Language typically starts to appear with first words around 10-18 months. It progressses to a stage of telegraphic style speaking ("milk allgone") around 2 years. By 4 years, the mean length of an utterance (MLU) is typically around 4-5 words. By 5, the child has a vocabulary of around 5-10,000 words. It has been estimated that at this age the child is acquiring around 5 new words every day.
Thus, language is acquired early and fast. It is also evidently central to our human cognition. Its acquisition is therefore important and impressive. For this reason, it has attracted a great deal of research attention. The present lecture concentrates on conceptualising the very earliest achievements in this development.
(1) Phonetics. Language is typically - but not inevitably (cf. deaf sign languages) based upon sound. This must be produced - thus, there is a psychology of speech production. It must also be received - thus, there is a psychology of speech perception. Our language is made up on discrete units of sound (phonemes). In English there are around 50 of these. In some languages, there are more.
(2) Semantics. These sounds compose words and the words have reference. The developmental psychologist will be interested in how this system of meaning is acquired in early life.
(3) Syntax. The words of a language are organised into higher order units of meaning - complex utterances and phrases/sentences. The way in which this organization must occur describes the syntax of a language. Human speakers are impressively creative in their application of syntax: they can create totally novel sentencs by imaginative application of these rules of combination. However, the rules are also constraining. Certain utterances are not permitted - and typically, native speakers of a language can readily identify these - often without formal, reflective insight into the rules.
(4) Pragmatics. To be an effective speaker of some language entails appreciating the conventions that govern the use of particular talk. There is a need to master the conventions whereby meaning is constructed and understood in particular situations of communication.
All of these aspects of language are of interest to the developmental psychologist as they all have a course of acquisition. Perhaps the issue of syntax has stimulated the most research as it is hard to understand how such sophisticated (if implicit) knowledge can be acquired so easily so young. In other words, the most distinctive feature of our early achievment concerns the mastery of the structural rules of language.
Chomsky thus coined the notion of a language acquisition device - LAD. This would be some form of prewired "device" that somehow facilitated the processing and comprehension of a native language - as it was heard by the child during early development. This device might have "understanding" of certain universal structural features of language, making the task of learning the particular local, native language much facilitated. Biologists such as Lenneberg speculated (on the basis of biological, anatomical and clinical neurological evidence) that such a device could have evolved in humans, and that it might have representation within the human brain.
Further debate concerned whether there might be a critical period for language acquisition. This general line of reasoning placed the acquisition of languge in a "biological context".
(1) Humans are unique (possibly) in their achievement of this form of expression and communication. This implies a biological discontinuity and structural basis for the learning of language. More detail
(2) Learning takes place when we are very young and not readily able to master other understandings that, by comparison, seem relatively straightforward. To some it seems, for example, paradoxical that children should make elementary mistakes of perspective taking (see later lecture) while mastering so fluently the complex syntactic structure of their native language.
(3) The environment is very impoverished as a source of teaching support. The hapless child has to put up with a very messy linguistic context - people talking in ungrammatical and casual way often in parallel conversations and often against a background of radio, television and other stray talk. This is not an arena of "teaching" something in the conventional sense.
(4) The acquisition of language tends to follow a particular sequence. It is stage-like. This suggests also a biological/maturational mechanisms underpinning the progress that is made.
(5) The case studies of "wolf children" - where infants have been abandoned with little social stimulation - suggest that the critical period idea may apply. Often it is hard for this children to develop normal language functioning if they have not been stimulated in particular ways in early life.
It seems likely that language acquisition does indeed have a biological basis in this sense. However, it would be unforunate if this caused us to turn away from the topic of acquisition as if there was nothing more to study or understand. In gaining a fuller understanding of this achievement as peculiarly human, it is important to contextualise it further. In particular, we should recognise that language is a manifestation of a more general human cognitive nature and a manifestation of human beings peculiarly rich social life.
If infancy is characterised as a period of "sensory motor" intelligence, it means cognition is apparent in the childs action : intelligence is overt, is about the outward activity upon a world of things and persons. There is no mental life between the sensory and the motor - no reflective processing. Yet - so it is claimed - within the second year there does appear this new form of intelligence - one that is more covert, concerrned with the private manipulation of the world. This is the intelligence of "thought" as we normally understand that.
The great achievement of human intelligence is this capacity to work with re-presentations of the world. To exercise an intelligence based upon symbolic manipulations. One clear symptom of this new form of intelligence is apparent in the new forms taken by children's play.
One form of play is "sensory motor" - it seems to be about exercising basic ways of acting upon the material world. To do so may represent a form of practice and experiment that supports more focussed, problem-oriented explorations. Such sensory motor play remains after the period for which it is named of course.
However, it is partially displaced by other forms. Particularly what may be called "symbolic play". Here, the classic format is that of pretense. To pretend is to make one thing stand for another. It is thus a representational form of activity, It may be expressed in socio-dramatic formats (playing shops) or in more thematic phantasy (star wars). This also might be seen as a form of "exercise" - as suggested for the sensory motor formats above. In each case the child seems motivated to use these tools of cognition (whether the schemes of infancy or the symbols of early childhood).
In the lecture, the develomental course of this playful representational activity was illustrated for the case of doll play - in respect of decentration, decontextualisation and integeration. More detail
Play is the appropriation of objects-to-hand for socio-dramatic representational activity. It may be more privately creative. This is the case for the other representational achievements that are very familiar of this period: drawing, modelling and dance-mime. However, the most conspicuous achievement of a representational capacity is communicative language (where spoken words serve as the units of representations - the symbols).
So this cognitive perspective would have us recognize language as an outgrowth of a rich human symbolic capacity. We may then assume that cultural practices and demands serve to harnass and amplify this capabilty rather selectively for different individuals. Indeed our mastery of symbol systems (music, maths, programming, drawing etc) is very variable. Within the same frame of argument, cultural practices may be assumed to be significant in the harnasseing of linguistic potential also. Thus, it is appropriate to turn to the social context of early language development.
Another view might be that reward (reinforcement to many psychologists) and punishment might be important. Again, probably it is - to some extent. But studies of parents reacting to their childrens talk indicate that "reward" tends to follow the truth value of what is said not the linguistic accuacy. Unless the notion of "response" and "reinforcement" is stretched to make them very flexible indeed, then this kind of model just doesnt seem to work. If the meanings of these terms are stretched - then it doesnt seem a very useful theory any more.
These ideas invite us to look for the precursors of language in comunicative experience as it is typically organized for the young child. Researchers have paid particular attention to (i) the development of a sense of (communicative) dialogue, (ii) emergence in the topic-comment structure of communication, (iii) witnessing and understanding a grammar to action (parsing activity in terms of actions, objects, locations, recipients, instruments and so on).
Various studies were mentioned that drew attention to the child's natural opportunities to participate in experiences of the kind implied in the above distinctions.
Recognizing the child as a participant in social action - and remembering that language is being (helpfully) used by adults in the context of that action has been an important theoretical insight. Thus the form that structure in the environment takes to support the acquisition of language is one that concerns opportunities for particiption in socially-organized action. In very general terms, we may then assume that the child decodes the symbols of spoken language in the course of acting and reacting to this participatory experience.
COLE & COLE: Chap 8. (1 ed: Chap 9) RICE, M: Childrens lang. acq.: American Psychologist, v44, 1989 Pp149- FLAVELL, J: Cognitive Development (2nd Ed. 1985) Chap. 8. (Res) SCHAFFER, H: The child's entry into a social world. Chap. 6. (Res)