The Articulate Mammal (16 page)

We may conclude then that parents who consciously try to ‘coach’ their children by simplifying and repeating may be actually
interfering
with their progress. It does not pay to talk to children as if one was telling a foreign tourist how to get to the zoo. Language that is impoverished is harder to learn, not simpler. Children appear to be naturally ‘set’ to extract a grammar for themselves, provided they have sufficient data at their disposal. Those who get on best are those who are exposed to a rich variety of language – in other words, those whose parents talk to them in a normal way.

But what does ‘talk in a normal way’ mean? Here we need to clear up a misunderstanding which seems to have originated with Chomsky. He has claimed that what children hear ‘consists to a large extent of utterances that break rules, since a good deal of normal speech consists of false starts, disconnected phrases and other deviations’ (Chomsky 1967: 441). Certainly, children are likely to hear
some
deviant sentences. But later research indicated that the speech children are exposed to is not particularly substandard. Adults tend to speak in shorter sentences and make fewer mistakes when they address children. There is a considerable difference between the way a mother talks to another adult, and the way she talks to her child. One researcher recorded a mother talking to an adult friend. Her sentences were on average fourteen to fifteen words long, and she used several polysyllabic medical terms:

‘I was on a inhalation series routine. We wen’ aroun’ from ward to ward. People, are, y’know, that get all this mucus in their chest, and it’s very important to breathe properly an’ to be able to cough this mucus up and out an’ through your chest, y’know as soon as possible. And we couldn’t sterilize the instruments ’cause they were plastic.’

But when she spoke to her child the same mother used five-or six-word sentences. The words were shorter, and referred to things the child could see or do:

COME LOOK AT MOMMA’S COLORIN’ BOOK.

YOU WANNA SEE MY COLORING BOOK?

LOOK AT MY COLORING BOOK.

LOOKIT, THAT’S AN INDIAN, HUH?

IS THAT AN INDIAN?

CAN YOU SAY INDIAN?

TALK TO ME.

(Drach, quoted in Ervin Tripp – 1971)

Most parents automatically simplify both the content and syntax when they talk to children. This is not particularly surprising – after all, we do not address bus conductors and boyfriends in the same way. The use of language appropriate to the circumstances is a normal part of a human’s language ability.

Speech to children in different cultures is so similar that it might even ‘have an innate basis in pan-human child-care behavior’ according to the controversial claim of one researcher (Ferguson 1978: 215). ‘Motherese’, as it is sometimes called, tends to consist of short, well-formed sentences spoken slowly and clearly. We shall discuss the relationship between the structure of adult speech and children’s progress in
Chapter 7
. Here we have simply pointed out that direct teaching does not accelerate the speed of learning and might even be a hindrance.

But this is perhaps an over-simplification. Correction
can
help, if the young learner is currently thinking through the problem corrected. Youngsters ‘tune in’ to different aspects of their language as they progress. If a child is tussling with so-called ‘reflexives’, and its parents are sensitive enough to notice this, then correction may be worthwhile, as in the following dialogue:

(Saxton 2000: 229)

In short, correction which ties in with a child’s linguistic level may be more useful than was once assumed.

Let us now return to the question of practice. What is being claimed here is that practice alone cannot account for language acquisition. Children do not learn language simply by repetition and imitation. Two types of evidence support this view.

The first concerns the development of ‘inflections’ or word endings. English has a number of very common verbs which have an ‘irregular’ past tense form (e.g. CAME, SAW, WENT) as opposed to the ‘regular’ forms such as LOVED, WORKED, PLAYED. It also has a number of irregular plurals such as FEET and MICE, as well as the far more numerous plurals ending in -S such as CATS, GIRAFFES and PYTHONS. Quite early on, children learn correct past tense and plural forms for common words such as CAME, SAW and FEET. Later, they abandon these correct forms and replace them with over- generalized
‘regular’ forms such as COMED, SEED and FOOTS (Ervin 1964). The significance of this apparent regression is immense. It means that language acquisition cannot possibly be a straightforward case of ‘practice makes perfect’ or of simple imitation. If it were, children would never replace common forms such as CAME and SAW, which they hear and use all the time, with odd forms such as COMED, SEED and FOOTS, which they are unlikely to have come across.

The second type of practice which turns out to be unimportant for language acquisition is spontaneous imitation. Just as adults subconsciously imitate and expand their children’s utterances, so children appear to imitate and ‘reduce’ sentences uttered by their parents. If an adult says ‘I shall take an umbrella’, a child is likely to say TAKE ’RELLA. Or ‘Put the strap under her chin’ is likely to be repeated and reduced to STRAP CHIN. At first sight, it looks as if this might be an important mechanism in the development of language. But Susan Ervin of the University of California at Berkeley came to the opposite conclusion when she recorded the spontaneous utterances of a small group of toddlers (Ervin 1964). To her surprise she found that when a child spontaneously imitates an adult, her imitations are not any more advanced than her normal speech. She shortens the adult utterance to fit in with her current average length of sentence and includes the same number of endings and ‘little’ words as in her non-imitated utterances. Not a single child produced imitations which were more advanced. And one child, Holly, actually produced imitations that were less complex than her spontaneous sentences!

