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In child language, most observational and research evidence points to the general superiority of comprehension over production: children seem to understand "more" than they actually produce. For instance, a child may understand a sentence with an embedded relative in it (e.g., "The ball that's in the sandbox is red") but not be able to produce one. W.R. Miller (1963: 863) gave us a good example of this phenomenon in phonological development: "Recently a three-year-old child told me her name was Litha. I answered Litha?' 'No, Litha.' 'Oh, Lisa.' 'Yes, Litha.'" The child clearly perceived the contrast between English s and th, even though she could not produce the contrast herself.
How are we to explain this difference, this apparent "lag" between comprehension and production? We know that even adults understand more vocabulary than they ever use in speech, and also perceive more syntactic variation than they actually produce. Could it be that the same competence accounts for both modes of performance? Or can we speak с comprehension competence as something that is identified as separate from production competence? Because comprehension for the most part runs ahead of production, is it more completely indicative of our overall competence? Is production indicative of a smaller portion of competence? Surely not. It is therefore necessary to make a distinction between production competence and comprehension competence. A theory с language must include some accounting of the separation of the two type of competence. In fact, linguistic competence no doubt has several mode or levels, at least as many as four, since speaking, listening, reading, an writing are all separate modes of performance.
Perhaps
an even more compelling argument for the separation с competencies
comes from research that appears to support the superiority of production
over comprehension. Gathercole (1988) reported on number of studies
in which children were able to produce certain aspect of language they
could not comprehend. For example, Rice (1980) found that children who
did not previously know terms for color were able t respond verbally
to such questions as "What color is this?" But they were not
able to respond correctly (by giving the correct colored object) t "Give
me the [color] one." While lexical and grammatical instances с
production-before-
Nativists contend that a child is born with an innate knowledge of or predisposition toward language, and that this innate property (the LAD or UG is universal in all human beings. The innateness hypothesis was a possible resolution of the contradiction between the behavioristic notion that language is a set of habits that can be acquired by a process of conditioning and the fact that such conditioning is much too slow and inefficient a process to account for the acquisition of a phenomenon a complex as language.
But the innateness hypothesis presented a number of problems itself. One of the difficulties has already been discussed in this chapter: the LAI proposition simply postpones facing the central issue of the nature of the human being's capacity for language acquisition. Having thus "explained language acquisition, one must now scientifically explain the genetic transmission of linguistic ability—which we cannot yet do with certainty. О the other hand, while the LAD remains a rationalistic hypothesis, I think w can take heart in slowly mounting genetic (scientific) evidence of the transmission of certain abilities, and assume that among those abilities we will one day find hard evidence of "language genes."
We must not put all our eggs in the innateness basket. Environmental factors cannot by any means be ignored. For years psychologists and educators have been embroiled in the "nature-nurture" controversy: What are those behaviors that "nature" provides innately, in some sort of predetermined biological timetable, and what are those behaviors that are, by environmental exposure—by "nurture," by teaching—learned and internalized? We do observe that language acquisition is universal, that every child acquires language. But how are the efficiency and success of that learning determined by the environment the child is in? or by the child's individual construction of linguistic reality in interaction with others? The waters of the innateness hypothesis are considerably muddied by such questions.
An interesting line of research on innateness was pursued by Derek Bickerton (1981), who found evidence, across a number of languages, of common patterns of linguistic and cognitive development. He proposed that human beings are "bio-programmed" to proceed from stage to stage. Like flowering plants, people are innately programmed to "release" certain properties of language at certain developmental ages. Just as we cannot make a geranium bloom before its "time," so human beings will "bloom" in predetermined, preprogrammed steps.
Closely related to the innateness controversy is the claim that language is universally acquired in the same manner, and moreover, that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to all languages. Decades ago Werner Leopold (1949), who was far ahead of his time, made an eloquent case for certain phonological and grammatical universals in language. Leopold inspired later work by Greenberg (1963, 1966), Bickerton (1981), and Slobin (1986,1992).
Currently, as noted earlier in this chapter, research on Universal Grammar continues this quest. One of the keys to such inquiry lies in research on child language acquisition across many different languages in order to determine the commonalities. Slobin (1986, 1992) and his colleagues gathered data on language acquisition in, among others, Japanese, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Hebrew, and Turkish. Interesting universals of pivot grammar and other telegraphese emerged. Maratsos (1988) enumerated some of the universal linguistic categories under investigation by a number of different researchers. These categories are still the subject of current inquiry:
Much of current UG research is centered around what have come to be known as principles and parameters. The child's "initial state is supposed to consist of a set of universal principles which specify some limited possibilities of variation, expressible in terms of parameters which need to be fixed in one of a few possible ways" (Saleemi 1992:58). In simpler terms, this means that the child's task of language learning is manageable because of certain naturally occurring constraints. For example, the principle of structure dependency "states that language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements in a sentence (such as words, morphemes, etc.)" (Holzman 1998:49). Take, for example, the following sentences:
- The boy that's wearing a red shirt and standing next to my brother kicked the ball.
