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LANGUAGE LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD
Preview
In this chapter, we will look briefly at the language development of young children. We will then consider several explanations that have been offered for how language is learned. There is an immense amount of research on child language. Although much of this research has been done with middle-class North American and European families, there is a rich body of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research as well. Our purpose in this chapter is to touch on a few main points in this research, primarily as preparation for the discussion of second language acquisition (SLA), which is the focus of this book.
Language acquisition is one of the most impressive and fascinating aspects of human development. We listen with pleasure to the sounds made by a three-month-old baby. We laugh and ‘answer’ the conversational ‘ba-ba-ba’ babbling of older babies, and we share in the pride and joy of parents whose one-year-old has uttered the first ‘bye-bye’. Indeed, learning a language is an amazing feat—one that has attracted the attention of linguists and psychologists for generations. How do children accomplish this? What enables a child not only to learn words, but also to put them together in meaningful sentences? What pushes children to go on developing complex grammatical language even though their simple early communication is successful for most purposes? Does child language develop similarly around the world? How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?
The first three years: Milestones and developmental sequences
One remarkable thing about L1 acquisition is the high degree of similarity in the early language of children all over the world. Researchers have described developmental sequences for many aspects of L1 acquisition. The earliest vocalizations are simply the involuntary crying that babies do when they are hungry or uncomfortable. Soon, however, we hear the cooing and gurgling sounds of contented babies, lying in their beds and looking at the fascinating shapes and movement around them. Even though they have little control over the sounds they make in these early weeks of life, infants are able to hear subtle differences between the sounds of human languages. Not only do they distinguish the voice of their mother from those of other speakers, they also seem to recognize the language that was spoken around their mother before they were born. Furthermore, in cleverly designed experiments, researchers have demonstrated that tiny babies are capable of very fine auditory discrimination. For example, they can hear the difference between sounds as similar as ‘pa’ and ‘ba’.
Janet Werker, Patricia Kuhl, and others have used new technologies that allow us to see how sensitive infants are to speech sounds. What may seem even more remarkable is that infants stop making distinctions between sounds that are not phonemic in the language that is spoken around them. For example, by the time they are a year old, babies who will become speakers of Arabic stop reacting to the difference between ‘pa’ and ‘ba’, which is not phonemic in Arabic. Babies who regularly hear more than one language in their environment continue to respond to differences between these sounds (Werker, Weikum, & Yoshida, 2006). One important finding is that it is not enough for babies to hear language sounds from electronic devices. In order to learn—or retain—the ability to distinguish between sounds, they need to interact with a human speaker (Conboy & Kuhl, 2011).
Whether they are becoming monolingual or bilingual children, however, it will be many months before their own vocalizations begin to reflect the characteristics of the language or languages they hear and longer still before they connect language sounds with specific meaning. However, by the end of their first year, most babies understand quite a few frequently repeated words in the language or languages spoken around them. They wave when someone says ‘bye-bye’; they clap when someone says ‘pat-a-cake’; they eagerly hurry to the kitchen when ‘juice and cookies’ are mentioned.
At 12 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 50 different words and some produce many more. About this time, they begin to combine words into simple sentences such as ‘Mommy juice’ and ‘baby fall down’. 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 the combined words have a meaningful relationship that makes them more than just a list of words. Thus, for an English-speaking child, ‘kiss baby’ does not mean the same thing as ‘baby kiss’. Remarkably, we also see evidence, even in these early sentences, that children are doing more than imperfectly imitating what they have heard. Their two- and three-word sentences show signs that they can creatively combine words. For example, ‘more outside’ may mean ‘I want to go outside again.’ Depending on the situation, ‘Daddy uh-oh’ might mean ‘Daddy fell down’ or ‘Daddy dropped something’ or even ‘Daddy, please do that funny thing where you pretend to drop me off your lap’.
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. For example, children do not use temporal adverbs such as ‘tomorrow’ or ‘last week’ until they develop some understanding of time. In other cases, the developmental sequences seem to reflect the gradual acquisition of the linguistic elements for expressing ideas that have been present in children’s cognitive understanding for a long time. For example, children can distinguish between singular and plural long before they reliably add plural endings to nouns. Correct use of irregular plurals (such as ‘feet’) takes even more time and may not be completely under control until the school years.
In the 1960s, several researchers focused on how children acquire grammatical morphemes in English. One of the best-known studies was carried out by Roger Brown and his colleagues and students. In a longitudinal study of the language development of three children (called Adam, Eve, and Sarah) they found that 14 grammatical morphemes were acquired in a similar sequence. The list below (adapted from Brown’s 1973 book) shows some of the morphemes they studied.
present progressive -ing (Mommy running)
plural -s (two books)
irregular past forms (Baby went)
possessive -s (Daddy’s hat)
copula (Mommy 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 had also mastered those at the top, but the reverse was not true. Thus, there was evidence for a ‘developmental sequence’ or order of acquisition. However, the children did not acquire the morphemes at the same age or rate. Eve had mastered nearly all the morphemes before she was two-and-a-half years old, while Sarah and Adam were still working on them when they were three-and-a-half or four.
Brown’s longitudinal work was confirmed in a cross-sectional study of 21 children. Jill and Peter de Villiers (1973) found that children who correctly used the morphemes that Adam, Eve, and Sarah had acquired late were also able to use the ones that Adam, Eve, and Sarah had acquired earlier. The children mastered the morphemes at different ages, just as Adam, Eve, and Sarah had done, but the order of their acquisition was very similar.
Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain why these grammatical morphemes are acquired in the observed order. Researchers have studied the frequency with which the morphemes occur in parents’ speech, the cognitive complexity of the meanings represented by each morpheme, and the difficulty of perceiving or pronouncing them. In the end, there has been no simple satisfactory explanation for the sequence, and most researchers agree that the order is determined by an interaction among a number of factors.