We may conclude, then, that mere practice – in the sense of direct repetition and imitation – does not affect the acquisition of language in a significant way. However, we must be careful that such a statement does not lead to misunderstandings. What is being said is that practice alone cannot account for language acquisition: children do not learn merely by constant repetition of items. In another sense, they do need to ‘practise’ talking but even this requirement is not as extensive as might be expected. They can learn a surprising amount by just listening. The amount of talking a child needs to do in order to learn language varies considerably. Some children seem to speak very little. Others are constantly chattering, and playing with words. One researcher wrote a whole book on the pre-sleep monologues of her first child Anthony, who murmured paradigms to himself as he prepared for sleep:

GO FOR GLASSES

GO FOR THEM

GO TO THE TOP

GO THROW

GO FOR BLOUSE

PANTS

GO FOR SHOES

(Weir 1962)

To her disappointment, her second child David was nowhere near as talkative although he eventually learned to speak just as well. These repetitious murmurs do not seem to be essential. Children vary enormously in the amount of ‘language drills’ they engage in (Kuczaj II 1983).

So far, then, we have considered four of the six characteristics of biologically triggered behaviour which were listed at the beginning of this chapter. All these features seem to be present in language. We now come to the fifth feature, ‘There is a regular sequence of “milestones” as the behaviour develops, and these can usually be correlated with age and other aspects of development.’ (See point 5 on p. 60.) We shall deal with this in a section by itself.

THE PRE-ORDAINED PROGRAMME

All children seem to pass through a series of similar ‘stages’ as they acquire language. The age at which different children reach each stage or ‘milestone’ varies considerably, but the relative chronology remains the same. The milestones are normally reached in the same order, though they may be nearer together for some children and farther apart for others.

Consequently, we can divide language development into a number of approximate phases. The chart below is highly over-simplified. The stages overlap, and the ages given are only a very rough guide – but it does give some idea of a child’s likely progress.

In order to illustrate this progression we shall describe the successive phases which a typical (and non-existent) English child is likely to go through as she learns to speak. Let us call this child
Barbara
a name derived from the Greek word for ‘foreigner’ and meaning literally ‘someone who says bar-bar, who talks gibberish’.

Barbara’s first recognizable vocal activity was
crying
. ‘The newborn baby comes into the world crying. Unless interrupted by sickness, the production of sounds is constant in human beings, from the first cry to the last breath’ (Boysson-Bardies 1999: 37). During the first four weeks of her life, Barbara was truly:

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:

And with no language but a cry.

Tennyson

A number of different types of cry could be detected. She cried with hunger when she wanted to be fed. She cried with pain when she had a tummy ache, and she cried with pleasure when she was fed, comfortable and lying in her mother’s arms. However, strictly speaking, it is perhaps inaccurate to speak of crying as a ‘language phase’, because crying seems to be instinctive communication and may be more like an animal call system than a true language. Babies’ pain cries are distinguishable from hunger cries everywhere in the world (Lester and Boukydis 1991). So although crying may help to strengthen the lungs and vocal cords (both of which are needed for speech), crying itself perhaps should not be regarded as part of true language development.

Barbara then passed through two reasonably distinct pre-language phases, a
cooing
phase and a
babbling
phase. Early researchers confused these stages and sometimes likened them to birdsong. The nineteenth-century scholar Hippolyte Taine noted of his daughter:

She takes delight in her twitter like a bird, she seems to smile with joy over it, but as yet it is only the twittering of a bird for she attaches no meaning to the sounds she utters.

(Taine 1877, in Bar-Adon and Leopold 1971: 21)

The first of these two phases,
cooing
, began when Barbara was approximately 6 weeks old. To a casual observer, she sounded as if she was saying GOO GOO. But cooing is difficult to describe. Some textbooks call it ‘gurgling’ or ‘mewing’. The sound is superficially vowel-like, but the tracings produced on a sound spectrogram show that it is quite unlike the vowels produced by adults. Cooing seems to be universal. It may be the vocal equivalent of arm
and leg waving. That is, just as babies automatically strengthen their muscles by kicking their legs and moving their arms about, so cooing may help them to gain control over their vocal apparatus.

Gradually, consonant-type sounds become interspersed in the cooing. By around 6 months, Barbara had reached the
babbling
stage. She gave the impression of uttering consonants and vowels together, at first as single syllables – but later strung together. The consonants were often made with the lips, or the teeth, so that the sequences sounded like MAMA, DIDIDI, or PAPAPA. On hearing these sounds, Barbara’s parents confidently but wrongly assumed that she was addressing them. Such wishful thinking accounts for the fact that MAMA, PAPA and DADA are found as nursery words for mother and father all over the world (Jakobson 1962). Barbara soon learned that a cry of MAMA meant immediate attention – though she often used it to mean ‘I am hungry’ rather than to refer to a parent. This phenomenon has been noted by numerous researchers. Charles Darwin, for example, remarked that at the age of 1 year his son ‘made the great step forward of inventing a word for food, namely,
mum
but what led him to it I did not discover’ (Darwin 1877, in Bar-Adon and Leopold 1971: 28). Another investigator observed that his child called MAMA as a request for a piece of bread being buttered by himself, the father.