LANGUAGE LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER 1
Language acquisition is one of the most impressive and fascinating
aspects of human development.

Researchers have travelled all over the world to observe, record and study
children’s early language development.

The first three years: Milestones and developmental

sequences
Researchers have described DEVELOPMENTAL SEQUENCES for many
aspects of first language acquisition. The earliest vocalizations are simply
the involuntary crying that babies do when they are hungry or
uncomfortable.

Even though they have little control over the sounds they make in these
early weeks of life, infants are able to hear very subtle differences
between the sounds of human languages.

By the end of their first year, most babies understand quite a few
frequently repeated words. At twelve months, most babies will have
begun to produce a word or two that everyone recognizes.

By the age of two, most children reliably produce at least fifty different
words and some produce many more. Also, they begin to combine words
into simple sentences. These sentences are sometimes called 'telegraphic'
because they leave out such things as articles, prepositions, and auxiliary
verbs. We recognize them as sentences because, even though function
words and grammatical morphemes are missing, the word order reflects
the word order of the language they are hearing and because the
combined words have a meaning relationship that makes them more than
just a list of words. Children do more than imperfectly imitate what they
have heard. Their two- and three-word sentences show signs that they
can creatively combine words.

As children progress through the discovery of language in their first three

years, there are predictable patterns in the emergence and development
of many features of the language they are learning. For some language
features, these patterns have been described in terms of developmental
sequences or ‘stages’. To some extent, these stages in language
acquisition are related to children's cognitive development.
The developmental sequences seem to reflect the gradual mastery of the
linguistic elements for expressing ideas that have been present in
children's cognitive understanding for a long time.

Grammatical morphemes
Roger Brown and his colleagues carried out the longitudinal study of the
language development of three children. They found that fourteen
grammatical morphemes were acquired in a remarkably similar sequence.
The morphemes that they studied were:

 present progressive -ing (Mommy running)

 plural -s (Two books)
 irregular past forms (Baby went)
 possessive's (Daddy shat)
 copula (Annie is happy)
 articles the and a
 regular past -ed (She walked)
 third person singular simple present -s (She runs)
 auxiliary be (He is coming)

Brown and his colleagues found that a child who had mastered the
grammatical morphemes at the bottom of the list was sure to have
mastered those at the top, but the reverse was not true. The children did
not acquire the morphemes at the same age or rate.

Brown's longitudinal work was confirmed in a CROSS-SECTIONAL study of

twenty-one children. It was found that children who correctly used the
morphemes that the children from the other study had acquired, late were
also able to use the ones that the other children had acquired earlier. The
children mastered the morphemes at different ages but the order of their
acquisition was very similar. They were similar to each other and similar
to the other children.

Most researchers agree that the order in which morphemes are acquired
is determined by an interaction among a number of different factors.

Children's knowledge of grammatical morphemes:

‘Wug test’: children are shown drawings of imaginary creatures with novel
names or people performing mysterious actions. Children have to
complete sentences with wugs' and 'bodded'. By doing this, they
demonstrate that they know rules for the formation of plural and simple
past in English. By generalizing these patterns to words they have never
heard before, they show that their language is not just a list of memorized
word pairs.
The acquisition of other language features also shows how children's
language develops systematically, and how they go beyond what they
have heard to create new forms and structures.

Negation
Children learn the functions of negation very early. They learn to
comment on the disappearance of objects, to refuse a suggestion, or
reject an assertion.

Even though children understand these functions and express them with
single words and gestures, it takes some time before they can express
them in sentences, using the appropriate words and word order. The are
four stages in the development of negation:

Stage 1

Negation is usually expressed by the word 'no', either all alone or as the
first word in the utterance.

No. No cookie.

Stage 2

Utterances grow longer and the sentence subject may be included. The
negative word appears just before the verb. Sentences expressing
rejection or prohibition often use don't.

Daddy no comb hair.

Don't touch that!

Stage 3

The negative element is inserted into a more complex sentence. Children

may add forms of the negative other than 'no', including words like 'can'
and don't. These sentences appear to follow the correct English pattern of
attaching the negative to the auxiliary or modal verb. However, children
do not yet vary these forms for different persons or tenses:

I can't do it. He don't want it.

