Chapter 11 The Stages of Language Acquisition

Introduction

In

the two preceding chapters we discussed the POS argument for the Innateness Hypothesis. In this chapter we present the background for a second type of argument in favor of innateness. The argumentation is based on the study of stages of language acquisition. We will see that it has been widely claimed that all children go through comparable stages. This, the argument goes, is expected when the acquisition of language is guided by innate principles. The Study of the Process of Language Acquisition

The

process of language acquisition is characterized by a number of important characteristics: Universality: All children when exposed to language input will acquire the mental grammar suited for the relevant language(s) (excluding physical or mental disorders that prevent them from doing so). (The default choice in all societies is spoken language, rather than signed language; I return to this point in Part IV.). A related point is that all human societies have languages. Flexibility: Any children can acquire any of the languages of the world (often more than one at the same time). Rapidity: Given the complexity of language and compared to other skills, language acquisition proceeds amazingly fast. Uniformity of result: Despite being exposed to different data sets, all children belonging to a speech community come up with essentially the same mental grammar. Uniformity of stages: All children go through similar stages in their growth to full grammatical competence.

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The first characteristic can be taken as an argument for the universality, i.e., innateness of a species-specific language capacity, which we almost take for granted. The second characteristic suggests that all languages are variations on a universal theme. The third and fourth characteristics hark back to the matters that we have discussed in the previous chapters, namely that input data that a child is exposed to do not determine the mental grammar all on their own. Rather the parameters can be set efficiently on cues that are widely available utterances of a certain type, and not only in specific utterances. And even if one does not believe in too much innate knowledge, it is still the case that constraints can be inferred from exposure to representative examples of them; again, it is not required that a child hears a specific set of utterances. Because any random set of utterances will contain the relevant cues and construction types, children home in on their mental grammar quickly guided by powerful (general and specific) innate capacities. In this chapter we will focus on the fifth characteristic. We know that children do not construct a mental grammar overnight. It takes a few years. During these years it is typically not the case that the child is silent. Rather, the child starts producing utterances of some sort or other quite early. In the beginning, these utterances are very simple and perhaps merely noises charged with some emotional content. We then encounter the first word (at around the 12th month on the average). One-word utterances become twoword utterances in the course of the second year of life. Around the beginning of the third year, there is a rapid growth toward grammatical adulthood. After that, there is still some growth (for example, in terms of vocabulary, morphology, and sentence complexity), but many researchers say that, by the beginning of the third year, most of the essential grammatical rules are in place. Linguists are interested in the stages that a child goes through in the process of language acquisition. In a previous chapter this was referred to as the developmental problem of language acquisition, although there isnt really a problem in this case. The problem, if you will, in this case is to understand the internal and sequential logic of the stages. A first step to the solution of this problem lies in a precise and detailed description of the utterances that children produce from the earliest days that they start making noise. Methods of Inquiry

How does one gather data about the phases of language acquisition? Systematic research
into child language acquisition started after the invention of the tape recorder and other technical devices. Before that time, people would often keep diaries of the progress of their children (as, for example, Charles Darwin did). Such diary studies (containing socalled spontaneous data) are of great value. In modern times, people still keep diaries of this sort (often, but not always, these people are linguists); however, linguists have also started gathering spontaneous data in more organized ways, for example, by audiotaping (and sometimes also videotaping) numerous children at regular intervals. Here we can distinguish two types of studies. So-called (a) longitudinal studies follow children for an extended period in their language development. If, on the other hand, we get our longterm perspective by combining data from different children of different ages, we call the study (b) cross-sectional:

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(a) (b)

|------------------------------------------------------------------------| (one child) 1.5 3.5 |-----------------------| (child a) 1.5 |-----------------------| (child b) 2.0 |-------------------------| (child c) 2.5 |------------------| (child d) 3.0 3.5

Some studies gather data from a large group of children. Such group studies typically do not record children on a daily basis, but rather with intervals of several weeks. Individual studies usually have a denser recording frequency, simply because that is more feasible if you only work with one child, or just a few. The latter approach gives a detailed account of the development, but the resulting picture is necessarily that of a small number of children. Group studies give an average of the progress that children make over time. Such studies provide a cruder picture, but one that is likely to reveal some general patterns (with the danger, of course, of overlooking interesting individual variations). It is well known that children may differ both in terms of the precise timing of their progress and in the details of their mistakes. This is no different from the fact that children differ in when they start to walk, start to eat solid food, become toilet trained, and so on. It is therefore difficult to say that a child is advanced or behind if she deviates from the average. The word mistake, by the way, should not be taken literally. At every moment in the development, a child has a system of his or her own, with its own regularities. If a child has said nothing by the age of two, we suspect that there might be a problem. Production and Perception

Many

acquisition studies focus on the production capacity of children, because the relevant data are relatively easy to obtain. We must realize, however, that children also develop their perceptual capacity (i.e., their capacity to understand linguistic utterances). It is well known that perceptual abilities are ahead of production abilities. Long before children produce their first simple recognizable utterances, they clearly show understanding of a lot that is being said to them. We will see that perception (understanding) is always ahead of production, no matter what the circumstances are. It is important to study both production and comprehension. The latter is much more difficult because, as we know, an appropriate response to a sentence does not necessarily mean that the child has grasped the whole sentence structure and all the words in it. It may be that understanding one or two words is enough to remind the child of prior situations. If we say to a child We are now going to bed, it may be that the word bed is enough to trigger a reluctant attitude. This, by the way, may be one reason why perception or understanding seems to be ahead of production. To produce a full sentence, you simply must master all the required rules. To understand a full sentence, it may be sufficient that you got a few of the central words in it. If understanding is based on such a partial grasp of the rules, we expect that subtle distinctions might be lost in this phase.