To supplement the evidence we have from simply observing children, some carefully designed procedures have been developed to further explore children’s knowledge of grammatical morphemes. One of the first and best known is the ‘wug test’ developed by Jean Berko (1958). In this test, children are shown drawings of imaginary creatures with novel names or people performing mysterious actions. For example, they are told, ‘Here is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two ____’ or ‘Here is a man who knows how to bod. Yesterday he did the same thing. Yesterday, he ____’. By completing these sentences with ‘wugs’ and ‘bodded’, children demonstrate that they know the patterns for plural and simple past in English. By generalizing these patterns to words they have never heard before, they show that their language is more than just a list of memorized word pairs such as ‘book/books’ and ‘nod/nodded’.
ACTIVITY 1.1
Try out the wug test
A web search for ‘wug test’ will turn up many examples of the pictures and the text created for this landmark research. If you know some English-speaking children under the age of five years, try using the test with them.
- What similarities and differences do you notice among the children at different ages?
- Which grammatical morphemes do they find easy and which ones are more difficult?
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.
Children learn the functions of negation very early. That is, they learn to comment on the disappearance of objects, to refuse a suggestion, or to reject an assertion, even at the single word stage. However, as Lois Bloom’s (1991) longitudinal studies show, 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 following stages in the development of negation have been observed in the acquisition of English. Similar stages have been observed in other languages as well (Wode, 1981).
Stage 1
Negation is usually expressed by the word ‘no’, either all alone or as the first word in the utterance.
No. No cookie. No comb hair.
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’t’ 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.
Even though their language system is by now quite complex, they may still have difficulty with some other features related to negatives.
I don’t have no more candies.
The challenge of learning complex language systems is also illustrated in the developmental stages through which children learn to ask 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 (Bloom, 1991). ‘What’ is generally the first wh-question word to be used. It is often learned as part of a chunk (‘Whassat?’) and it is some time before the child learns that there are variations of the form, such as ‘What is that?’ and ‘What are these?’.
‘Where’ and ‘who’ emerge very soon. Identifying and locating people and objects are within the child’s understanding of the world. Furthermore, adults tend to ask children just these types of questions in the early days of language learning, for example, ‘Where’s Mommy?’ or ‘Who’s that?’.
‘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’, having discovered how effectively this little word gets adults to engage in conversation, for example, ‘Why that lady has blue hair?’
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 understanding the answers they get, as the following conversation with a four-year-old clearly shows.
| CHILD | When can we go outside? |
| PARENT | In about five minutes. |
| CHILD | 1-2-3-4-5! Can we go now? |
The ability to use these question words is at least partly tied to children’s cognitive development. It is also predicted in part by the questions children are asked and the linguistic complexity of questions with different wh- words. Thus it does not seem surprising that there is consistency in the sequence of their acquisition. Perhaps more surprising is the consistency in the acquisition of word order in questions. This development is not based on learning new meanings, but rather on learning different linguistic patterns to express meanings that are already understood.
Children’s earliest questions are single words or simple two- or three-word sentences with rising intonation:
Cookie? Mommy 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. To describe this, we need to see the pattern from the child’s perspective rather than from the perspective of the adult grammar. We call this stage ‘fronting’ because the child’s rule seems to be that questions are formed by putting something (a verb 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. The questions resemble those of Stage 3, but 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?
Even at this stage, however, children seem able to use either inversion or a whword, but not both (for example, ‘Is he crying?’ but not ‘Why is he crying?’ Therefore, we may find inversion in yes/no questions but not in wh- questions, unless they are formulaic units such as ‘What’s that?’
At Stage 5, both wh-and yes/no questions are formed correctly.
Are these your boots?
Why did you do that?
Does Daddy have a box?
Negative questions may still be a bit too difficult.
Why the teddy bear can’t go outside?
And even though performance on most questions is correct, there is still one more hurdle. 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
At this stage, children are able to correctly form all question types, including negative and complex embedded questions.
Passage through developmental sequences does not always follow a steady uninterrupted path. 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. But the overall path takes them towards a closer and closer approximation of the language that is spoken around them.
By the age of four, most children can ask questions, give commands, report real events, and create stories about imaginary events, using correct word order and grammatical markers most of the time. In fact, it is generally accepted that by age four, children have acquired the basic structures of the language or languages spoken to them in these early years. Three- and four-year-olds continue to learn vocabulary at the rate of several words a day. They also begin to acquire less frequent and more complex linguistic structures such as passives and relative clauses.
Much of children’s language acquisition effort in the late pre-school years is spent in developing their ability to use language in a widening social environment. They use language in a greater variety of situations. They interact more often with unfamiliar adults. They begin to talk sensibly on the telephone to invisible grandparents (younger children do not understand that their telephone partner cannot see what they see). They acquire the aggressive or cajoling language that is needed to defend their toys when playing with other children. They show that they have learned the difference between how adults talk to babies and how they talk to each other, and they use this knowledge in elaborate pretend play in which they practise using these different ‘voices’. In this way, they explore and begin to understand how and why language varies.
In the pre-school years, children also begin to develop metalinguistic awareness, the ability to treat language as an object separate from the meaning it conveys. Three-year-old children can tell you that it’s ‘silly’ to say ‘drink the chair’, because it doesn’t make sense. However, although they would never say ‘cake the eat’, they are less sure that there is anything wrong with it. They may show that they know it’s a bit odd, but they will focus mainly on the fact that they can understand what it means. Five-year-olds, on the other hand, know that ‘drink the chair’ is wrong in a different way from ‘cake the eat’. They can tell you that one is ‘silly’ but the other is ‘the wrong way around’.
Language acquisition in the pre-school years is impressive. It is also noteworthy that children have spent thousands of hours interacting with language—participating in conversations, eavesdropping on others’ conversations, being read to, watching television, etc. A quick mathematical exercise will show just how many hours children spend in language-rich environments. If children are awake for ten or twelve hours a day, we may estimate that they are in contact with the language of their environment for 20,000 hours or more by the time they go to school.
Although pre-school children acquire complex knowledge and skills for language and language use, the school setting requires new ways of using language and brings new opportunities for language development.
In the school years, children’s ability to use language to understand others and to express their own meanings expands and grows. Learning to read gives a major boost to metalinguistic awareness. 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. Unlike three-year-olds, children who can read understand that ‘the’ is a word, just as ‘house’ is. They understand that ‘caterpillar’ is a longer word than ‘train’, even though the object it represents is substantially shorter! Metalinguistic awareness also includes the discovery of such things as ambiguity. Knowing that words and sentences can have multiple meanings gives children access to word jokes, trick questions, and riddles, which they love to share with their friends and family.