Stage 4

Children begin to attach the negative element to the correct form of

auxiliary verbs such as 'do and 'be:

You didn't have supper. She doesn't want it.

At this point, they still have difficulty with some other features related to
negatives.
I don't have no more candies.

Questions
There is a remarkable consistency in the way children learn to form
questions in English. For one thing, there is a predictable order in which
the wh words emerge. What is generally the first wh question word to be
used. It is often learned as part of a chunk, and it is some time before the
child learns that there are variations of the form.

‘Where’ and ‘who’ emerge very soon. Identifying and locating people and
objects are within the child's understanding of the world.

Why emerges around the end of the second year and becomes a favourite
for the next year or two. Children seem to ask an endless number of
questions beginning with why.

Finally, when the child has a better understanding of manner and time,
‘how’ and ‘when’ emerge. In contrast to ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘who’
questions, children sometimes ask the more cognitively difficult ‘why’,
‘when’, and ‘how’ questions without always understanding the answers
they get.

The ability to use these question words is at least partly tied to children's
cognitive development.

There is the consistency in the acquisition of word order in questions. This

development is based on learning different linguistic forms to express
meanings that are already understood.

Stage 1

Children's earliest questions are single words or simple two- or three-word

sentences with rising intonation:

Cookie? Mummy book?

At the same time, they may produce some correct questions correct
because they have been learned as chunks:

Where's Daddy? What's that?

Stage 2

As they begin to ask more new questions, children use the word order of
the declarative sentence, with rising intonation.

You like this? I have some?

They continue to produce the correct chunk-learned forms such as What's

that?' alongside their own created questions.
Stage 3

Gradually, children notice that the structure of questions is different and

begin to produce questions such as:

Can I go? Are you happy?

Although some questions at this stage match the adult pattern, they may
be right for the wrong reason. Children use 'fronting' because the
questions are formed by putting something—a verb form or question word
—at the ‘front’ of a sentence, leaving the rest of the sentence in its
statement form:

Is the teddy is tired? Do I can have a cookie?

Why you don't have one? Why you catched it?

Stage 4

At stage 4, some questions are formed by subject-auxiliary inversion.

There is more variety in the auxiliaries that appear before the subject.

Are you going to play with me?

At this stage, children can even add ‘do’ in questions in which there would
be no auxiliary in the declarative version of the sentence.

Do dogs like ice cream?

Children seem able to use either inversion or a wh word, but not both.
Therefore, we may find inversion in yes/no' questions but not in wh-
questions, unless they are formulaic units such as ‘What's that?’.

Stage 5

Both wh- and yes/no questions are formed correctly.

Negative questions may still be a bit too difficult.

Even though performance on most questions is correct,when wh-words

appear in subordinate clauses or embedded questions, children
overgeneralize the inverted form that would be correct for simple
questions and produce sentences such as:

Ask him why can't he go out.

Stage 6

Children are able to correctly form all question types, including negative
and complex embedded questions.
Children appear to learn new things and then fall back on old patterns
when there is added stress in a new situation or when they are using
other new elements in their language.

The pre-school years

By the age of four, most children can ask questions, give commands,
report real events, and create stories about imaginary ones-using correct
word order and grammatical markers most of the time. By age four,
children master the basic structures of the language or languages spoken
to them in the early years. Three- and four-year-olds continue to learn
vocabulary at the rate of several words a day. They begin to acquire less
frequent and more complex linguistic structures such as passives and
relative clauses.

In the late pre-school years children develop their ability to use language
in social environments:

 They interact more often with unfamiliar adults.

 Begin to talk sensibly on the telephone to invisible grandparents.
 Acquire the aggressive language that is needed to defend their toys
in the playground.
 Show that they have learned the difference between how adults talk
to babies and how they talk to each other.
 Use this knowledge in elaborate pretend play in which they practise
using these different voices.