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Later, we talk mostly about the development of production capacities. Let me add, though, that in more recent times, there are many experiments that test the childs understanding of utterances at very early ages, as well as the childs capacity to discriminate arbitrary noise from linguistics sounds, or sounds from the language of his mother from sounds from some other languages, and so on. It turns out that before children show any sign of understanding the meaning of language, they are already sensitive to the kind of small phonetic differences that can distinguish one phoneme from another phoneme. In short, there is a lot of information about the childs perceptional abilities, but only some of that information will be covered later. An Overview of the Stages of Language Acquisition

Linguists have studied acquisitional development in the various areas of grammar, such
as phonology, syntax, and so on. The earliest phases are mainly interesting for the phonology, simply because no child starts with understanding or producing sentences, or even words, right away. Other areas of interest are vocabulary growth, how meaning is learned, and how the structure of sentences emerges. Phonology

It

is possible to establish that children at a very early age (long before they can say recognizable words or even babble) are capable of detecting the kinds of phonetic differences between sounds that potentially can be phonemic (i.e., distinguish one phoneme from another) in the languages of the world. Acquisition starts in the Womb

The acquisition of (or at least sensitivity for) the sound system of a given language starts
very early. Sensitivity to language-related distinctions, in fact, starts when the child is still in the mothers womb. Experiments have shown that the unborn child responds to the difference between its mothers voice and other voices, and it can even notice whether the mother speaks her own language or a foreign language. In order to obtain these results, researchers perform habituation studies in which they measure changes in the babys heart rate and take these changes as indications that the baby has noticed a difference in stimuli. Categorical Perception

general method to establish that children are sensitive to a difference between two stimuli (noises, shapes, etc.) is to perform a habituation study. This works as follows: A child is confronted with an artificial (i.e., laboratory-produced) stimulus of some sort

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(auditory, visual) for a certain amount of time while sucking on a pacifier that is linked to an electronic device that registers the rate of sucking. For example, the child is exposed to repetitions of the syllable /ba/. When the sound first appears, the sucking rate will go up but as repetitions of /ba/ are heard by the child, the rate will slow down to a steady pace. We see the effect of habituation; that is, the child is getting used to the /ba/ sound, and it no longer calls for special attention. When, subsequently, a different syllable is presented, the rate goes up again because the childs interest has been aroused. This may, in itself, not be too surprising. However, the question is: How different must the second stimulus be for the baby to show measurable excitement? Sounds can differ in very minimal ways along the various phonetic dimensions that sounds have, such as (a) the amount of voicing due to vocal cord tension and distance between vocal cords (b) the amount of stricture in the mouth (between lips, or tongue and teeth or tongue and roof of the mouth) (c) the location of stricture in the mouth (from front to back in the mouth) All these dimensions involve continua that allow an infinite number of possibilities. When we consider voicing, we can represent the possibilities as a scale: voiced ----------------------------------------------------- voiceless Languages of the world appear to make just a small number of choices for each dimension, or scale, perhaps no more than two. When it comes to the vocal cords, for example, we see that languages can have a difference between [p] (no voicing, tense vocal cords) and [b] (voicing, slack vocal cords). From an objective point of view, however, we can make many (an infinite number of) sounds that differ from each other in terms of the same distances on the scale. For practical purposes, let us say that we make ten distinctions: voiced -------------------------||---------------------------- voiceless x1 x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 x8 x9 x10 Let us say that the first stimulus that has been repeated for a while uses a sound that has voicing corresponding to point x1 on the voicing scale. Replacing this by x2 has no effect on the sucking rate; it stays steady. Replacing it by x3, x4, or x5 also has no effect. However, when the stimulus changes to x6, there is an increase in sucking rate, which signals that, according to the childs mind, a new stimulus has appeared. It is as though the perception of sounds is sensitive to certain thresholds that must be crossed before a difference is registered by the mind, and this means that the mind is not sensitive to (i.e., is deaf to) gradient differences as such, and that it imposes a binary categorization on the scale. When a certain threshold is passed, the sound belongs to a different category. This is called categorical (not categorial) perception. The results of categorical perception experiments are the same when we start with voicing degree x4. The change to x5 has no effect, but that from x5 to x6 has. Then, when