One of the most impressive aspects of language development in the school years is the astonishing growth of vocabulary. Children enter school with the ability to understand and produce several thousand words, and thousands more will be learned at school. In both the spoken and written language at school, words such as ‘homework’ or ‘ruler’ appear frequently in situations where their meaning is either immediately or gradually revealed. Words like ‘population’ or ‘latitude’ occur less frequently, but they are made important by their significance in academic subject matter.
Vocabulary grows at a rate of between several hundred and more than a thousand words a year, depending mainly on how much and how widely children read (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985). 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. Dee Gardner (2004) suggests that reading a variety of text types is an essential part of vocabulary growth. His research has shown how the range of vocabulary in narrative texts is different from that in 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 (for example, ‘mummy’, ‘mummies’, ‘mummified’). 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. As Terry Piper (2006) and others have documented, some children will have even more to learn if they come to school speaking an ethnic or regional variety of the school language that is quite different from the one used by the teacher. They will have to learn that another variety, often referred to as the standard variety, 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. We will return to this topic when we discuss bilingualism in early childhood.
Explaining first language acquisition
These descriptions of language development from infancy through the early school years show that we have considerable knowledge of what children learn in their early language development. More controversial, however, are questions about how this development takes place. What abilities does the child bring to the task and what are the contributions of the environment? Since the middle of the 20th century, three main theoretical positions have been advanced to explain language development: behaviourist, innatist, and interactionist/developmental perspectives.
Behaviourism is a theory of learning that was influential in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the United States. With regard to language learning, the best-known proponent of this psychological theory was B. F. Skinner (1957). 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.
Analysing children’s speech: Definitions and examples
The behaviourists viewed imitation and practice as the primary processes in language development. To clarify what is meant by these two terms, consider the following definitions and examples.
Imitation: word-for-word repetition of all or part of someone else’s utterance.
| MOTHER | Shall we play with the dolls? |
| LUCY | Play with dolls |
Practice: repetitive manipulation of form.
| CINDY | He eat carrots. The other one eat carrots. They both eat carrots. |
Now examine the transcripts from Peter, Cindy, and Kathryn. They were all about 24 months old when they were recorded as they played with a visiting adult. Using the definitions above, notice how Peter imitates the adult in the following dialogue.
Peter (24 months) is playing with a dump truck while two adults, Patsy and Lois, look on.
| PETER | Get more. |
| LOIS | You’re gonna put more wheels in the dump truck? |
| PETER | Dump truck. Wheels. Dump truck. |
(later)
| PATSY | What happened to it (the truck)? |
| PETER | (looking under chair for it) Lose it. Dump truck! Dump truck! Fall! Fall! |
| LOIS | Yes, the dump truck fell down. |
| PETER | Dump truck fell down. Dump truck. |
(Unpublished data from P. M. Lightbown)
If we analysed a larger sample of Peter’s speech, we would see that 30–40 per cent of his sentences were imitations of what someone else had just said. We would also see that his imitations were not random. That is, he did not simply imitate 30–40 per cent of everything he heard. Detailed analyses of large samples of Peter’s speech over about a year showed that he imitated words and sentence structures that were just beginning to appear in his spontaneous speech. Once these new elements became solidly grounded in his language system, he stopped imitating them and went on to imitate others (Bloom, Hood, & Lightbown, 1974).
Unlike a parrot who imitates the familiar and continues to repeat the same things again and again, 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. For example, consider how Cindy imitates and practises language in the following conversations.
Cindy (24 months, 16 days) is looking at a picture of a carrot in a book and trying to get Patsy’s attention.
| CINDY | Kawo? kawo? kawo? kawo? kawo? |
| PATSY | What are the rabbits eating? |
| CINDY | They eating … kando? |
| PATSY | No, that’s a carrot. |
| CINDY | Carrot. (pointing to each carrot on the page) The other … carrot. The other carrot. The other carrot. |
(A few minutes later, Cindy brings Patsy a stuffed toy rabbit.)
| PATSY | What does this rabbit like to eat? |
| CINDY | (incomprehensible) eat the carrots. |
(Cindy gets another stuffed rabbit.)
| CINDY | He (incomprehensible) eat carrots. The other one eat carrots. They both eat carrots. |
(One week later, Cindy opens the book to the same page.)
| CINDY | Here’s the carrots. (pointing) Is that a carrot? |
| PATSY | Yes. |
(Unpublished data from P. M. Lightbown)
Cindy appears to be working hard on her language acquisition. She practises new words and structures in a way that sounds like a student in some foreign language classes! Perhaps most interesting is that she remembers the ‘language lesson’ a week later and turns straight to the page in the book she had not seen since Patsy’s last visit. What is most striking is that, like Peter, her imitation and practice appear to be focused on what she is currently ‘working on’.
The samples of speech from Peter and Cindy seem to lend some support to the behaviourist explanation of language acquisition. Even so, as we saw, the choice of what to imitate and practise seemed determined by something inside the child rather than by the environment.
Not all children imitate and practise as much as Peter and Cindy did. The amount of imitation in the speech of other children, whose development proceeded at a rate comparable to that of Cindy and Peter, has been calculated at less than 10 per cent. Consider the examples of imitation and practice in the following conversation between Kathryn and Lois.
Kathryn (24 months)
| LOIS | Did you see the toys I brought? |
| KATHRYN | I bring toys? Choo choo? Lois brought the choo choo train? |
| LOIS | Yes, Lois brought the choo choo train. |
| KATHRYN | (reaching for bag) I want play with choo choo train. I want play with choo choo train. (taking out slide) Want play. What’s this? |
| LOIS | Oh you know what that is. |
| KATHRYN | Put down on floor. This. I do this. |
(Kathryn puts the slide on the floor.)
| KATHRYN | (taking out two cars of train) Do this. I want do this. (trying to put train together) I do this. I do this. |
| LOIS | OK. You can do it. You can do it. Look I’ll show you how. |
(Lois puts it together.)
| KATHRYN | (searching in box) I get more. Get a more. No more choo choo train. Get truck. (taking out truck) Kathryn truck. Where? Where a more choo choo train? |
| LOIS | Inside. It’s in the box. |
| KATHRYN | A choo choo? (taking out part of train) This is a choo choo train. |
(from Bloom & Lahey, 1978, p. 135)
Like Cindy, Kathryn sometimes repeats herself or produces a series of related practice sentences, but she rarely imitates the other speaker. Instead, she asks and answers questions and elaborates on the other speaker’s questions or statements. Thus, children vary in the amount of imitation they do. In addition, many of the things they say show that they are using language creatively, not just repeating what they have heard. This is evident in the following examples.
