Module 3.2

Children talking

The baby has been listening for some time - but the first words do not emerge immediately. This may be partly because the vocal apparatus is not yet fully in place (Deacon) or because the brain has not yet developed fully (Aitchison). But once the child does start to talk, there is a predictable sequence to the language that she produces. You can see an outline of this at Andrew Moore's Resource Site

How does what the child says relate to what she hears around her? B.F. Skinner, a highly influential behaviourist psychologist, maintained that children attempted to repeat the sounds and words that they heard around them. At first, their utterances are phonologically inaccurate and formally incorrect - but as their attempts are shaped by the praise and encouragement of their parents, and as they learn to pay closer attention to what they hear, so they conform more and more closely to the adult model.

To some extent, the behaviourist model can account for early language behaviour. The child may well produce such sentences as 'Daddy gone', which indicates that she is paying attention to the words which receive primary stress in an utterance such as 'Daddy's gone now'. But there are considerable difficulties for the theory ; how do we account for utterances such as 'Daddy goed', or 'Daddy wented'? Or for 'Give me the other one spoon'? Sentences such as these indicate that the infant is making up her own rules, and that she is capable of saying things that she has never heard.

So the idea that children learn language through repetition will not account for all the language that children produce - nor for all the language that adults produce, of course. In particular, children make mistakes - but these are not random. They appear to be the result of applying rules - rules which somehow the infant has worked out for herself, and which she now applies in inappropriate contexts. In the 'gone', 'goed', 'wented' example, we see that at first the child repeats what she has heard, without analyzing it. She then realizes that the past tense is signalled by adding 'ed' to the verb stem - and so she does this even to irregular verbs (she also may believe that there are two verbs - 'go' and 'went').

This capacity of the child to analyze language and discover the underlying rules is often put forward as being an argument for the LAD. However, it should be said that children do - like adults - tend to impose order upon the world, and to search for regularities in other domains as well. So it may be that the child's ability to build a language is simply one aspect of our species' general capacity to analyze and classify.

Recap

When children start to talk, they do not simply repeat what their parents and other care-givers say to them. Their language deviates from the adult model in ways which suggest that they are working out the rules for themselves.

Now go on to the next part