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we are in the new category of voiceless sounds, subsequent changes to x7, x8, and so on, again have no effect. The change from x5 to x6 is just as big or small as all other changes in the experiments, so the size of the difference is not what is relevant. What matter is crossing the threshold that lies between the category voiced and the category voiceless. Apparently, even though phonetic scales allow an infinite number of distinctions, children are predisposed to perceive only one binary distinction, locating the threshold roughly in the middle of the scale. All sounds on either side of the threshold belong to the same category as far as the child is concerned, and both categories function as polar opposites, referred to by simple crude labels such as voiced and voiceless. (The polar opposites that can be defined for each scale provide the phonetic basis for phonological features or elements. There is evidence, however, from phonological systems that several phonetic scales allow a finer division, i.e., into four categories: two on both extremes of the scale and two intermediate. Be that as it may, the finding of categorical perception says that the ear/mind is sensitive to transitions from one category to the next, and not for variation within each category.) The absolutely amazing fact is that children are sensitive to the threshold between phonetic categories as of the age of one month, perhaps even earlier. The second amazing fact is that all children, all over the world, are sensitive to the same thresholds, which means that the ability of categorical perception is fully independent of the language that they are exposed to. The only explanation is that categorical perception is innate. Each categorical threshold defines a potential phonemic distinction. Thus, indeed, many languages have /b/ and /p/ as different phonemes. Recall that this means that the phonetic difference between [b] type sounds (sounds to one side of the threshold) and [p] type sounds (sounds on the other side of the threshold) can make the only difference between two different morphemes or words (forming a minimal pair). The difference between [l] and [r] is phonemic in many languages, for example in English: light vs. right

However, in Japanese both sounds correspond to allophones of one phoneme. In other words, Japanese has no minimal pairs involving just a difference between [l] and [r]. As a consequence, Japanese adults have great difficulty perceiving the difference between both sound types. If categorical perception is innate and independent from the language that the child is exposed to, we expect that Japanese babies are sensitive to the threshold between [l] and [r] sounds; and they are! But when Japanese children learn Japanese, they learn to ignore the difference between /l/ and /r/. In other words, they must develop a deafness for this distinction. Likewise, English babies are sensitive to the threshold between [p] and [ph], even though this distinction is allophonic in English. We know that this threshold (on the continuum that involves glottal opening (i.e., the distance between the vocal cords) forms a potential phonemic contrast as it does in Thai. We conclude that children are innately predisposed to regard certain phonetic differences (i.e., those on both sides of the thresholds) as potentially distinctive, namely those differences that can be used to differentiate phonemes. Interestingly, children lose the ability to perceive thresholds around the sixth month if these thresholds are not used

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for a phonemic contrast in the language that they are exposed to. Thus, Japanese kids of about six months old do not show an increase in the sucking rate when a repeated stimulus [la] is replaced by [ra], whereas English kids still do that and continue to do that. We see that one part of learning language is to lose certain abilities! It has been shown that certain other animal species (including macaques and chinchillas) have a very similar sensitivity to phonetic thresholds, such as that between voiced and voiceless sounds. I am not sure what to make of this. It doesnt invalidate the point that the relevant knowledge is innate for humans, or that it is put to use in the acquisition of language. However, it does perhaps mean that the ability for categorical perception developed in the course of evolution for other reasons than language. Mind you, it has not been shown that such nonhuman animals are sensitive to the full set of distinctions that differentiates among the phonological elements that are required for human languages. There is now evidence that we also find categorical perception effects in the perception of sign languages (see Part IV). If this is correct, we learn that categorical perception is not specific to auditory perception. Categorical perception is, as said, common in the animal world, not only with respect to sound, but also with respect to visual input. Sheep, for example, can distinguish between cats and dogs. If provided with morphed stimuli composed of mixtures of dog and cat features, the sheeps brain will fire either for one or the other, depending on which is represented by the highest percentage of features in the morphed stimulus. It seems that we are dealing here with issues that bear on the ability to form categories in general. It is obvious that animals other than humans have the ability to form categories, so it would make sense that they show the same categorical effects. Categorical perception may have developed early in evolution (before humans split off into a separate line), perhaps within the group of mammals. Language (being based on a system of categories) requires this ability, but this does not mean that the ability is language-specific. Phonology (Production)

We will now look at the stages in the development of a childs phonological production
capacity. We need to start long before a child utters a more or less recognizable word. The stages are not necessarily strictly consecutive; that is, there is overlap. - Stage I (08 weeks): Basic biological noises Reflexive noises (e.g., crying because of hunger or pain) show a preference for vocalic [a]-like noises; vegetative noises (sucking, burping) are more consonantal in nature. No language-specific properties are noted at this point; that is, babies all over the world make the same kinds of noises in this stage. - Stage II (820 weeks): Cooing and laughing Cooing involves a syllable-like noise consisting of a back consonant and a [a] or [u] vowel: [gu], [ga], often nasalized. Later on, these syllables may occur in repeated