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.
| MOTHER | Maybe we need to take you to the doctor. |
| RANDALL | Why? So he can doc my little bump? |
Randall forms the verb ‘doc’ from the noun ‘doctor’, by analogy with farmers who farm, swimmers who swim, and actors who act.
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Even older children have to work out some puzzles, for example, when familiar language is used in unfamiliar ways, as in the example below. When David (5 years, 1 month) was at his older sister’s birthday party, toasts were proposed with grape juice in stemmed glasses:
| FATHER | I’d like to propose a toast. |
Several minutes later, David raised his glass:
| DAVID | I’d like to propose a piece of bread. |
Only when laughter sent David slinking from the table did the group realize that he wasn’t intentionally 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 not the same toast and could not be replaced with its apparent near-synonym, ‘a piece of bread’.
Randall (2 years, 9 months) asked the following questions in various situations over the course of a day.
Are dogs can wiggle their tails?
Are those are my boots?
Are this is hot?
Randall had concluded that the trick of asking questions was to put ‘are’ at the beginning of the sentence. His questions are good examples of Stage 3 in question development.
Randall (3 years, 5 months) was looking for a towel.
You took all the towels away because I can’t dry my hands.
He meant ‘I can’t dry my hands because you took all the towels away’, but he made a mistake about which clause comes first. Children at this stage of language development tend to mention events in the order of their occurrence. In this case, the towels disappeared before Randall attempted to dry his hands, so that’s what he said first. He did not yet understand how a word like ‘before’ or ‘because’ changes the order of cause and effect.
These examples of children’s speech provide us with a window on the process of language learning. Imitation and practice alone cannot explain some of the forms created by children. They are not merely repetitions of sentences that they have heard from adults. Rather, 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. And although behaviourism goes some way to explaining the sorts of overgeneralization that children make, it is not a satisfactory explanation for the acquisition of the more complex grammar that children acquire. These limitations led researchers to look for different explanations for language acquisition.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential figures in linguistics. His ideas about how language is acquired and how it is stored in the mind sparked a revolution in many aspects of linguistics and psychology, including the study of language acquisition. The innatist perspective is related to Chomsky’s hypothesis that all human languages are based on some innate universal principles.
In his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior (1957), 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, all children will learn to walk as long as adequate nourishment and reasonable freedom of movement are provided. They do not have to be taught. They will learn to walk at about the same age, and they will walk in essentially the same way. 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, or rather, 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. The language children are exposed to includes false starts, incomplete sentences, and slips of the tongue, and yet they learn to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. 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 (UG) 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.
Consider the following sentences, from a book by Lydia White (1989). These English sentences contain the reflexive pronoun ‘himself’. Both the pronoun and the noun it refers to (the antecedent) are printed in italics. (An asterisk at the beginning of a sentence indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical.)
a John saw himself.
b *Himself saw John.
In (a) and (b), it looks as if the reflexive pronoun must follow the noun it refers to. But (c) disproves this:
c Looking after himself bores John.
If we consider sentences such as:
d John said that Fred liked himself.
e *John said that Fred liked himself.
f John told Bill to wash himself.
g *John told Bill to wash himself.
we might conclude that the noun closest to the reflexive pronoun is the antecedent. However, (h) shows that this rule won’t work either:
h John promised Bill to wash himself.
And it’s even more complicated than that. Usually the reflexive must be in the same clause as the antecedent as in (a) and (d), but not always, as in (h). Furthermore, the reflexive can be in the subject position in (i) but not in (j).
i John believes himself to be intelligent (non-finite clause).
j *John believes that himself is intelligent (finite clause).
In some cases, more than one antecedent is possible, as in (k) where the reflexive could refer to either John or Bill:
k John? showed Bill? a picture of himself.
When we look at this kind of complexity, it seems it would be very hard to learn, and children do make errors along the way. Yet, most school-age children with L1 English would be able to correctly interpret the grammatical sentences and recognize the ungrammaticality of the others. Researchers who study language acquisition from the innatist perspective argue that such 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 such complex syntax in spite of limitations of the input. They hypothesize furthermore that the innate mechanism is used exclusively for language acquisition.
The innatist perspective emphasizes the fact that almost all children successfully acquire their native language—or more than one language if they live in a multilingual community. 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 acquire the basic syntax and morphology of the language spoken to them in a variety of conditions, some of 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). Children achieve different levels of vocabulary, creativity, social grace, and so on, but virtually all achieve the ability to use the patterns of the language or languages spoken to them. This is seen as support for the hypothesis that language is somehow separate from other aspects of cognitive development and may depend on a specific module of the brain.
The critical period hypothesis
The innatist perspective is often linked to the critical period hypothesis (CPH)—the hypothesis that animals, including 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, since nearly all children are exposed to language at an early age. 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. His story was dramatized in a 1970 film by François Truffaut called L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child). When Victor was discovered, he was about 12 years old and completely wild, apparently having had no contact with humans. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, 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.
Nearly 200 years later, Genie, a 13-year-old girl who had been isolated, neglected, and abused, was discovered in California. Because of the irrational demands of a father with mental health problems and the submission and fear of an abused mother, Genie had spent more than 11 years tied to a chair or a crib 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, and she had long since resorted to complete silence. 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, including Susan Curtiss (1977). 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. She used grammatical forms inconsistently and overused formulaic and routine speech. Genie’s life was studied and analysed by researchers and therapists in the years after her discovery and many observers were struck by the resilience she showed in some aspects of her life (see, for example, Rymer, 1994). However, she never achieved a level of language that would be considered typical for a person of her age or even of a much younger child.