In the preschool years, children develop metalinguistic awareness: the

ability to treat language as an object separate from the meaning it
conveys. Three-year-olds children know "drink the chair" is silly because it
makes no sense. But if you say "cake the eat," they might notice it's odd,
but they will focus on the fact that they can understand what it means. In
contrast, five-year-olds children can explain that "drink the chair" is silly
and that "cake the eat" is just the wrong order.

The school years

Children develop the ability to understand language and to use it to
express themselves in the pre-school years. In the school years, these
abilities expand and grow.

Children also develop more sophisticated metalinguistic awareness. They

learn to read. Seeing words represented by letters and other symbols on a
page leads children to a new understanding that language has form as
well as meaning. Reading reinforces the understanding that a ‘word’ is
separate from the thing it represents.
Metalinguistic awareness also includes the discovery of such things as
ambiguity. Knowing that words and sentences can have multiple meaning
gives children access to word jokes, trick questions, and riddles.

Many words are acquired in early childhood, when the repetition of

ordinary events and experiences provides frequent exposure to a limited
number of words. Children enter school with the ability to understand and
produce hundreds or even a few thousand words. Many more are learned
at school. In both the spoken and written language at school, some words
appear frequently in situations where their meaning is either immediately
or gradually revealed. Vocabulary grows at a rate between several
hundred and more than a thousand words a year, depending mainly on
how much and how widely children read. The kind of vocabulary growth
required for school success is likely to come from both reading for
assignments and reading for pleasure, whether narrative or non-fiction.

There are words in non-fiction texts that are unlikely to occur in stories or
novels. In addition, non-fiction tends to include more opportunities to see
a word in its different forms. The importance of reading for vocabulary
growth is seen when observant parents report a child using a new word
but mispronouncing it in a way that reveals it has been encountered only
in written form.

Another important development in the school years is the acquisition of

different language registers. Children learn how written language differs
from spoken language, how the language used to speak to the principal is
different from the language of the playground, how the language of a
science report is different from the language of a narrative.

Children who come to school speaking an ethnic or regional variety of the

school language that is quite different from the one used by the teacher,
will have to learn the standard variety which is required for successful
academic work. Other children arrive at school speaking a different
language altogether. For these children, the work of language learning in
the early school years presents additional opportunities and challenges.

The behaviourist perspective: Say what I say

Behaviorism was a theory of learning that was very influential in the
1940s and 1950s, especially in the United States. The most well-known
supporter of this idea about language learning was Skinner. Traditional
behaviourists hypothesized that when children imitated the language
produced by those around them, their attempts to reproduce what they
heard received ‘positive reinforcement’. This could take the form of praise
or just successful communication. Thus, encouraged by their environment,
children would continue to imitate and practise these sounds and patterns
until they formed 'habits' of correct language use.

According to this view, the quality and quantity of the language the child
hears, as well as the consistency of the reinforcement offered by others in
the environment, would shape the child's language behaviour. This theory
gives great importance to the environment as the source of everything
the child needs to learn.

The behaviourists viewed imitation and practice as the primary processes

in language development.

o Imitation: word-for-word repetition of all or part of someone else's

utterance.
o Practice: repetitive manipulation of form.

Children appear to imitate selectively. The choice of what to imitate

seems to be based on something new that they have just begun to
understand and use, not simply on what is ‘available’ in the environment.
Something inside the child, not the environment.

Children vary in the amount of imitation they do. Many of the things they
say show that they are using language creatively, not just repeating what
they have heard.

Patterns in language

The first example shows a child in the process of learning patterns in

language, in this case the rules of word formation, and overgeneralizing
them to new contexts. Randall (36 months) had a sore on his hand. He
forms the verb doc from the noun 'doctor', by analogy with farmers who
farm, swimmers who swim, and actors who act.

Unfamiliar formulas

Even older children have to work out some puzzles, for example, when
familiar language is used in unfamiliar ways. For example, at his sister's
birthday party, David heard his father said, “I'd like to propose a toast".
Later, David raised his glass and said, “I'd like to propose a piece of
bread”.