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sequences, produced a-rhythmically, with no clear intonational melodies. In this stage, children show a lot of tongue and lip activities. - Stage III (2030 weeks): Vocal play The child produces a great array of syllables involving many different sounds, not necessarily those occurring in the target language, causing enjoyment for both herself and her parents. A very important observation is that children appear to be physically capable of producing sounds that are not in the target language. - Stage IV (2550 weeks): Babbling Babbling is often taken as showing the first signs of an influence of the language that the child is exposed to. Babbling is more restricted than vocal play and more systematic. We see a preference for using sounds of the target language and a low occurrence of sounds that do not occur in the target language (even though the child could make these and other sounds in earlier stages). Most likely, babbling helps the child to practice articulatory control and to explore the correspondence between articulatory movements and resulting sound. (If babbling is not possible for medical reasons, children will still end up with normal pronunciation skills, although with some delay.) The influence of the target language becomes stronger and stronger, and soon it is possible to distinguish among the babbling of babies that are exposed to different target languages. In other words Japanese babbling does not sound the same as Russian babbling. Babble-syllables (like [ba]) occur in repeated sequences (reduplicated babbling). Later on in this stage, we hear sequences with different consonants or vowels: [gagu], [babi]. - Stage V (918 months): Melodic utterances The child produces utterances with a rhythmic structure and intonational pattern that sounds like longer, multiword utterances, although there are no recognizable words. Every parent knows that children in this stage may produce sequences of meaningless syllables (at least, there seems to be no meaning), which sounds like whole sentences because the child imposes these very natural-sounding intonational melodies on the string of syllables. - Stage VI (11.5 yrs.): The appearance of words (holophrastic stage) The early appearance of intonational melodies remains a striking property as the child moves on to make her first words, which, due to such patterns, may convey the meaning of whole sentences. Around the end of the first year, we begin to see the appearance of such single-word utterances. Children start producing specific proto-words, that is, forms that appear in the same kinds of situations. There is perhaps no clear meaning yet, but it does seem that the idea of words having some kind of meaning or use is dawning on the childs mind. The number of such words in each childs repertoire grows steadily. During the period to come, while their utterances develop from one, to two, to multiword utterances (see following), children continue to increase their vocabulary. Once children get the hang of it, they learn words very quickly. The rate of learning is

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often estimated at one word per hour (during their waking hours). This process goes on for several years. In this stage, children, like adults, use their hands when they communicate verbally. In the one-word stage, manual gestures and words form an integrated system, at least for a while. In this stage the child may utter a word (say, give), while pointing to a doll. The word and gesture together mean give me the doll. In other words, word and gesture complement each other; the latter refers to the object of the former. As the verbal capacity develops and utterances get to be more complex, manual gesturing acquires the role of a system that is parallel to, and secondary to, speechperhaps even redundant. (However, pointing gestures remain crucial in order to interpret certain types of utterances like Look there! You dont know where to look unless you see the speakers pointing gesture. Also, gesturing in general appears to be far from redundant and, indeed, rich in information that is not contained in the spoken word.) It is crucial to understand that the holophrases (one-word utterances) convey meanings that correspond to whole sentences in adult speech. Thus, when a child says: Doll, the actual meaning of that holophrase could be a variety of things: I want that doll. I see a doll. The doll is doing something. I know who made that noise, the doll. and so on In fact, in this stage, children understand multiword utterances, being aware of the difference between: dog push baby vs. baby push dog

Thus, the child knows the relevance of word order, even though he himself cannot make multiword utterances. - Stage VII (1.52 yrs.): Two-word stage The next stage in the development, starting somewhere between a year and a half and two years, shows the arrival of two-word utterances: dog fall mommy drink daddy chair mommy chair the dog fell mommy is drinking something daddys chair mommy is sitting on the chair

Perhaps, these utterances are at first simply two holophrastic utterances in a row, each being uttered somewhat separately with its own intonation peak. Soon, however, the two words start sounding as forming a unit package, with one intonation peak. It is not obvious, and indeed controversial, whether children organize these utterances in terms of word categories (like noun, verb, and adjective) or whether they

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operate with semantic notions such as agent (the one who does something), action, location, and so on. The ordering of words in this stage seems to reflect mostly the order of words in full-fledged sentences in the target language. - Stage VIII (22.5 yrs.): Telegraphic stage The next stage is called the telegraphic stage. We now see longer utterances like the following: Daddy read book. What your name? Give me cookie. Alexandra want milky. Mommy give Alexandra milky. This stage is called telegraphic because it reminds us of the way in which people used to write telegrams for which they would be charged by the word. People would leave out closed-class words, as well as simplify the words themselves by leaving out endings (although that doesnt follow from the financial issue). In this stage, closed-class words and inflectional endings are missing because they are typically unstressed, but there is some indication of word categories and phrase structure organization. Therefore, the regularities of the telegraphic sentences lend themselves to the same kind of analysis that linguists give to full-fledged sentences in the target language. The emergence of the telegraphic stage marks the beginning of a rapid development toward syntactic adulthood. As of this point, sentences get longer and more varied, showing evidence of various kinds of inflection rules and transformations. Further Issues

Having presented an overview of the most widely recognized stages, I will now discuss
some specific issues, first regarding the phonological development. The Causes of Simplifications