Although Victor and Genie appear to provide evidence in support of the CPH, it is difficult to argue that the hypothesis is confirmed on the basis of evidence from their stories. Due to the circumstances of these tragic lives, we cannot know what factors besides biological maturity might have contributed to the failure to acquire normal linguistic ability. Sadly, similar cases have been reported in both scientific and popular publications. It is possible that some of the children suffered from brain damage, developmental delays, or a specific language impairment, even before they were separated from normal human interaction.
A more appropriate test of the CPH is the case of children who live in homes where they receive love and care, yet do not have access to language at the usual time. This is the case for some profoundly deaf children who have hearing parents. Only 5–10 percent of the profoundly deaf are born to deaf parents, and only these children are likely to be exposed to sign language from birth. Hearing parents may not realize that their child cannot hear because the child uses other senses to interact with them. Thus, although the early childhood period may appear to be the same in most ways for both hearing and deaf children, it may be devoid of language that is accessible to the deaf child. These children’s later experience in learning sign language has been the subject of some important research related to the CPH.
Like oral and written languages, sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) make use of grammatical markers to indicate such things as time (for example, past tense) and number. These markers are expressed through specific hand or body movements.
Elissa Newport (1990) and her colleagues studied the ability of deaf users of ASL to produce and comprehend grammatical markers. They compared Native signers (who were exposed to ASL from birth), Early signers (who began using ASL between four and six years of age), and Late signers (who began learning ASL after age 12). They found no difference between the groups in some aspects of their use of ASL, for example in vocabulary knowledge. However, on tests focusing on grammatical markers, the Native group used the markers 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. There has been controversy regarding the importance of exposing deaf children to sign language as early as possible. Some parents and educators, as well as speech and language therapists, have argued that early exposure to sign language could interfere with children’s development of oral language. However, current research suggests that even for children who are given cochlear implants and thus have greater access to oral language, exposure to sign language adds to—rather than interferes with—their overall development of language knowledge and skill (Humphries et al., 2012).
Another line of research that has given new insight into the importance of early language experience comes from studies of ‘international adoptees’. These are children who were adopted at an early age by families who did not speak the language the child had heard during infancy. In their review of studies of international adoptees, Johanne Paradis, Fred Genesee, and Martha Crago (2011) concluded that cognitive and linguistic outcomes were generally very positive. Some comparisons of the adoptees’ language with that of children the same age who had always heard the same language showed that subtle differences persist even after several years, but these are not the kinds of differences that most people would notice, nor do they prevent the adoptees from successfully using their new language. Here again, of course, one cannot know whether something other than a late exposure to the language spoken in the adoptive environment also contributed to these subtle differences.
It is clear, therefore, that late exposure does not mean that a child cannot successfully learn and use a new language. Nevertheless, with continuing research on children’s linguistic behaviours and intuitions, as well as the studies of infants’ speech perception that we saw above, there is growing evidence that language acquisition begins at birth, and possibly even before, as the child’s brain is shaped by exposure to the language(s) in the environment. We will return to the issue of early and late language experiences in discussions of bilingualism and second language learning.
Interactionist/developmental perspectives
Developmental and cognitive psychologists have focused on the interplay between the innate learning ability of children and the environment in which they develop. They 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 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.
Psychologists attribute considerably more importance to the environment than the innatists do even though they also recognize a powerful learning mechanism in the human brain. They see language acquisition as similar to and influenced by the acquisition of other kinds of skill and knowledge, rather than as something that is different from and largely independent of the child’s experience and cognitive development. Indeed, researchers such as Dan Slobin (1973) have long emphasized the close relationship between children’s cognitive development and their acquisition of language.
One of the earliest proponents of the view that children’s language is built on their cognitive development was the Swiss psychologist/epistemologist, Jean Piaget (1951). 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 (knowing that things hidden from sight are still there), the stability of quantities regardless of changes in their appearance (knowing that 10 pennies spread out to form a long line are not more numerous than 10 pennies in a tightly squeezed line), and logical inferencing (figuring out which properties of a set of rods (their size, weight, material, etc.) cause some rods to sink and others to float on water).
It is easy to see how children’s cognitive development would partly determine how they acquire language. For example, the use of certain terms such as ‘bigger’ or ‘more’ depends on the children’s understanding of the concepts they represent. 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.
Another influential student of child development was the psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978). He observed interactions among children and also between children and adults in schools in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. He concluded that language develops primarily from social interaction. He argued that in a supportive interactive environment, children are able to advance to higher levels of knowledge and performance. Vygotsky referred to a metaphorical place in which children could do more than they would be capable of doing independently as the zone of proximal development (ZPD).
Vygotsky 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. The conversations provide the child with scaffolding, that is, a kind of supportive structure that helps them make the most of the knowledge they have and also to acquire new knowledge.
Vygotsky’s view differs from Piaget’s. Piaget saw language as a symbol system that could be used to express knowledge acquired through interaction with the physical world. For Vygotsky, thought was essentially internalized speech, and speech emerged in social interaction. Vygotsky’s views have become increasingly central in research on L2 development, as we will see in Chapter 4.
Since the 1970s, researchers have studied children’s language learning environments in a great many different cultural communities. The research has focused not only on the development of language itself, but also on the ways in which the environment provides what children need for language acquisition. Between 1985 and 1997, Dan Slobin edited five volumes devoted to research on the acquisition of 28 languages, providing examples and analyses of child language and the language-learning environment from communities around the world (Slobin, 1985–1997). Then, the year 2000 saw the launch of a resource for child language researchers, which is remarkable in its scale: the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), where researchers share child language data in dozens of languages in the form of audio/video recordings and transcriptions of recorded language samples from children and their interlocutors (MacWhinney, 2000). Another recent large-scale resource on child language learning is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDIs) (Fenson et al., 2007), a database that brings together information from questionnaires and checklists completed by parents for a large number of children learning different languages.
One feature of cross-cultural research on child language development is the description of child-rearing patterns. Catherine Snow (1995) and others have studied the apparent effects on language acquisition of the ways in which adults talk to and interact with young children. In middle-class North American homes, researchers observed that adults often modify the way they speak when talking to little children. This child-directed 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, picture books, 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. For example, when Peter says, ‘Dump truck! Dump truck! Fall! Fall!’, Lois responds, ‘Yes, the dump truck fell down’.