The group, then, realized that he wasn’t making a play on words, he was
concentrating so hard on performing the fascinating new gesture and the
formulaic expression “I’d like to propose...” that he failed to realize that
the word he thought he knew ‘toast’, was being used in a different way
and not referring to a piece of bread.
Three-years old children tend to mention events in the order of their
occurrence.

Children appear to pick out patterns and generalize them to new contexts.
They create new forms or new uses of words. Their new sentences are
usually comprehensible and often correct.

Behaviourism seems to offer a reasonable way of understanding how

children learn some of the regular and routine aspects of language,
especially at the earliest stages. However, children who do little overt
imitation acquire language as fully and rapidly as those who imitate a lot.

The innatist perspective: It’s all in your mind

A central part of Noam Chomsky’s thinking is that all human languages
are fundamentally innate and that the same universal principles underlie
all of them. Chomsky challenged the behaviourist explanation for
language acquisition. He argued that children are biologically
programmed for language and that language develops in the child in just
the same way that other biological functions develop. For example, every
child will learn to walk as long as adequate nourishment and reasonable
freedom of movement are provided. The child does not have to be taught.
Most children learn to walk at about the same age, and walking is
essentially the same in all normal human beings. For Chomsky, language
acquisition is very similar. The environment makes only a basic
contribution-in this case, the availability of people who speak to the child.
The child's biological endowment, will do the rest.

Chomsky argued that the behaviourist theory failed to account for ‘the
logical problem of language acquisition’-the fact that children come to
know more about the structure of their language than they could
reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples of language
they hear. He concluded that children's minds are not blank slates to be
filled by imitating language they hear in the environment. Instead, he
hypothesized, children are born with a specific innate ability to discover
for themselves the underlying rules of a language system on the basis of
the samples of a natural language they are exposed to.

This innate endowment was seen as a sort of template, containing the

principles that are universal to all human languages. This Universal
Grammar would prevent the child from pursuing all sorts of wrong
hypotheses about how language systems might work. If children are pre-
equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in which the
language they are acquiring makes use of these principles.
Researchers who study language acquisition from the innatist perspective
argue that complex grammar could never be learned purely on the basis
of imitating and practising sentences available in the input.

They hypothesize that since all children acquire the language of their
environment, they must have some innate mechanism or knowledge that
allows them to discover complex syntax in spite of limitations of the input.

The innatist perspective emphasizes the fact that all children successfully
acquire their native language. Children who are profoundly deaf will learn
sign language if they are exposed to it in infancy, and their progress in the
acquisition of that language system is similar to hearing children's
acquisition of spoken language. Even children with very limited cognitive
ability develop quite complex language systems if they are brought up in
environments in which people interact with them. Children master the
basic syntax and morphology of the language spoken to them in a variety
of conditions- some which would be expected to enhance language
development (for example, caring, attentive parents who focus on the
child's language), and some which might be expected to inhibit it (for
example, abusive or rejecting parents).

Virtually all children achieve mastery of the structure of the language or

languages spoken to them.

The Critical Period Hypothesis

Chomsky's ideas are often linked to the Critical Period Hypothesis: the
hypothesis that humans are genetically programmed to acquire certain
kinds of knowledge and skill at specific times in life. Beyond those ‘critical
periods’, it is either difficult or impossible to acquire those abilities. With
regard to language, the CPH suggests that children who are not given
access to language in infancy and early childhood (because of deafness or
extreme isolation) will never acquire language if these deprivations go on
for too long.

It is difficult to find evidence for or against the CPH. However, history has
documented a few 'natural experiments' where children have been
deprived of contact with language. Two of the most famous cases are
those of Victor and Genie.

In 1799, a boy who became known as Victor was found wandering naked
in the woods in France. When he was captured, he was about twelve years
old and completely wild, apparently having had no contact with humans. A
young doctor accustomed to working with deaf children, devoted five
years to socializing Victor and trying to teach him language. Although he
succeeded to some extent in developing Victor's sociability, memory, and
judgement, there was little progress in his language ability. Victor
responded only to sounds that had had meaning for him in the forest. He
eventually spoke only two words. He said ‘lait’ only when he saw a glass
of milk. He never used the word to ask for it.