The first words that children utter are not identical to the target words. Children simplify
the form of words at first. Comparing the form that they produce to the adult target form, we can make up a list of simplification processes. Children avoid combinations of consonants (play > pay), or replace difficult sounds by easier ones (this > zis). There is a debate in this area about whether the simplifications are due to motor control problems (i.e., the articulatory inability to produce the adult target forms because they are still too difficult to articulate) or to a cognitive immaturity to mentally represent the full form. We know that children can understand the words in all their complexity long before they can pronounce them correctly. Thus, for recognition, they are able to represent the correct forms early on at some cognitive level. In other words, the child
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must have some kind of a representation of the adult form so that he can recognize words spoken to him by matching them to the representations in his receptive lexicon. How, then, do we account for the fact that children cant articulate the forms in a correct way for some time, and that they gradually get better at producing the full pronunciation? A fact that goes against the motor explanation is that children can, in fact, articulate a wide array of sounds in the early stages before they try to make actual words some say all the sounds of the worldand that they lose the ability to make a great number of them, including sounds that are actually part of their language, when they start homing in on the system of their own language and start making words. I would like to suggest that the reasons for the simplifications could be purely phonological. Recall that the phonological system is a checking device. Strings that are illformed need to be repaired by adjustment rules. In the case of children, lots of words enter their receptive lexicon (where they are used for recognizing adult speech) where they are recorded as holistic sound events, i.e., without an analysis into phonemes. However, when these words are called from the lexicon for active use by the child, i.e,. in production, they have to pass the wellformedness test of the childs mental grammar. When this mental grammar is in its early stages of development, the representations that are called from the lexicon turn out to be illformed from the viewpoint of the childs system, and thus they need to be adjusted from the viewpoint of the childs own phonological system. To understand this point it is crucial to understand that the childs grammar is not identical to the grammar of the adult. Each child has to construct his own grammar, guided by innate mechanisms and the language input. The growth of the phonological systems involves the development of the phonotactic system which means that words are analyzed into phonemes of the language which are grouped into the kinds of syllable templates that the language permits. It is assumed here that the child develops the phonotactic system incrementally, i.e., step by step, going from less marked (largely simpler) structures to more marked (largely more complex) structures. Let us assume that the child is trying to learn English, which, as we have seen in chapter 8, has rather complex syllables (such as sprint). Children will work their way toward this template, but they start simply, initially allowing only CV syllables. Meanwhile, from a perceptional point of view, the child has stored words like play and cat which have a complex onset and complex rhyme, respectively. We must assume that the child has stored these forms, segmented into phones, i.e., sound categories that he has extracted from the overall input and which guide his recognition of the words in the utterances in his environment. Categorial perception allows the child to make such distinctions which, as we have seen, are in no form or shape dependent on the grammatical, phonological system that the child has to develop. Let us now consider what happens when the child tries to utter one of those words himself. To be used, a word must be wellformed according to the various systems of the mental grammar. For the phonology this means that the form must conform to the phoneme and syllable structure constraints. If a form is presented to the phonological system that is not wellformed a repair rule, if available, will be applied. When the childs grammar only recognizes CV syllables as wellformed and a form like play or cat is presented to the system, something has to give.

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Word Syllable Onset | Consonant | /k/ /p/ /l/ Vowel | // /e/ /t/ Rhyme |

As shown the /l/ of play and the /t/ of cat cannot be made to fit into the CV template which means that, by way of repair, these consonants are deleted, i.e., we will simply assume that an illformed part of a word will not be pronounced. However, this deletion occurs when the word is taken out of the lexicon for pronunciation. The lexical form, which is the basis for recognizing the word, keeps its /t/ (i.e., the words /ple/ and /kt/ must stay in the lexicon as is, in order to make it possible for the child to identify it when someone else uses it). Viewed in this way, the simplification patterns in child speech reveal information about the cognitive phonological structures that the childs grammar considers to be wellformed at a given stage of development, and thus about the maturation of the mental grammar. But this is crucially different from attributing the mistakes to an alleged immaturity of the motor control system for articulation. I have already suggested that the cognitive maturation of the phonological system is governed by complexity, such that children naturally start out with the simpler inventories of primes and simpler structures, and then move on to the successively more complex set of primes and more complex structures. Growth of complexity follows from setting parameters to marked values. These parameters do not only regard the syllable template, but also the word as a whole, i.e., combinations of syllables. The typical shape of early words is monosyllabic; a bit later they become bisyllabic. Thus, several unstressed syllables will be dropped if children try to pronounce longer words. At the same time, when the syllable template is still CV consonants clusters are simplified, and final consonants dropped: kangaroo elephant spoon desk try [wu] [fan] [pu] or [fu] [de] [taj]

The illformedness (from the viewpoint of the childs grammar) of unstressed material not only causes the shrinkage of longer words, but it also suppresses endings and beginnings (inflectional material), at least if these are not stressed, as indeed is the case in many languages (although not in all).

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I assumed that the distinction between consonants and vowels (or perhaps we should say, between onsets and rhymes) is taken for granted by the child. Indeed, we could say that the syllable CV constitutes a basic (perhaps innate) template for words. Clearly, this template represents the simplest syllable that one can think of. Gradually, as the word template unfolds into bisyllabic combinations, bisyllabic words start popping up: potato [tejdo]

At the same time the child is also working on the phonemic inventory, which likewise must unfold from simpler to more complex phonemes. Thus, children also substitute difficult sounds with easier ones: sea ship look [ti] [sp] [wuk]

In a stage in which the child finds the consonant /s/ too complex, which means that it has not been admitted in his phonemic system, we can test that he does hear the difference between /s/ and /t/. When we ask the child saying [ti] for sea where the [ti] is, he will not understand that we are talking about the sea. On the perception side, and thus also mentally, the child registers the word in its full form. Summarizing, in his own CV stage, the child will reduce words of various syllabic complexity to a simple CV template: CV CVC CCVC VC CCVCCV CVCVC etc.

