language during this critical period, their brains do not create the necessary structures to develop native-speaker competency in a language. Looking at the examples cited earlier, we see what could be interpreted as evidence for such a hypothesis. Isabelle and Grace were exposed to normal language well before the onset of puberty, and by the age of 8, both acquired language to the same level of proficiency as their peers.

It is the Nicaraguan children, however, who provide the most interesting and compelling data for the critical period hypothesis. When the first generation came together to attend the school, they were adolescents, and while they did acquire some language, they did not acquire a fully formed language. The next generations of children, though, were younger, and in two generations, they had created a complete new language, a fully formed creole with all the structural properties of a natural language. The most compelling evidence for the critical period hypothesis comes from the fact that the first generation of deaf students never fully acquired the newly invented language even though they were exposed to it. In adulthood, their language use retained the simplified characteristics of a pidgin. Succes- sive generations, in contrast, were younger when they were exposed to the new language and acquired it fully. We will return to the critical period hypothesis in Chapter 4 in our discussion of second language acquisition.

“Normal” and Enriched Environments

What constitutes a normal environment? Most of us would answer by describing our own experiences, and that is entirely appropriate since “normal” admits of degrees. Some caregivers pay a great deal of attention to their children’s language by reading to them, expanding their abbreviated utterances, or asking questions that elicit more language. Some mothers read Shakespeare and Dickens aloud to their infants. Other parents may do nothing special beyond the communication involved in day-to-day care. Is one environ- ment better than the other? That is hard to say because of the many children who have thrived in less-than-ideal circumstances. What we do know is that, in general, children

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 63 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.2 Environmental Influences

who have experienced language used in a variety of contexts and, in particular, those who have had stories and books read to them, attain greater proficiency in language. We also know that language proficiency helps to determine children’s success in school. Educators have known this for years and have touted the benefits of an “enriched” lin- guistic environment. Enrichment, fortunately, does not require any special materials or even additional time. If adults repeat and expand their children’s utterances, for example, they provide an extra measure of linguistic modeling that helps the child to learn. When Sarah said, “Nana outside,” her grandmother responded, “You want to go outside?” Thus, her grandmother not only confirmed Sarah’s meaning but also provided her with a fully formed, grammatical sentence that could be used to convey that meaning.

Another way of enriching the linguistic environment is to read to children. Television, computers, smart phones, and iPads might seem more attractive—and certainly they command children’s attention—but in terms of linguistic stimulation, children love sto- ries. Telling stories to children helps them to develop “the mind’s eye” (i.e., to envision events and characters outside the here-and-now). Reading serves a similar function; it not only broadens their experience of language, it helps them to become better readers later on. In the 1990s and the first decade of this century, it became fashionable to teach children sign language before they were capable of forming real words. Based on research show- ing that nonhearing children acquired a vocabulary of signs much larger than the vocabulary attained by hearing children of the same age, parents began to teach American Sign Language, or, in some cases, homesigns, to their infants. Usually, they intro- duced signing at around 7 to 9 months. Whether early signing had any benefits for oral lan- guage or literacy development is unclear, but it certainly did no harm and arguably gave rise to better communication between caregivers and their infants.

It might seem that if we believe in innateness, we need not con- cern ourselves with environ- mental influence—if language is instinctive, then children will learn it no matter what. But we should not be lulled into thinking that the fact that lan- guage seems so effortless means that it is. As Pinker puts it, “The effortlessness, the trans- parency, the automaticity are illusions, masking a system of great richness and beauty” (2010, p. 21). Moreover, although there is widespread agreement about the magnificence of the feat, there remains controversy about how it is accomplished, about the precise nature of the relationship between nature (or instinct) and environment. These issues have led psychologists and linguists to pose numerous theories about how language is learned.

This child is learning American Sign Language to help him communicate despite his inability to talk. Do you know anyone who uses signs with their prespeech children?

Blend Images/SuperStock

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 64 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

Theorists at one extreme of the issue contend that language is a learned behavior and that language learning is no different from any other kind of human learning. Theo-rists at the other extreme take the position that not much learning is required, that language is wholly instinctive. Neither extreme is reasonable, but in between the two are a number of competing theories about how it is that a preschool child has a tacit under- standing of how the grammar of his language works that would take a linguist hundreds of pages to describe.