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Researchers working in a ‘language socialization’ framework have found that the kind of child-directed speech observed in middle-class American homes is by no means universal. In some societies, adults do not engage in conversation or verbal play with very young children. For example, Bambi Schieffelin (1990) found that Kaluli mothers in Papua New Guinea did not consider their very young children to be appropriate conversational partners. Martha Crago (1992) observed that in traditional Inuit society, children are expected to watch and listen to adults. They are not expected or encouraged to participate in conversations with adults until they are older and have more developed language skills.
Other researchers have observed that in some societies, young children interact primarily with older siblings who serve as their caregivers. Even within the United States, Shirley Brice Heath (1983) and others have documented substantial differences in the ways parents in different socioeconomic and ethnic groups interact with their children. Nevertheless, in every society, children are in situations in which they hear language that is meaningful to them in their environment. And they acquire 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. This is not to say that differences in children’s environments do not have an impact on some aspects of early language learning (Rowe, 2008). For example, a number of studies in the USA have found that the amount of language addressed to children in their early years is associated with differences in their vocabulary when they start school (Gilkerson et al., 2017; Hart & Risley, 1995)
The role of interaction between a language-learning child and an interlocutor who responds to the child is illuminated by cases where such interaction is missing. Jacqueline Sachs and her colleagues (1981) 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 an 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 a hearing adult, his expressive abilities started to improve. By the age of four years and two months, most of the unusual speech patterns had disappeared, replaced by language more typical of his age. Jim’s younger brother Glenn did not display the same type of language delay. Glenn’s linguistic environment was different from Jim’s: he had his older brother—not only as a model but, more importantly, as a conversational partner whose interaction allowed Glenn to develop language in a more typical way.
Jim showed very rapid acquisition of English once he began to interact with an adult on a one-to-one basis. The fact that prior to this experience, he had not acquired language in the way that most children do suggests that impersonal sources of language such as television or radio alone are not sufficient. One-to-one interaction gives children access to language that is adjusted to their 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. Even in children’s programmes, where simpler language is used and topics are relevant to younger viewers, no immediate adjustment is made for the needs of an individual child. Once children have acquired some language, however, television can be a source of language and cultural information.
As more and more research has documented the ways in which children interact with the environment, developmental and cognitive psychologists find further evidence that language acquisition is usage-based. In this view, language acquisition is possible because of children’s general cognitive capacities and the vast number of opportunities they have to make connections between the language they hear and what they experience in their environment. Sophisticated electronic recording devices have been used to track and count words and phrases children hear in their daily lives. Deb Roy documented his son’s acquisition of words, showing the frequency and the contexts for the occurrence of language. His research provided an impressive demonstration of the power of interaction between the child and the adults and how adults focus on the language the child has begun to use (Roy, 2009).
The usage-based perspective on language acquisition differs from the behaviourist view in that the emphasis is more on the child’s ability to create networks of associations rather than on processes of imitation and habit formation. Referred to by various names, including cognitive linguistics, this view also differs sharply from the innatist perspective because language acquisition is not seen as requiring a separate ‘module of the mind’ but rather depends on the child’s general learning abilities and the contributions of the environment. As Elena Lieven and Michael Tomasello (2008) put it, ‘Children learn language from their language experiences—there is no other way’ (p. 168). According to this view, what children need to know is essentially available to them in the language they are exposed to.
Some of the early research in this framework was done in the context of connectionism and involved computer simulations in which samples of language were provided as input to a fairly simple program. The goal was to show that the computer could ‘learn’ certain things if exposed to enough examples. The program was found to be able to sort out the patterns from the input and to generalize beyond what it was actually exposed to. It even made the same kinds of creative ‘mistakes’ that young children make, such as putting a regular -ed ending on an irregular verb, for example, eated.
In a usage-based model, language acquisition involves not only associating words with elements of external reality. It is also a process of associating words and phrases with other words and phrases that occur with them, or words with grammatical morphemes that occur with them. For example, children learning languages in which nouns have grammatical gender learn to associate the appropriate article and adjective forms with nouns. So if children are learning French, they learn that la and une go with chaise (chair) and le and un go with livre (book). Similarly, they learn to associate pronouns with the verb forms that mark person and number—il aime (he likes) and nous aimons (we like). They also learn which temporal adverbs go with which verb tenses.
Of particular importance to this 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 and among language forms are built up. For usage-based theorists, acquisition of language, while impressive, is not the only remarkable feat accomplished by the child. They compare it to other cognitive and perceptual learning, including learning to ‘see’. That is, the visual abilities that we take for granted, for example, focusing on and interpreting objects in our visual field, are actually learned through experience (Tomasello, 2009).
The differences between innatist, behaviourist, and interactionist/developmental perspectives are clear. Innatism is based on biological and neurological explanations, emphasizes the innate and universal nature of language learning, and focuses on the final state, that is, the kind of linguistic knowledge that adult native speakers have. Behaviorist and interactionist/developmental perspectives emphasize a much greater role for the linguistic environment and focus on developmental features of learning. However, behaviourism views learning as a process of imitation and habit formation while interactionist/developmental perspectives view learning as a more creative process in which learners’ innate abilities (linguistic and cognitive) interact with the environment. We revisit these theories (and others) in relation to L2 learning in Chapter 4.
Although most children progress through the stages of language development without significant difficulty or delay, there are some children for whom this is not the case. The majority of children produce recognizable first words by 12 months; however, a small number may not speak before the age of three years. In very young children, one way to determine whether delayed language reflects a problem or simply an individual difference within the normal range is to determine whether the child responds to language and appears to understand even if they are not speaking.
For older children, delays in learning to read that seem out of keeping with a child’s overall cognitive functioning may suggest that there is a specific problem in that domain. Some children seem to begin reading almost by magic, discovering the mysteries of print with little direct instruction. For most children, instruction that includes some systematic attention to sound–letter correspondences allows them to unlock the treasure chest of reading. Both groups fall within a ‘normal’ range. For some children, however, reading presents such great challenges that they need expert help beyond what is available in a typical classroom. Parents and teachers need to bring in specialists who can help to assess the child’s needs and work out a programme of support.
