Module 1.3

But ...

By no means all linguists are in agreement with Chomsky over the LAD or over the idea that the child has little need of parental guidance and intervention - see what French linguist, Claude Hagège has to say about it. (What do you think Chomsky or Pinker might reply to Hagège's objection?)

Notice that we have so far talked about the acquisition of grammar - and sometimes it seems that in Chomsky's view, the grammar is the language. But a child's knowledge of her tongue adds up to far more than knowledge about the way words are structured into sentences. In order to speak comprehensibly and to understand what is said, the child must master a number of different sub-systems of rules. Some of these can be seen as extra-linguistic ; a young Mexican Indian, for example, needs to know that he should not look his interlocutor in the eye, while young Europeans, on the other hand, have to learn that they are expected to make eye-contact. Other sets of rules, however, are fundamental to language as such. First of all, the child must master the sound-system of his mother-tongue. Have a look at how he begins to do this.

Even before birth, the baby can hear the sounds of human voices around him - and he listens to them. He has picked out the prosodic features of his mother's speech, and can distinguish them from those of other languages. Moreover, he recognizes the rhythms of what he hears ; when he has heard his mother reading a particular poem to him regularly, he will react to that poem in ways that he does not react to another, even when it is read by someone else ... see Boysson-Bardies, p. 38.

Secondly, the child has to relate sound to meaning ; acquiring the lexicon of his mother tongue means more than just learning how to say the words, and putting words together in a grammatically acceptable way does not necessarily mean that you will make sense. The child manages to master the semantic bases of his mother-tongue very quickly indeed - but does he do it without help from adults? There is good evidence that people vary in the command they have over vocabulary - and that much of this variation can be explained by the ways in which adults - in cultures like ours, the mother is of particular importance - talk to them.

Nor is it enough for the child to be able to construct grammatically acceptable, phonologically comprehensible sentences with a meaningful lexicon ; he must also know how to construct a discourse, how to form a narrative and how to successfully take part in the give-and-take of conversation. The rules which govern these skills appear to differ from one culture to another, which leads us to suspect that there children must receive considerable training in the use of language from parents, other caretakers, and peers.

Recap 2

Language is not just syntax ; phonology, semantics, discourse, narration and the rules of conversation are all skills that must be mastered if a child is to speak well. While some of these do seem to be acquired with only a minimum of intervention on the part of caretakers, others do not. So perhaps children cannot do it all by themselves

How do you think parents help their children acquire vocabulary? What can they do to make sure their offspring can constuct a discourse or a narrative? Can teachers help schoolchildren do this, and how?

Go on to the next section.