We cannot describe all the theories that have evolved or the cases that have been made for them, but we will examine four broad categories of theory related to language that have had a major influence. They are behaviorist, active construction of a grammar, neural con- nectionism, and social interaction.

Behaviorist Theories

As appealing as behaviorism was in the early part of the 20th century, it has little credence as a theory of language acquisition. Basically, behaviorist theories take the position that children learn through imitation. They listen to the speech around them, imitate what they hear, and then through a system of reinforcement (i.e., being praised or rewarded for correct utterances and having errors ignored or corrected), they learn to discard their imperfect imitations. The problems with applying this theory to real children learning language are obvi- ous. First, children produce utterances they have never heard and, second, adults rarely respond to the form of the utterance. No theory of imitation can account for this and simi- lar utterances. See Chomsky’s Case Against Behaviorism for more on this topic.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 65 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

The most serious flaw of imitation as a theory is that it cannot account for how children come to produce or understand novel utterances, whether in the way they pronounce words or in the way they inflect them, or in the sentences they produce. Pronunciation errors are generally attributed to children’s immature articulators (i.e., their physical inability to produce an exact replica of the adult form). Chloe’s lalo for yellow would be assumed to be caused by her articulators not being sufficiently well developed to produce two distinct consonants and two distinct vowels in the same word.

Other kinds of errors are more problematic. It is highly unlikely that Chloe ever heard anyone say, “Nana, you forgotted.” Yet she and all children her age regularly produce sen- tences they could not have heard from anyone else. Even if behaviorism could account for how these forms are created, the theory stumbles on the notion of reinforcement. There is overwhelming evidence that, in general, adults neither negatively reinforce flawed utter- ances nor positively reinforce correct ones. When I responded to Chloe with, “Yes, I sup- pose I did forget,” although I modeled the correct form, my response was to her mean- ing, not her imperfect syntax. This type of response is typical of adult-child interactions: Adults focus on the meaning that the child is trying to make, and any correction is geared toward helping to make that meaning clear rather than to correct the form. More impor- tantly, even if I had (foolishly!) tried to correct Chloe’s syntax, and if she had understood what I was trying to do, it would not have effected any change in her language. Children attend to meaning.

Chomsky’s Case Against Behaviorism

Noam Chomsky pointed out the many problems with behaviorism in his 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behav- ior. Although Chomsky’s criticism spoke to first language acquisition, the argument holds for second. Chomsky argued that behaviorism cannot account for the various facts of language acquisition, namely:

• Young children acquire language at a remarkable speed. • Children are largely impervious to correction of form. • By the time most children are 4 or 5, they have an

almost limitless capacity to understand and produce sentences they have never heard before.

• The notion that reinforcement accounts for learning runs counter to experience—a child does not utter the word dog over and over in the presence of adults who reinforce that behavior.

Chomsky speculated that the abilities that account for all of these facts are largely innate, part of the cognitive endow- ment children have at birth.

Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of verbal behavior. Language, 35, pp. 26–58. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Noam Chomsky is an American philosopher, political activist, and linguist. In the 1960s and 1970s, he made an influential case for the existence of a language instinct.

Associated Press

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 66 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

The Active Construction of a Grammar Theory

Active construction of a grammar theory contends that children use the speech they hear around them to construct the rules of the language by listening for and discovering pat- terns, hypothesizing about the rules that create those patterns, and then testing those rules in their own usage. They are, in a way, “little linguists.” Certainly, there are data which would appear to support such a theory. In the sentence Nana, you forgotted, Chloe had clearly detected that past tense is formed by adding an -ed. Other words that she used at this time give strong indication of the rule that she had created:

Learning Grammatical Morphemes

In a longitudinal study of three children, Roger Brown (1973) revealed compelling data showing that the order in which children acquired grammatical morphemes in English was very consistent. Even allowing for slight individual variations, the results showed that children acquired 14 common morphemes in the following order:

1. Present progressive -ing 2. Preposition in 3. Preposition on 4. Plural -s 5. Irregular past, e.g., went 6. Possessive -’s 7. Uncontractible copula be 8. Articles a, the 9. Regular past -ed

10. 3rd person regular -s 11. 3rd person irregular, e.g., has 12. Uncontractible auxiliary be 13. Contractible copula be (It’s Mommy) 14. Contractible auxiliary be (He’s eating.)