CV

Then the child starts expanding this basic template, by allowing coda consonants (CVC) or by doubling the basic template (CVCV). Again, we see that complexity plays a role here: The word structures that the child will produce herself gradually increase in complexity. The type of word structure that the child produces will, of course, depend on the language she is learning. In some languages of the world there simply are no other syllable types than CV, and all words are sequences of this basic syllable type. Growth of the Phonemic Inventory

In early stages of production, all children, no matter what language they are learning,
show a preference for certain types of sounds. Ninety-five percent of their early

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consonants come from the following list which most languages have as part of their consonantal inventory: p t k s w b d g h j m n

We see velar consonants ([k, g]) appearing first (in the cooing stage), followed by alveolar consonants ([t, d, n]). Around six months, velars drop in popularity. Meanwhile, labial sounds ([p, b, m]) increase over time, but after the first year, labials drop in popularity in comparison with alveolars that end up being the most frequent consonants, followed by labials, with velars taking the third place. (It is also often claimed that labials are more popular than alveolars in the very beginning, which is why parents are very often called mama and papa by children all over the world. If this really testifies to a general popularity of labials in some stage of development , this may be due to the fact that their articulation is visible. Note, though, that dada or tata is also among the very early utterances.) As for manner of articulation (constriction) we also see a preference order. Stops come before fricatives, for example. Among the vowels, there is also a more or less predictable progression. Children have an early preference for open vowels like [a], followed by closed vowels like [i] or [u]. Other types of vowels follow later. The cause of these preferences is, as said, complexity. Phonemes that are acquired earlier are simpler in terms of their feature structure; recall that phonemes are composed out of smaller elements, often called features. The first phonemic contrast that the child acknowledges is implicit in the recognition of the universal CV syllable, i.e,. the difference between consonant and vowel. In this stage the child will adopt the unmarked consonant and vowel phoneme (let us say /d/ and /a/, respectively), which means that all other phoneme types are substituted (by repair) by these two phonemes: [p] [t] [k] [b] [d] etc [I] [u] [a] [o] [e] etc.

/d/

/a/

Then, gradually, the child will allow additional phonemic differences for consonants and vowels:

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Consonants Obstruent Stops Fricatives Sonorant Liquids Glides Open

Vowels Closed Mid High

This unfolding progresses along the dimensions of manner (shown here), place, and laryngeal properties. Feedback

How does the child realize that more phonemes are needed? Categorical perception in
itself does not produce the phonemic distinctions that are made in a given language; rather, it merely allows the child, at the perceptual level, to establish distinctions that are, in principle, contrastive. It seems to me that the pressure to expand the phonemic inventory (as well as the syllabic inventory) comes from a feedback system that compares the childs own output to the representations in the receptive lexicon. This feedback system will register the difference between /ple/ and /pe/ and this causes pressure on the childs phonological system to expand. Word Categories and Basic Sentence Structure

When the child is one and a half years old, on the average, she will have a vocabulary of
some 50 (proto-)words. These will be mostly nouns (for family members, food, animals, toys, etc.), verbs (typically for basic actions like eating, moving around), a number of words for social interaction (greetings, thank-you, yes, no, etc.), and perhaps some frequent adjectives (dirty [diaper], good [boy]). There is some evidence to attribute to the noun-verb difference the same status as, in phonology, the consonant-vowel difference. This would suggest that the basic template for sentence structure is: Sentence Noun (Subject) Verb (Predicate)

There is a systematic lack or paucity of closed-class words like prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and so on, even though such words may be quite frequent in the speech of adults (like articles, for example). According to some researchers it is no coincidence that such closed-class words are usually short and unstressed. This lack of closed-class words (which often play an
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important grammatical function in the sentence, just like inflectional affixes do) persists even in the phase where children start forming multiword utterances (see the telegraphic phase later). However, even though a child does not produce closed-class words, or inflectional affixes, it is important to point out again that he can and does hear them. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)

The linguist Roger Brown proposed a measure that might indicate the progress a child is
making on his way to syntactic adulthood. He suggested that we establish the average number of morphemes in the utterances that a child produces at the time of measuring. Because, initially, most words are monomorphemic, this is almost equal to measuring the average number of words. When a child is around 18 months the MLU is 1.5 (usually), whereas when it is three years old, it is 3.0. As of that point, the MLU grows very rapidly. Inflection

The development of the acquisitional system involves such things as forming plurals of
nouns, past tense for verbs, and so on. At some point, we get clear evidence for children having acquired inflectional rules. Consider the following typical development of verbs that have an irregular past tense: I break bring II breaked bringed III broke brought

At first, children learn all word forms on an item-by-item basis, that is, they learn break and bring as independent forms. Then, in the second phase, they realize that there is a rule for past tense formation (add -ed to the verb). The majority of verbs form their past tense with this ending. Now, the children produce not only correct forms like walked, but also incorrect forms like breaked. The latter type of form presents evidence that the child has indeed acquired a rule, because the form breaked does not occur in the input. Only later does the child realize that there is a difference between regular and irregular verbs, and this is when the form broke makes its entrance. Rules for past tense and plural formation develop around the third year. In languages that have much more inflectional affixes than English, inflectional rules are acquired even earlier that that. Often, learning inflectional endings is compared to the learning of nonlexical words like articles and prepositions. There appears to be a fairly regular intake of such categories in children learning English. Verb endings like -ing (singing, eating) are very early, followed by plural endings, followed by possessive endings (fathers, dogs), followed by past tense endings. Early, just after -ing, come prepositions, whereas articles come later. It is not clear at this point what determines this specific order of acquisition.
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The Acquisition of Meaning