The first two sentences rely on a structural grouping, characteristic of all languages, called "phrase," or more specifically, "noun phrase." Without awareness of such a principle, someone would get all tangled up in sentence (2). Likewise, the principle of word order permutation allows one to perceive the difference between (3) and (4). Children, of course, are not born with such sophisticated perceptions of language; in fact, sentences like (2) are incomprehensible to most native English speaking children until about the age of four or five. Nevertheless, the principle of structure dependency eventually appears in both the comprehension and production of the child.
According to UG, languages cannot vary in an infinite number of ways. Parameters determine ways in which languages can vary. Just one example should suffice to illustrate. One parameter, known as "head parameter," specifies the position of the "head" of a phrase in relation to its complements in the phrase. While these positions vary across languages, their importance is primary in all languages. Languages are either "head first" or "head last." English is a typical head-first language, with phrases like "the boy that's wearing a red shirt" and "kicked the ball." Japanese is a head-last language, with sentences like "E wa kabe ni kakkatte imasu" (picture wall on is hanging) (from Cook & Newson 1996:14).
One of the assumptions of a good deal of current research on child language is the systematicity of the process of acquisition. From pivot grammar to three- and four-word utterances, and to full sentences of almost indeterminate length, children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical, and semantic system of language. Ever since Berko's (1958) groundbreaking "wug" study, we have been discovering more and more about the systematicity of the acquisition process.
But in the midst of all this systematicity, there is an equally remarkable amount of variability in the process of learning! Researchers do not agree on how to define various "stages" of language acquisition, even in English. Certain "typical" patterns appear in child language. For example, it has been found that young children who have not yet mastered the past-tense morpheme tend first to learn past tenses as separate items ("walked," "broke," "drank") without knowledge of the difference between regular and irregular verbs. Then, around the age of four or five, they begin to perceive a system in which the -ed morpheme is added to a verb, and at this point all verbs become regularized ("breaked,""drinked,""goed"). Finally, after school age, children perceive that there are two classes of verbs, regular and irregular, and begin to sort out verbs into the two classes, a process that goes on for many years and in some cases persists into young adulthood.
In both first and second language acquisition, the problem of variability is being carefully addressed by researchers (see Bayley & Preston 1996 and Tarone 1988, for example). One of the major current research problems is to account for all this variability: to determine if what is now variable in our present point of view can some day be deemed systematic through such careful accounting.
For years researchers have probed the relationship between language and cognition. The behavioristic view that cognition is too mentalistic to be studied by the scientific method is diametrically opposed to such positions as that of Piaget (1972), who claimed that cognitive development is at the very center of the human organism and that language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive development.
Others emphasized the influence of language on cognitive development. Jerome Bruner (Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield 1966), for example, singled out sources of language-influenced intellectual development", words shaping concepts, dialogues between parent and child or teacher and child serving to orient and educate, and other sources. Vygotsky (1962, 1978) also differed from Piaget in claiming that social interaction, through language, is a prerequisite to cognitive development. Thought and language were seen as two distinct cognitive operations that grow together (Schinke-Llano 1993). Moreover, every child reaches his or her potential development, in part, through social interaction with adults and peers. Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is the distance between a child's actual cognitive capacity and the level of potential development (Vygotsky 1978:86).
One of the champions of the position that language affects thought was Benjamin Whorf, who with Edward Sapir formed the well-known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity—namely, that each language imposes on its speaker a particular "world view." (See Chapter 7 for more discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.)
The issue at stake in child language acquisition is to determine how thought affects language, how language affects thought, and how linguists can best describe and account for the interaction of the two. While we do not have complete answers, it is clear that research has pointed to the fact that cognitive and linguistic development are inextricably intertwined with dependencies in both directions. And we do know that language is a way of life, is at the foundation of our being, and interacts simultaneously with thoughts and feelings.
It is a common informal observation that children are good imitators. We think of children typically as imitators and mimics, and then conclude that imitation is one of the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language. That conclusion is not inaccurate on a global level. Indeed, research has shown that echoing is a particularly salient strategy in early language learning and an important aspect of early phonological acquisition. Moreover, imitation is consonant with behavioristic principles of language acquisition—principles relevant, at least, to the earliest stages.
But it is important to ask what type of imitation is implied. Behaviorists assume one type of imitation, but a deeper level of imitation is far more important in the process of language acquisition. The first type is surface-structure imitation, where a person repeats or mimics the surface strings, attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code. It is this level of imitation that enables an adult to repeat random numbers or nonsense syllables, or even to mimic nonsense syllables. The semantic data, if any, underlying the surface output are perhaps only peripherally attended to. In foreign language classes, rote pattern drills often evoke surface imitation: a repetition of sounds by the student without the vaguest understanding of what the sounds might possibly mean. The earliest stages of child language acquisition may manifest a good deal of surface imitation since the baby may not possess the necessary semantic categories to assign "meaning" to utterances. But as children perceive the importance of the semantic level of language, they attend to a greater extent to that meaningful semantic level—the deep structure of language. They engage in deep-structure imitation. In fact, the imitation of the deep structure of language can literally block their attention to the surface structure so that they become, on the face of it, poor imitators. Consider the following conversation as recorded by McNeill (1966:69).