Later, de Villiers and de Villiers replicated the study with 21 English-speaking children, and the order they obtained correlated very highly with the children in Brown’s study:

There is a consensus that this research has uncovered a crucial property of first lan- guage development, namely that the acquisition of a number of grammatical features follows an order that is largely the same across individuals. A plausible inference from this insight is that the underlying mechanisms determining this developmental order are identical across individuals and largely unaffected by external influences. (Meisel, 2011, p. 64)

Another compelling kind of evidence against behaviorism is the observation that children learning the same language tend to do so in remarkably similar ways. There is strong evidence, for example, that children acquire certain of the grammatical morphemes of English in a largely invariant order, as we see in Learning Grammatical Morphemes.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 67 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

Sarah holded my doll.

She gived it to me.

I ated all my lunch.

(Chloe 4 years, 6 months)

With forgotted and ated, she had doubled up on her past tense, probably because she did not realize that the verbs were already in the past tense, or perhaps because she had heard the past tenses more often than the present. Eventually, she will discover that her forms do not match the language used by others around her, and she will refine her rules and try again. Chloe’s utterances were governed by her own grammar, which differs in significant ways but also shares important characteristics with adult grammar. Through the testing, modification, and editing of her rules, she will progress gradually, as a linguist does when constructing the rules of an unfamiliar language, until she achieves the same set of rules underlying adult speech.

Children’s language errors present no difficulty for the active construction of a grammar theory. In fact, those who hold this theory do not even see the imperfect forms as errors, but rather as developmental forms, those language forms, differing notably from adult forms, that children produce as they learn the language. They are seen as evidence that children’s learning is rule governed, as exemplars of rules in progress rather than as errors to be eradicated.

Connectionist Theories

Connectionist theories hold that children learn language through neural connections in the brain, developing these connections by being exposed to and using languages.

Proponents of connectionist theories would concede that rules are useful for describing the language forms that children produce during the acquisition process, but they would also argue that children play no active role in actually creating those forms. These theo- rists recognize that children bring some significant degree of innate capacity to the task of language learning and would also concede that eventually children’s language is rule governed. Connectionists argue, however, that in the process of acquisition, children are not little linguists working out rules in their heads, but are more like little statisticians, computing probabilities and building neural connections in the brain based on their expo- sure to and use of language. With increased exposure, the connections are strengthened. (See Figure 3.1.)

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 68 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

Each brain cell, or neuron, has a sending fiber or axon (right), which is coated in myelin, and a receiving fiber, or dendrite (left). These neuron connections are the basis for connectionist theory.

Source: Hemera/Thinkstock

Two kinds of language learning are often cited in support of connectionist theories. One is how children learn what a word is. The second is their learning of the past tense. How does a connectionist believe a child learns what a word is? In a continuous stream of speech in which there are no overt demarcations between words, how is it that children learn where the word boundaries are? More specifically, how do children, hearing, “Once upon a time in a land far away, a little boy and a little girl lived in a cottage at the edge of the woods,” come to know which parts of that string constitute words? Over time, they will hear parts of that utterance in other contexts—perhaps in a sentence such as, “What is that little boy doing?” or “She couldn’t find her little boy anywhere.” Based on the evi- dence, they might conclude that littleboy is a word, but hearing little and boy separately in other contexts over time, they eventually create a mental representation for little and boy separately. Remember Chloe’s question, “Are we going to your ami today?” She had segmented Miami as my and ami, and according to this theory, she would have done so based on the statistical probability that whatever came after my was another word. In this instance, she was wrong, but connectionists hold that this was not because she had formed the right rule and applied it in the wrong context but that she had not yet had enough experience with Miami in other contexts to form the correct representation (i.e., the place where her nana lived).