Genie, a thirteen-year-old girl who had been isolated, neglected and

abused, was discovered in California.

Because of the irrational demands of a disturbed father and the

submission and fear of an abused mother, Genie had spent more than
eleven years tied to a chair in a small, darkened room. Her father had
forbidden his wife and son to speak to Genie and had himself only growled
and barked at her.

She was beaten when she made any kind of noise. Genie was
undeveloped physically, emotionally, and intellectually. She had no
language.

After she was discovered, Genie was cared for and educated with the
participation of many teachers and therapists. After a brief period in a
rehabilitation centre, she lived in a foster home and attended special
schools. Genie made remarkable progress in becoming socialized and
cognitively aware. She developed deep personal relationships and strong
individual tastes and traits. Nevertheless, after five years of exposure to
language, Genie's language was not like that of a typical five-year old.
There was a larger than normal gap between comprehension and
production.

There are some children who come from ordinary homes, yet do not have
access to language at the usual time. This is the case for some profoundly
deaf children who have hearing parents. Hearing parents may not realize
that their child cannot hear because the child uses other senses to
interact in an apparently normal way. Thus, the early childhood period
may be normal and loving but devoid of (falto de) language that the
children can access.

Elissa Newport and her colleagues studied deaf users of American sign
language. Only 5-10 per cent of the profoundly deaf are born to deaf
parents, and only these children are likely to be exposed to ASL from
birth. The remainder of the profoundly deaf population begin learning ASL
at different ages, often when they start attending a residential school
where sign language is used for day-to-day communication.

Like oral and written languages, ASL makes use of grammatical markers
to indicate such things as time and number. The researchers studied the
ability to produce and comprehend grammatical markers in Native signers
(who were exposed to ASL from birth), Early learners (who began using
ASL between four and six years of age), and Late learners (who began
learning ASL after age twelve).

On tests focusing on grammatical markers, the Native group used the

forms more consistently than the Early group who, in turn, used them
more consistently than the Late group. The researchers concluded that
their study supports the hypothesis that there is a critical period for first
language acquisition, whether that language is oral or gestural.

We will return to a discussion of the CPH in Chapter 3 when we look at the

age issue in second language acquisition.

The innatist perspective is seen as an explanation for the question of how

adult speakers come to know the complex structure of their first language
on the basis of language that they actually hear.

Interactionist/developmental perspectives: Learning from

inside and out
Cognitive and developmental psychologists argue that the innatists place
too much emphasis on the 'final state' (the competence of adult native
speakers) and not enough on the developmental aspects of language
acquisition. In their view, language acquisition is but one example of the
human child's remarkable ability to learn from experience, and they see
no need to assume that there are specific brain structures devoted to
language acquisition. They hypothesize that what children need to know is
essentially available in the language they are exposed to as they hear it
used in thousands of hours of interactions with the people and objects
around them.

Developmental psychologists and psycholinguists have focused on the

interplay between the innate learning ability of children and the
environment in which they develop. They see language acquisition as
similar to and influenced by the acquisition of other kinds of skill and
knowledge.

Piaget and Vygotsky

In the early decades of the 20th century, Piaget observed infants and
children in their play and in their interaction with objects and people. He
was able to trace the development of their cognitive understanding of
such things as object permanence, the stability of quantities regardless of
changes in their appearance, and logical inferencing.

It is easy to see from this how children's cognitive development would

partly determine how they use language. The developing cognitive
understanding is built on the interaction between the child and the things
that can be observed or manipulated. For Piaget, language was one of a
number of symbol systems that are developed in childhood. Language can
be used to represent knowledge that children have acquired through
physical interaction with the environment.

Vygotsky observed interactions among children and also between

children and adults in schools in the Soviet Union. He concluded that
language develops primarily from social interaction. He argued that in a
supportive interactive environment, children are able to advance to a
higher level of knowledge and performance. Vygotsky referred to this
metaphorical place in which the children could do more than they would
be capable of independently as the Zone of Proximal Development. He
observed the importance of conversations that children have with adults
and with other children and saw in these conversations the origins of both
language and thought. Vygotsky's view differs from Piaget's.