How do children figure out the meaning of words? This is by no means an easy question
to investigate. It is, however, likely that children use a number of general assumptions or expectations. Just imagine how tremendously difficult the task would otherwise be. Imagine a child hearing the word cat (in the sentence Look, a cat!) in a context where someone points to a small black cat crossing the yard. How does the child know that the form cat refers to the animal, rather than to its tail, or to its crossing, or to the grass in the yard? How does a child learn that the form cat does not only refer to the cat that was just in the yard, but can also be used for other cats, and not just to cats that are black like the one in the yard, but to cats of all colors and sizes? It has been argued that the child makes certain assumptions about the meaning of words, such as: a. b. The Whole Object Assumption A word refers to whole objects and not to parts of the objects. The Category Assumption A word refers to sets of similar things, and not to individual things, i.e., words are labels for categories. The Uniqueness Assumption The relation between category and word is biunique.

c.

According to (a) the child assumes that the word cat refers to the whole thing that runs across the yard, when mommy points to it and says Look, a cat, rather than to its tail, or to its color. Assumption (b) says that children will form categories (types) that group different yet similar objects or events under one label. This assumption predicts that children will overgeneralize the meaning of words, as indeed they do. A word like dog might refer to all four-legged animals for a while. However, children have also been observed to undergeneralize when, for example, the word dog is taken as only referring to the dog next door. This may be due to the tendency (discussed earlier) to formulate narrow hypotheses, which, then, runs against the Category Assumption. Finally, assumption (c) forms the cornerstone of all semiotic systems. A one-toone relationship between word form and word meaning is, obviously, an ideal for every sign system because it avoids confusion and is maximally economical. A further cue (to arrive at meanings) that children get comes from the position of words in the sentences. For example, at some point children will realize (always subconsciously) that a word that is preceded by the or a is a noun and from this they will infer that the meaning of the word is likely to be an object of some sort. Likewise, the child will get cues from endings. For example, a word ending in -ing is likely to be of a verbal nature and thus, in terms of its meaning, most likely referring to an action of some

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sort. This linking of syntactic notions to semantic notions is called syntactic bootstrapping: If a word is a noun then its meaning is an object of some sort. If a word is a verb then its meaning is an action of some sort. I will return to this link between word meaning and word class label later on. There is one further issue that could play an important role in learning meanings, which is the claim that meanings need not be learned at all, because they are innate. According to this claim, what children must learn is the language-specific phonological labels for the innate set of meanings. It seems, however, clear that, whereas there may be a core of meanings (i.e., basic semantic concepts) that may be innate, all sorts of specific word meanings are most likely not innate. For example, it is unlikely that the meaning broom is innate. Humans invent new items all the time, and it is ridiculous to assume that, corresponding to every conceivable thing, there is an innate concept. Vocabulary Growth

The ability to learn new words at a very fast rate is an extremely important aspect of the
childs capacity for language. Around the age of 12 months the child starts saying his first words. It has been estimated that the average high school student (around age 17) knows at least 60,000 words (and this list would exclude all complex words whose meaning can be transparently derived from the parts of which it is composed). You can now figure out that this means memorizing (60,000 : 16 =) 3,750 words per year, which means (3,750 : 365 =) 10.3 per day, which means roughly one word per each waking hour and a half (assuming barely 7 hours of sleep). It is indeed astonishing that the human mind is capable of memorizing arbitrary sound-meaning combinations at this rate, and many have argued that human language as we know it couldnt exist if it werent for this essentially imitative capacity. Morphology

Because complex words form a lower level in the linguistic hierarchy than sentences, we
might perhaps expect that children learn to form complex words before they form sentences. This is not the case, however. The ability to form compounds and words that contain derivational affixes develops when children are already producing lots of sentences. When children use words that are compounds or contain affixes from an adult point of view (like eater, armchair), that does not mean that these words have the same status for the child. For the child, at first all words are just simplex. We see evidence for the emergence of derivational and compound rules in the childs grammar when the child starts making new words. It isnt until after the third year that such evidence becomes apparent.
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The Notion of Bootstrapping

Students

of acquisition face the following general problem: How does acquisition get started? Where does the child begin? The utterances that she hears are continuous stretches of sound with no obvious markers for word boundaries. How does the child break up the sentence into words, how does she assign meaning to words, and how does she decide to which word classes words belong? All these matters need to be settled somewhat before she can assign a possible syntactic, phonological, and semantic structure to the sentences. When a child is in a situation in which the mother points to some sort of moving object (let us say a cat) and says either cat or a little fluffy animal, given that the child assumes that both expressions indeed refer to the moving object (see the whole object assumption), she does not know that cat is one word, whereas the other expression contains four words. There is a term for the problem that the child somehow, somewhere has to get started in building up the mental grammar. This term is based on the metaphor that she, like Baron Munchausen, with nothing to hold on to has to lift herself up by her bootstraps out of the swamp of sound; the term is the bootstrapping problem. It would seem that establishing units like words and phrases is a good place to start and a prerequisite for being able to set the values of the parameters of the mental grammar. You might wonder how children manage to isolate word forms from the continuous speech flow of the input. It may be true that children hear a lot of isolated words (especially in child-directed speech, motherese), but speech directed to children also involves a lot of multiword sentences. Although it may not be obvious at first sight, it is a fact that there are no small pauses in-between the words (like the spaces between words in written language). Nonetheless, children manage to parse sentences into chunks (i.e., words), an ability that present-day computers still do not appear to have, despite enormous amounts of programming and money that have been invested in this issue. (If computers could parse speech into words as well as two-year-old children, your computer would have a microphonethe computers earinstead of a keyboard.) Saying that there are no pauses does not mean that there are no cues that signal beginnings and ends of words. Fortunately, as just pointed out, there are several bootstraps at the childs disposal: - Firstly, many words (in particular nouns, verbs, and adjectives), for example, tend to begin or end (depending on the language) in a strong syllable (called the stressed syllables). Researchers are convinced that stress plays an important role in parsing sentences into words. In English, the first syllable almost always has some stress (primary or secondary stress). Thus, the learner may realize at some point that each stressed syllable is the beginning of a new word. - Second, as mentioned before, children may detect frequency asymmetries with respect to combinations of phonemes, drawing the conclusion that the less frequent combinations signal divisions between words.