Figure 3.1: A neuron

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 69 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

Connectionists also use children’s acquisition of the past tense to explain their theory of language acquisition. When children produce blowed as the past tense of blow, these theorists argue it is because they have calculated it to be the most likely past tense based on other words the child has heard, such as mowed, flowed, and glowed. The connection- ists may be right, but how do they account for the fact that some children will produce bringed as the past tense of bring while others will produce brang? If children are actively constructing rules, the theory would predict that they would produce bringed and later learn that there is an exception, brought. If, however, they are working from a probability or statistical basis, the theory would predict that they might produce either form—brang, analogous with rang and sang, or bringed because they had heard other regular past tense forms. In other words, connectionism would predict that some children will get it right and others get it wrong, and this appears to be the case, at least at first. Chloe’s forgotted might be evidence that exposure, or frequency of occurrence, plays a role. She had heard forgot often enough to internalize it as a verb form but had not yet recognized it as a past tense, so she added a regular verb ending because that is the form she had heard on so many other verbs. In fact, it would fit the pattern of spot/spotted, dot/dotted, or plot/plotted. Before any of these rules can be learned, children must first learn words. Let us consider how Sarah learned baby from this theoretical perspective.

One of Sarah’s first words was baby. How did she learn it? According to this theory, she would have heard people using the word baby in several different contexts—female infants, male infants, infants wearing snowsuits, pictures of infants, dolls, and even in reference to herself. Through multiple exposures to the word, she formed neural connec- tions of various kinds—to the word itself, to a mother holding an infant, to pictures, dolls, or possibly just the letter /b/ or people without much hair. Eventually, these connections would coalesce into her mental representation of the word baby. These connections are not all of the same strength, or so the theory goes. If she heard the word baby used more fre- quently in reference to a doll than to a human baby or other referents, then the connection between baby and doll would be stronger than the connection between baby and any other possible referent. If, however, she had heard the word used more often with reference to a human baby, she might well develop a neural connection between baby and human infants (see Figure 3.2).

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 70 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

According to connectionist theory, this is how Sarah would learn the word baby.

Source: Thinkstock

Social Interaction Theory

Social interaction theory purports that children have an innate predisposition to acquire language and that they develop their own rules. This belief is shared with the active con- struction of a grammar theory. These theorists also believe that children acquire language as a result of interaction with more mature speakers of the language (i.e., older children and adults). On the face of it, this would seem to be obvious and self-explanatory. In fact, these theorists believe that children take a very active role by cuing “their parents to sup- ply them with the appropriate language they need” (Wilson & Mihalicek, 2011, p. 320). This is a truly interactive theory. On the one hand, children need the social environment to improve their linguistic and social skills, and on the other, the language-rich environment exists in large part because it is prompted by children. Social interactionists have observed that the speech older speakers use with children is specifically created to be more learn- able. They may have a point. Consider the following pair of utterances:

Figure 3.2: Example of connectionist theory

Hears: Baby

Sees

Creates Mental Representation

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 71 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.3 Theoretical Perspectives

a. See the choo-choo? Look at how big it is! It’s going really fast, isn’t it?

b. There is in our immediate vicinity a locomotive, which, despite its impressive size, is traveling at great speed.

Few, if any, adults would use sentence (b) when speaking with an infant. Most people instinctively adjust their speech to what they perceive to be an appropriate level for a young child to understand. This adaptation is called child-directed speech (CDS). CDS has distinct characteristics:

• Different rhythm and pitch. The speech typically has a sing-song quality, and the speaker’s pitch is usually higher.

• Simplified vocabulary. Rarely would we use choo-choo, doggie, or potty with adult speakers.

• Shorter sentences. The difference between utterances (a) and (b) illustrate this distinction well.

• Simplified structure. Shorter sentences usually have simpler structure than long ones. Again, the difference between (a) and (b) demonstrates this principle.

• Particularly helpful responses. Adults are more tolerant of and likely to respond to infantile utterances that are barely comprehensible, if at all. For example, when Sarah referred to herself as Ah-Ah, simplifying the sound structure, adults did not say, “Who?” or “Whom are you talking about?” Nor did they try to explain to her that she really should be using “I” to refer to herself and not the third person. Instead, they acknowledged the meaning of her utterance and even began to refer to her in the same way.

Apparently, adults use CDS for two reasons, neither of which is that they are consciously attempting to teach their children language. One is to maximize the likelihood of mean- ingful communication, and the other is to express affection, which might explain why peo- ple tend to use similar speech when talking to their pets (Apel & Masterson, 2009).