Child: Nobody don't like me.
Mother: No, say "nobody likes me."
Child: Nobody don't like me.(eight repetitions of this dialogue)
Mother: No, now listen carefully; say "nobody likes me."
Child: Oh! Nobody don't likes me.
You can imagine the frustration of both mother and child, for the mother was attending to a rather technical, surface grammatical distinction, and yet the child sought to derive some meaning value.The child was expressing a deep feeling, while the mother was concerned about grammar!
A similar case in point occurred one day when the teacher of an elementary-school class asked her pupils to write a few sentences on a piece of paper, to which one rather shy pupil responded, "Ain't got no pencil." Disturbed at this nonstandard response, the teacher embarked on a barrage of corrective models for the child: "I don't have any pencils, you don't have a pencil, they don't have pencils,..." When the teacher finally ended her monologue of patterns, the intimidated and bewildered child said, "Ain't nobody got no pencils?" The teacher's purpose was lost on this child because he too was attending to language as a meaningful and communicative tool, and not to the question of whether certain forms were "correct" and others were not. The child, like all children, was attending to the truth value of the utterance.
Research has also shown that children, when explicitly asked to repeat a sentence in a test situation, will often repeat the correct underlying deep structure with a change in the surface rendition. For example, sentences such as "The ball that is rolling down the hill is black" and "The boy who's in the sandbox is wearing a red shirt" tend to be repeated back by preschool children as "The black ball is rolling down the hill" and "The red boy is in the sandbox" (Brown 1970). Children are excellent imitators. It is simply a matter of understanding exactly what it is that they are imitating.
Closely related to the notion of imitation is a somewhat broader quest the nature of practice in child language. Do children practice t language? If so, how? What is the role of the frequency of hearing and producing items in the acquisition of those items? It is common to observe children and conclude that they "practice" language constantly, especially in the early stages of single-word and two-word utterances. A behavioristic model of first language acquisition would claim that practice—repetition and association—is the key to the formation of habits by operant conditioning.
One unique form of practice by a child was recorded by Ruth' (1962). She found that her children produced rather long monologues in bed at night before going to sleep. Here is one example: "What color… What color blanket . . . What color mop . . . What color glass… Mommy's home sick ... Mommy's home sick ... Where's Mommy home sick . . Where's Mikey sick . . . Mikey sick." Such monologues an uncommon among children, whose inclination it is to "play" with language just as they do with all objects and events around them. Weir's data show far more structural patterning than has commonly been found in other data. Nevertheless, children's practice seems to be a key to language acquisition.
Practice is usually thought of as referring to speaking only. But on also think in terms of comprehension practice, which is often considered under the rubric of the frequency of linguistic input to the child. Is the acquisition of particular words or structures directly attributable to frequency in the child's linguistic environment? There is evidence that certain very frequent forms are acquired first: what questions, irregular past tense forms, certain common household items and persons. Brown and Hanlon (1970), for example, found that the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic item in the speech of mothers was an overwhelmingly strong predictor of the order of emergence of those items in their children's speech.
There are some conflicting data, however. Telegraphic speech is one case in point. Some of the most frequently occurring words in the language are omitted in such two- and three-word utterances. And McNeill (1968:416) found that a Japanese child produced the Japanese postposition ga far more frequently and more correctly than another contrasting postposition wa, even though her mother was recorded as using wa twice as often as ga. McNeill attributed this finding to the fact that ga as a subject marker is of more importance, grammatically, to the child, and she therefore acquired the use of that item since it was more meaningful on a deep-structure level. Another feasible explanation for that finding might lie in the easier pronunciation of g.
The frequency issue may be summed up by noting that nativists who claim that "the relative frequency of stimuli is of little importance in language acquisition" (Wardhaugh 1971:12) might, in the face of evidence now available, be more cautious in their claims. It would appear that frequency of meaningful occurrence may well be a more precise refinement of the notion of frequency.
The role of input in the child's acquisition of language is undeniably crucial. Whatever one's position is on the innateness of language, the speech that young children hear is primarily the speech heard in the home, and much of that speech is parental speech or the speech of older siblings. Linguists once claimed that most adult speech is basically semigrammatical (full of performance variables), that children are exposed to a chaotic sample of language, and only their innate capacities can account for their successful acquisition of language. McNeill, for example, wrote: "The speech of adults from which a child discovers the locally appropriate manifestation of the linguistic universals is a completely random, haphazard sample, in no way contrived to instruct the child on grammar" (1966: 73). However, Labov's (1970) studies showed that the presumed ungrammati-cality of everyday speech appears to be a myth. Bellugi and Brown (1964) and Drach (1969) found that the speech addressed to children was carefully grammatical and lacked the usual hesitations and false starts common in adult-to-adult speech. Landes's (1975) summary of a wide range of research on parental input supported their conclusions. Later studies of parents' speech in the home (Hladik & Edwards 1984; Moerk 1985) confirmed earlier evidence demonstrating the selectivity of parental linguistic input to their children.