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- Third, as mentioned before, there is evidence that children are capable of detecting recurrent combinations of syllables and taking these combinations to be units. - Fourth, it is perhaps reasonable to assume that the use of certain fixed combinations as one-word utterances confirms their unity for the child. This is especially the case with proper names and nouns that refer to frequently experienced objects. With respect to detecting boundaries of syntactic phrases, phrasal stress (the fact that in each phrase the stressed syllable in a word is more prominent that the stressed syllable of other words) may be of help: [that little white HOUSE]NP [belongs to ME]VP In addition, pauses may also provide cues for syntactic units, as well as the shape of intonational tunes. Different Types of Bootstrapping

The idea that the phonological string contains statistical and intrinsic properties (stress,
specific clusters that can or cannot occur at word boundaries, etc.) that point the child to cutting it up in words and phrases is called phonological bootstrapping. Once words have been isolated and certain potential syntactic groupings have been noted, the child also needs to establish word class labels, and eventually meaning. Earlier, we suggested that syntactic category may provide a cue to meaning: If a word is a verb then its meaning is an action of some sort This is called syntactic bootstrapping. The syntax can also be a pointer to meaning in a different way. For example, verbs that can take a sentence as a complement belong to a special semantic class, which excludes action verbs. You can say: I think that John comes. but not: * I walk that John goes Thus, hearing the first sentence indicates that it cannot be an action verb. In other cases the child perhaps gets at the meaning of a word before she gets at the category. In that case the meaning can be a pointer to the category:

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Semantic bootstrapping If a word refers to a thing it is a noun. If a word refers to an action it is a verb. If a word refers to a property it is an adjective. etc. In the case of the relationship between category and meaning, however, the most reliable prediction seems to come from taking the meaning as basic. Indeed, all THINGS are expressed as nouns, but not all nouns express things. Take the noun destruction (of Rome). This noun refers to an event. To some extent, word category labels can also emerge simply from noting the distribution of words in terms of their combinations with other words, or in terms of the inflectional endings that they can take. Thus, words that occur with endings like -ed must be verbs, and so on. A third route to word labels is the following: In a sense, establishing that words belong to different word classes is comparable to establishing that sounds belong to different phonemes. The child might start assuming that all words belong to one class, the class word, and only decide that more than one class is involved when he encounters a minimal (sentence) pair: The boy hits [balls] The boy hits [well] The word balls and the word well occur in the same context, but have totally different semantic functions (which is not the same as saying that they have different meanings; that in itself is not enough). Balls refers to the theme of hit, whereas well modifies the act of hitting. Thus, one might say that both words are syntactically contrastive, assuming that the learner assumes that themes and modifiers map onto different syntactic units (i.e., objects and adverbial phrases, respectively). In conclusion, to get started the child might be using several strategies and rely on the fact that there are relationships (sometimes called linking rules) between the three dimensions of grammar (phonology, syntax, and semantics) which allow the child to use a finding in one dimension as a pointer to some property in another dimension. Conclusions

This chapter has presented an overview of the stages in language development in first
language acquisition. The fact that all children appear to go through very similar, timereleased phases has been taken to constitute an argument for the innateness hypothesis. Maria Montessori got that right a long time ago! The argument is that, unless there is an innate language-specific capacity, there is no reason to expect that children go through similar phases AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME, and apparently independent from their development in other (cognitive) areas. The latter is an important point, because if we would just be talking about similarities in stages, it might be argued that

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the sequence of stages simply follows one single, rather plausible claim, namely that in learning something new, a person will always follow a path from simple to more and more complex. We have seen that subsequent stages follow a growth in complexity. This means that we should not be too surprised about the nature of the stages. That all children move from simple to complex cannot be the basis for an argument in favor of the Innateness Hypothesis. However, granted that many individual differences exist, there also is a regular timing, allowing for a lot of individual variation. Regularity of this sort generally points to the biological determination, or if that sounds too strong, biological guidance of the development. The different steps are time-released by the innate capacity, and this process appears to be totally separate from other aspects of the childs development. Children who turn out to be smart are not necessarily fast language learners, and vice versa. In other words, the argument is that acquisitional stages show a pattern of (biological) maturation which in turn suggests that language acquisition is guided by a language instinct.

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