There are three problems with social interaction theory: The first is that nobody is certain about how long children need to be exposed to CDS. The sec- ond is that they do eventually understand and use compli- cated sentences such as the one in the previous example; and the third is that CDS may be a cul- tural phenomenon—we do not know whether it is universal, although there is evidence from German, Mandarin, Russian,

All kinds of social interaction help children to learn language. This coach adapts her language to help her young players understand.

Larry Williams Associates/Corbis

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 72 10/26/12 10:45 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.4 Mistakes in Language: Errors or Developmental Forms?

and Swedish (The Talaris Institute, 2005, cited in Williamson, 2011). On the other hand, Shirley Brice Heath has provided evidence that there are cultures in which adults make no special adaptations to the language they use with children. In such cultures, children who want to participate in the conversation have to interrupt and do so to the best of their ability (Heath, 1983, 1986). We also know that some parents consciously attempt not to use CDS, yet there is no evidence that their children’s language learning is impaired or that they advance faster than other children.

On Choosing a Theory

Faced with so many theories, students often ask, “Which one is right?” The answer is none of the above. Theories are not facts but hypotheses crafted to fit the facts as they are known. There are aspects of each one of the theories that fit the facts. Although there is no compelling evidence that child-directed speech is necessary for language acquisition, nobody would argue that some degree of social interaction is necessary for learning to occur, and therefore some aspects of that theory are consistent with both connectionist and active construction of a grammar theories. Moreover, since it is likely that a child can construct rules only when the

necessary neural connections are made, those two theories may not be mutually exclusive. In fact, in many ways they are fully compatible. While behaviorism is largely discounted these days for its inability to account for the facts of language acquisition as we know them, even imitation— that cornerstone of behavior- ism—plays a role in children’s earliest utterances, providing babies with a “starting place” on which to build their lan- guage. The active construction of a grammar theory may best fit the data. But social interaction is also important, and there is no doubt that neurological factors also play a role.

3.4 Mistakes in Language: Errors or Developmental Forms?

Except for the behaviorists, who would consider children’s imperfect forms as errors, the consensus is that the mismatch between children’s forms and adult forms are not mistakes but developmental forms, or the imperfect renderings of children in the process of learning language. The social interactionist and active construction of a grammar theorists would see errors as evidence of rules-in-progress, or under construc- tion, while the connectionists would see them as evidence that the mental representation

When this toddler says, “I hided from you,” connectionist theorists would maintain that he is forming the past tense on the basis of other past tenses he has heard.

Digital Vision/Thinkstock

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 73 10/26/12 10:46 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.4 Mistakes in Language: Errors or Developmental Forms?

is incomplete. Whatever the cause, children’s developmental forms are interesting, par- ticularly when we consider the progression. Let’s look at the data for a child, Marcos, from age 15 months to 48 months (Table 3.1).

Table 3.1: Marcos’s development of the production and use of pancake

Age Utterance

15 months Cancake?

18 months Want cancake

24 months I want cancake

36 months Can we have pancakes, Nana?

48 months Can we have lion and bear pancakes, Nana?

From the time of his earliest utterances, Marcos was focused on meaning and made that meaning clear. Between the ages of 15 and 48 months, he made tremendous strides toward adult forms of language. Notice how, at 15 months, he let the noun bear the syntactic bur- den alone, relying on context to clarify any potential ambiguity. Just three months later, he added a verb to produce the sentence structure, VO. By the time he was 2, Marcos had produced an SVO sentence (I want cancake), and when he was 3, he was able to produce a fully formed question. Also, by age 3, he had mastered the pronunciation of pancakes, and by age 4, his phonology was mostly complete. He also made tremendous strides in syntax (Table 3.1).

At every stage of learning, the inconsistencies between the forms produced by children in the process of language acquisition and the target adult forms tell us that children are active participants in their learning. While they may start by mimicking the language sounds they hear, they figure out very quickly that there is purpose and form to language. We know this is true because their mismatches or “errors” are not random but systematic. At the time when Marcos was producing cancake for pancake, for example, he also pro- duced forms such as kickin for chicken and gucky for ducky. This was compelling evidence that he was operating on an assimilation rule that simplified the pronunciation by harmo- nizing the consonants. It is undeniable that language, even for a child under the age of 2, is a rule-governed undertaking. Learning the Sound System: A Work in Progress shows that children simplify their language in predictable ways as they move toward the adult form.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 74 10/26/12 10:46 AM

CHAPTER 3Section 3.4 Mistakes in Language: Errors or Developmental Forms?