However, when children receive their early schooling in a language that they do not speak at home, there may be delays in learning to read. These delays have sometimes been misinterpreted as reflecting an underlying reading disability. It is important to understand that learning to read depends very much on the development of good oral vocabulary and that children who are still developing L2 may simply need more time to acquire the background knowledge and vocabulary they need in order to understand what they are reading. Esther Geva and Gloria Ramirez (2015) describe the ‘multifaceted nature of English L2 reading comprehension’ and review research that has helped teachers develop approaches to help both L1 and L2 speakers acquire this most fundamental tool for education.
An in-depth discussion of the various types of disability (including deafness, articulatory problems, autism, dyslexia, and so on) that sometimes affect language development is outside the scope of this book. It is essential that parents and teachers be encouraged to seek professional advice if they feel that a child is not developing language as expected, keeping in mind that the range for ‘normal’ is wide indeed.
The language development of children who learn multiple languages during childhood is of enormous importance throughout the world. Indeed, the majority of the world’s children are exposed to more than one language. Some children learn multiple languages from earliest childhood; others acquire additional languages when they go to school. The acquisition and maintenance of more than one language can open doors to many personal, social, and economic opportunities. It is noteworthy that both the CHILDES and MB-CDI databases include information about children learning more than one language in early childhood (see Cross-cultural research).
Unfortunately, as Jim Cummins (2000) and others have said, and as was pointed out above, children who already know one or more languages and who arrive at their first day of school without an age-appropriate knowledge of the language of the school have often been misdiagnosed as having language delays or disorders. This includes immigrant and minority-language children who do not speak the school language at home and children who speak a different variety of the school language. These children’s knowledge of a different language or language variety is often incorrectly interpreted as a lack of normal language development and a lack of background knowledge for school subjects. They may be placed in remedial or special education classes because schools are not equipped to provide an adequate assessment of the children’s ability to use their home language, their general cognitive abilities, or their knowledge of school subjects that they have learned through another language. Researchers have made important progress in providing guidelines that can help educators distinguish between disability and diversity (Paradis, Genesee, & Crago, 2011), but much practical work remains to be done so that children can make the most of their cognitive and linguistic abilities. Cristina Sánchez-López and Theresa Young (2018) provide valuable guidance, especially for parents and teachers of children with special educational needs who are learning more than one language in pre-school and the early school years. With thoughtful planning and cooperation among families and educators, it is possible to provide appropriate inclusive educational opportunities for all children (Smith et al., 2018).
Children who learn more than one language from earliest childhood are referred to as ‘simultaneous bilinguals’, whereas those who learn another language later may be called ‘sequential bilinguals’. We sometimes hear people express the opinion that it is too difficult for children to cope with two languages. They fear that the children will be confused or will not learn either language well. However, there is little support for the myth that learning more than one language in early childhood is a problem for children who have adequate opportunities to use each one. On the contrary, there is a considerable body of research on children’s ability to learn more than one language in their earliest years. Although some studies show minor early delays in one or both languages for simultaneous bilinguals, there is no evidence that learning two languages has a substantial negative long-term effect on their linguistic development or interferes with cognitive development. It is of course important to acknowledge that creating the conditions for family bilingualism is not always easy. Children sometimes resist the use of a language that is not spoken by their friends and playmates in the larger community. Parents may find it easier to use one language, especially in the company of those who do not speak the other language. It may be hard to find books and games to reinforce the learning of a minority language in the home. But there is more and more guidance and support available for parents for whom the acquisition of more than one language is important. Anikka Bourgogne (2014) and Barbara Zurer Pearson (2008) are examples of writers who know both the research on bilingualism and the day-to-day experiences of parents who have embarked on this journey.
Many children attain high levels of proficiency in both languages. Ellen Bialystok (2001) and other cognitive and developmental psychologists have found convincing evidence that achieving bilingual proficiency can have positive effects on abilities that are related to academic success, such as metalinguistic awareness. Limitations that may be observed in the language of bilingual individuals are more likely to be related to the circumstances in which each language is learned than to any limitation in the human capacity to learn more than one language. For example, if one language is heard much more often than the other or is more highly valued in the community, that language may eventually be used better than, or in preference to, the other.
One aspect of bilingual language use is referred to as code switching—the use of words or phrases from more than one language within a conversation. For example, a child who speaks both French and English might say, ‘I’m playing with le château’. Such switching between languages may sometimes reflect the absence of a particular vocabulary word or expression, but it can just as often be the intentional use of a word from the other language for a variety of interactional purposes. Highly proficient adult bilinguals also code switch when they speak to others who also know both languages. The use of both languages within a bilingual context is not evidence of a lack of proficiency. It may have many different motivations, from expressing solidarity to making a joke. Psychologists have shown that speakers of more than one language are constantly making choices about how to express themselves and that code switching is patterned and often predictable. Indeed, this experience in making choices has been identified as contributing to cognitive flexibility throughout life (Bialystok, 2009). As we will see, code switching is just one of the ways that bilingual and multilingual individuals make use of their linguistic resources.
As children learn a second language at school, they need to learn both the variety of language that children use among themselves (and in informal settings with familiar adults) and the variety that is used in academic settings. In his early research on childhood bilingualism, Jim Cummins (2000) called these two varieties BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) and CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency). Characteristics of the two varieties overlap to a certain extent, but there are important differences, not just in the range of vocabulary that each requires but also in the way information is expressed. Luciana de Oliveira and Mary Schleppegrell (2015) have contributed to our understanding of what characterizes the language and interaction patterns of academic discourse. Their research in classrooms helps to explain why children need more time to acquire the vocabulary, grammar, and interaction patterns of academic language than they need to acquire the informal language of day-to-day interaction.