Piaget Vygotsky
Saw language as a symbol system Thought that language was
that could be used to express essentially internalized speech,
knowledge acquired through and speech emerged in social
interaction with the physical world. interaction.

Cross-cultural research
Since the 1970s, researchers have studied children’s language learning
environments in a great many different cultural communities. The
research has focused on the development of language itself and on the
ways in which the environment provides what children need for language
acquisition. Starting in the mid-1980s, Dan Slobin has edited a series of
volumes devoted to international research on language acquisition,
providing examples and analyses of child language and the language
learning environment from communities around the world.

One result of the cross-cultural research is the description of the

differences in childrearing patterns. In middle-class North American
homes, researchers observed that adults often modify the way they speak
when talking to little children. This Child-Direct Speech may be
characterized by a slower rate of delivery, higher pitch, more varied
intonation, shorter, simpler sentence patterns, stress on key words,
frequent repetition, and paraphrase. Furthermore, topics of conversation
emphasize the child's immediate environment or experiences that the
adult knows the child has had. Adults often repeat the content of a child's
utterance, but they expand or recast it into a grammatically correct
sentence.
It was found that the kind of child-directed speech observed in middle-
class American homes is by no means universal. There are substantial
differences in the ways in which parents in different socioeconomic and
ethnic groups interact with their children. In every society, children are in
situations in which they hear language that is meaningful to them in their
environment. And they achieve full competence in the community
language. Thus, it is difficult to judge the long-term effect of the
modifications that some adults make in speech addressed to children.

The importance of interaction

The role of interaction between a language-learning child and an
interlocutor who responds in some way to the child is illuminated by cases
where such interaction is missing.

Some researchers studied the language development of a child they

called Jim. He was a hearing child of deaf parents, and his only contact
with oral language was through television, which he watched frequently.
The family was unusual in that the parents did not use sign language with
Jim. Thus, although in other respects he was well cared for, Jim did not
begin his linguistic development in a normal environment in which a
parent communicated with him in either oral or sign language. A language
assessment at three years and nine months indicated that he was well
below age level in all aspects of language.

Although he attempted to express ideas appropriate to his age, he used

unusual, ungrammatical word order.

When Jim began conversational sessions with an adult, his expressive

abilities began to improve. By the age of four years, most of the unusual
speech patterns had disappeared, replaced by structures more typical of
his age.

Jim showed very rapid acquisition of the structures of English once he

began to interact with an adult on a one-to-one basis. The fact that he had
failed to acquire language normally prior to this experience suggests that
impersonal sources of language such as television or radio alone are not
sufficient. One-to-one interaction gives the child access to language that
is adjusted to his or her level of comprehension. When a child does not
understand, the adult may repeat or paraphrase. The response of the
adult may also allow children to find out when their own utterances are
understood. Television, for obvious reasons, does not provide such
interaction. Once children have acquired some language, however,
television can be a source of language and cultural information.

Connectionism
Connectionists hypothesize that language acquisition does not require a
separate ‘module of the mind’ but can be explained in terms of learning in
general. Furthermore, connectionists argue that what children need to
know is essentially available to them in the language they are exposed to.
Researchers claim that when children hear a word or phrase in the
context of a specific object, event, or person, an association is created in
the child's mind between the word or phrase and what it represents. Thus,
hearing a word brings to mind the object, and seeing the object brings to
mind the word or phrase. Eventually, any of the characteristics of the
object or event may trigger the retrieval of the associated word or phrase
from memory.

In a connectionist model, language acquisition is a process of associating

words with elements of external reality and a process of associating words
and phrases with the other words and phrases that occur with them, or
words with grammatical morphemes that occur with them.

According to connectionist theory, this is possible because of the child's

general ability to develop associations between things that occur
together.

Of particular importance to the connectionist hypothesis is the fact that

children are exposed to many thousands of opportunities to learn words
and phrases. Learning takes place gradually, as the number of links
between language and meaning are built up. They compare the
acquisition of language to other cognitive and perceptual learning,
including learning to see.