Over the course of a child’s first 10 years, the phonological rules will move closer and closer to the adult norm through a process called successive approximation, which refers to how children move progressively closer to the adult forms in certain aspects of their language learning. There is little doubt, however, that the most impressive development occurs in the first five years. We can see just how impressive in the following conversation between 5-year-old Marcos and his grandmother:

Nana: So, Marcos, who is your teacher this year?

Marcos: I have two teachers. Miss X teaches us in the morning, but Miss Y comes and teaches us in the afternoon.

Nana: What does Miss Y teach you?

(Marcos shrugs.)

Nana: You don’t know what she teaches you?

Marcos: I know, Nana, but I don’t know what you call it in English. I can tell you in Spanish.

Nana: Ah, I see. Try to tell me in English, but if you need to use some Spanish words, that’s okay.

Marcos: You understand Spanish?

Nana: Poco.

Learning the Sound System: A Work in Progress

These data come from Juan at age 3.

Adult word Juan’s pronunciation sit (sit) [sIt] snack (nack) [næk] soup (soop) [sup] sun (sun) [s�n] stop (top) [tap] spoon (poon) [pun]

Concentrating only on the initial consonants, provide the rule that explains Juan’s pronunciations. How do you think he would pronounce the following words?

snake spin scoot sock still

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 75 10/26/12 10:46 AM

CHAPTER 3Post-Test

Marcos: (Laughing) No, more than that. Miss Y shows us pictures (He hesitates.). Oh, I know, maps! Like on Dora, and the maps have different shapes and words on them. Did you know the big blue spots are water?

Nana: Real water?

Marcos: No, Nana, that’s silly. Not real water.

Nana: Right. I think I remember that, yes.

At age 5, Marcos has a solid grounding in all aspects of language. Yes, there is much left to learn—more vocabulary in both his languages, as well as the more subtle nuances of semantics and pragmatics that will make him a fully competent communicator. But, as we shall see in Chapter 6, when we take a closer look at each period of his learning, the foundation is firmly in place, and Marcos is not unique.

Conclusion

How children learn the intricacies of language remains, to some degree, a compel-ling puzzle although there are a number of theories that attempt to account for all the facts. What we know for certain is that children are born with the innate capacity to learn language and that the main requirement for doing so is exposure to lan- guage and opportunities to use it. We also know that although they are able to overcome physical and environmental challenges to learn language, there appears to be a critical period during which language learning is optimal, and that period ends around the onset of puberty. By the age of 5 or 6, the foundations of language are largely in place, but much learning of new vocabulary, sentence structure, and how to use language will occur over the next few years. We know that caregivers and teachers play an important role in this learning from birth throughout the school years.

Post-Test

1. By 3 months, most infants do NOT

a. pay more attention to people than objects. b. imitate sounds made in their environment. c. attend more to speech sounds than other sounds. d. identify relevant sounds made in their native language.

2. In comparison to hearing children, nonhearing children

a. take longer to learn forms of communication. b. learn forms of communication faster. c. have a larger vocabulary at the same age. d. have a smaller vocabulary at the same age.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 76 10/26/12 10:46 AM

CHAPTER 3Critical Thinking Questions

3. The active construction of language theory explains language acquisition as a process of

a. reinforcements and punishments for right and wrong language use. b. using language and learning the rules simultaneously. c. speaking the language prior to understanding the rules of language. d. learning the rules of language prior to using the language.

4. The assimilation rule claims that children

a. simplify pronunciation by harmonizing consonants. b. distinguish among the morphemes in their language. c. accommodate new language in their schemas. d. learn the language that they hear.

Answers 1. b. Imitate sounds made in their environment. The answer can be found in Section 3.1. 2. c. Have a larger vocabulary at the same age. The answer can be found in Section 3.2. 3. b. Using language and learning the rules simultaneously. The answer can be found in Section 3.3. 4. a. Simplify pronunciation by harmonizing consonants. The answer can be found in Section 3.4.

Key Ideas

• Children are born with an innate capacity to acquire language. • This capacity needs to be activated during the first five years of life in order for

them to acquire normal language proficiency. This time is referred to as the criti- cal period for language learning.

• All that is required for language acquisition is normal exposure to language through social interaction.