When children start school with little or no knowledge of the language spoken there, they may acquire BICS within a relatively short time—as little as a year or two. They learn from watching and imitating interactions among their peers and between teachers and students. They make connections between frequently heard words and phrases and the routines and recurring events of the classroom, cafeteria, and playground. For this reason, students are sometimes perceived as ‘fluent’ in their L2. This can lead teachers to assume that any difficulties in academic tasks are not due to limited language skills but to other causes—from lack of motivation to learning disabilities. More careful observation shows that the students, while fluent in social settings, do not have the CALP skills needed for academic tasks such as understanding a problem in mathematics, defining a word, or writing a science report.
Virginia Collier (1989) found that, for most students, acquiring age-appropriate CALP takes several years. As the L2 learner tries to catch up, the children who came to school already speaking the school language are continuing to learn hundreds of new words every year and to learn the concepts that these words represent. If L2 learners have limited knowledge of the school language and do not have opportunities to continue learning academic content in a language they already know, it is not surprising that they fall behind in learning the academic subject matter that their peers have continued to develop.
Children need time to develop their L2 skills. Many people assume that this means that the best approach is to start learning as early as possible and to avoid the use of the child’s previously learned languages. Certainly, it is important for children to begin learning and using the school language as early as possible, but considerable research suggests that continued development of the child’s home language actually contributes in the long term to more successful acquisition of the school language. Researchers and educators have expressed concern about situations where children are cut off from their family language when they are very young, spending long hours away from their families in settings where the home language is absent or even forbidden. Lily Wong Fillmore (2000) observed that when children are ‘submerged’ in a different language for long periods in pre-school or day care, their development of the family language may be slowed down or stalled before they have developed an age-appropriate proficiency in the new language. Eventually they may stop speaking the family language altogether, and this loss of a common language can lead to significant social and psychological problems.
Wallace Lambert (1987) called the loss of one language on the way to learning another subtractive bilingualism. It can have negative consequences for children’s self-esteem, and their relationships with family members are also likely to be affected by such early loss of the family language. In these cases, children seem to continue to be caught between two languages: they have not yet mastered the school language, and they have not continued to develop the family language. During the transition period, they may fall behind in their academic learning. Unfortunately, the ‘solution’ educators sometimes propose to parents is that they should stop speaking the family language at home and concentrate instead on speaking the school language with their children.
The research evidence suggests that a better approach is to strive for additive bilingualism—the maintenance of the home language while the L2 is being learned. This is especially true if the parents are also learners of the L2. If parents continue to use the language that they know best with their children, they are able to express their knowledge and ideas in ways that are richer and more elaborate than they can manage in a language they do not know as well. Using their own language in family settings is also a way for parents to maintain their own self-esteem, especially as they may have their own struggles with the new language outside the home, at work or in the community. Maintaining the family language also allows children to retain family connections with grandparents or relatives who do not speak the new language. They benefit from the opportunity to continue both cognitive and affective development using a language they understand easily while they are still learning the L2. Ofelia García (2009) and number of other educators and researchers use the term translanguaging to focus attention on the fact that multilingual individuals and communities do not draw on their languages as separate systems but rather draw on elements of a unified underlying communicative repertoire when they seek to understand or make themselves understood in different contexts. We will return to this topic in Chapter 2.
Other positive effects of bilingual or multilingual development go beyond those that accrue to the children and their families. Knowledge of more than one language can also increase opportunities for cross-cultural communication and economic cooperation among people. As we have seen, L2 learning takes motivation, opportunity, and lots of time. But teachers, parents, and students need to know that the many benefits of additive bilingualism will reward their patience and effort.
Summary
In this chapter, we have focused on some of the research on children’s early language development that has influenced research on L2 acquisition. We have described three broad theoretical perspectives for explaining L1 acquisition. In Chapter 2, we will look at some of the findings of research examining the developing language of L2 learners.
Questions for reflection
- Some research has found that the best predictor of children’s vocabulary growth is the amount of language addressed to them by their parents and other caregivers. What have you seen in this chapter that is compatible with that finding?
- Go to the children’s section of a library or bookstore and look at the vocabulary used in books that are published for children between three and six years old. Compare these to books for young readers, aged six to eight. What does this suggest about the importance of continuing to read to children after they have begun to learn to read at school? Finally, look at the language used in textbooks for children at age 10 or 11. What can you conclude about the challenge faced by English language learners entering school at this age?
- If you are or may be teaching a second language to a group of school-aged learners with different L1 backgrounds, can you think of pedagogical tasks/ activities in which children can display and use their L1 knowledge to help them learn the L2?
Suggestions for further reading
Berko Gleason, J., & Bernstein-Ratner, N. (Eds.). (2017). The development of language (9th ed.). New York: Pearson.
Many of the chapters by leading experts in child language introduce readers to the best-known findings of the past 60 years of research on children’s language development. In addition, there are chapters based on new research, using the kinds of technology that have only recently become available. Thus, the rich database created by researchers with notepads, tape recorders, and tools such as the wug test is complemented by studies of the neurological bases of language learning and language use.
García, O., & Kleifgen, K. (2018). Educating emergent bilinguals: Policies, programs, and practices for English learners (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
The education of minority-language children, especially in American schools, is the focus of this guide for educators who seek to provide the most appropriate and enriching schooling for these children. The emphasis is on the importance of drawing on all the learners’ linguistic and cultural resources and ensuring that teachers understand the importance of working towards equity in languages and communities both in schools and beyond.
Paradis, J., Genesee, F., & Crago, M. B. (2011). Dual language development and disorders: A handbook on bilingualism and second language learning (2nd ed.). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.
The authors describe language acquisition by children who learn more than one language simultaneously or sequentially, drawing on research from education, psychology, and linguistics. They make the research accessible by their writing style, the inclusion of a glossary of terms, and above all by relating the research to profiles of children who are acquiring their languages in a variety of home, school, and community situations. The authors provide insights into both normal and atypical multilingual development.
Pearson, B. Z. (2008). Raising a bilingual child: A step-by-step guide for parents. New York: Living Language (Random House).
Addressing herself mainly to parents, Barbara Zurer Pearson reviews research from many studies and shows how children become bilingual in many different environments. She also emphasizes the advantages of growing up with a knowledge of more than one language—from the evidence for cognitive flexibility to the benefits of cultural knowledge. Written in an approachable and humorous style, the text is supported by Pearson’s thorough knowledge of the research literature that is included in the bibliography.