• Child-directed speech helps children to understand the purposes of language and to work out meaning.

• Children’s ability to understand precedes their ability to produce language. • Children have a larger receptive vocabulary than productive vocabulary. • No perfect theory of language acquisition exists. • Language acquisition theories that focus on the importance of social interaction

and the child’s cognitive abilities are most useful for language teachers.

Critical Thinking Questions

1. List three classroom age-appropriate activities for a child in prekindergarten (age 4) that would help to develop conversational skills.

2. Why would the receptive vocabulary of a 2-year-old child be difficult to measure?

3. How does reading aloud to infants foster language development? Be as specific as possible in identifying components of language learning that will benefit.

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 77 10/26/12 10:46 AM

CHAPTER 3Critical Thinking Questions

4. Why is it impossible to learn to communicate in sentences through memorization?

5. What is the “good news” about language learning in the following forms?

a. I seed him do it! (36 months) b. She didn’t ate her food. (48 months) c. Cat bite me ‘cause it hurt. (40 months)

6. What is the theoretical perspective underlying the following quotation?

“In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.”

7. The following sentences are from Janie, a few weeks before her third birthday. Look at the past tense inflection she used in each sentence:

a. I heared Daddy (pronouncing heard to rhyme with feared). b. Mommy bringed the cupcakes. c. Mommy didn’t bringed the cupcakes. d. I singed that song at church.

Looking at sentences (a) through (d), what rule for past tense formation would you assume that Janie was using? Why do you think she would have formed this rule?

At the same time, Janie spoke this sentence:

e. Mama sanged the wrong words.

Does sanged cause you to change your answers? If so, how?

Now, read the following sentences from Janie.

f. Jessica hitted me! g. Sarah bit me! h. Molly bited me. i. Papa drived his car in the ditch.

Based on these sentences, what general statements can you make about what Janie has learned about forming the past tense?

8. If language is a product of instinct, what is the point to studying theories of how it is acquired?

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 78 10/26/12 10:46 AM

CHAPTER 3Weblinks

active construction of a grammar theory A theory that contends that children use the speech they hear around them to con- struct the rules of the language by listening for and discovering patterns, hypothesizing about the rules that create those patterns, and then testing those rules in their own usage.

child-directed speech (CDS) Language that adults use in talking with a young child, adapted to the child’s level of comprehension and featuring simplified structure and changes in pitch and rate of speech.

creole A language with more of the properties of natural language that has its origins in a pidgin; sometimes referred to as “second-generation” pidgin.

critical period hypothesis With regard to the first language, the first 5 years or so of life during which the child’s brain is most receptive to language learning.

developmental forms Imperfect forms (i.e., pronunciations, past-tenses, etc.) that young children produce during the pro- cess of learning a language.

feral children Children who have lived in relative isolation, apart from or only mar- ginally exposed to human society.

homesigns A rudimentary sign language that nonhearing people develop them- selves to communicate within their own communities.

innateness hypothesis The belief, first put forth by Noam Chomsky, that humans are predisposed to learn language.

pidgin A simplified language with ele- ments taken from local languages, used for communication between people who do not share a common language.

successive approximation The process by which children move progressively closer to the adult forms in certain aspects of their language learning. For example, a child learning the past tense of sing might progress from singed to sanged to sang.

Key Terms

Weblinks

Visit this website to watch and listen to Steven Pinker speak. http://www.ted.com/speakers/steven_pinker.html

This website offers a brief overview of many of the issues discussed in this chapter. http://www.slideshare.net/zmiers/feral-children-presentation-presentation

This website includes more information about Isabelle and other feral children. http://www.audiblox2000.com/book7.htm

This website provides additional information on Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjtioIFuNf8

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 79 10/26/12 10:46 AM

CHAPTER 3Weblinks

This website links to a description of connectionist theory and how it differs from active construction of a grammar theory (Elman, 2001). http://crl.ucsd.edu/courses/commdis/pdf/elman-chapter.pdf

This website has an easy-to-read description of the simplified talk that adults use with children (and pets!). See Graham Williamson’s (2011) article “Child-Directed Speech.” http://www.speech-therapy-information-and-resources.com/child-directed-speech.html

pip80380_03_c03_053-080.indd 80 10/26/12 10:46 AM