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    Language Acquisition: The Age Factor
    Language Acquisition: The Age Factor
    Language Acquisition: The Age Factor
    Ebook515 pages9 hours

    Language Acquisition: The Age Factor

    By David Singleton and Lisa Ryan

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    This book examines the evidence relative to the idea that there is an age factor in first and second language acquisition, evidence that has sources ranging from studies of feral children to evaluations of language programmes in primary schools. It goes on to explore the various explanations that have been advanced to account for such evidence. Finally, it looks at the educational ramifications of the age question, with particular regard to formal second language teaching in the early school years and in ‘third age’ contexts.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMultilingual Matters
    Release dateSep 6, 2004
    ISBN9781847699299
    Language Acquisition: The Age Factor
    Author

    David Singleton

    David Singleton is Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, Professor  Emeritus, University of Pannonia, Hungary and Professor, University of Applied Sciences, Konin, Poland. He is the author of numerous monographs and textbooks, including Key Topics in Second Language Acquisition (2014, with Vivian Cook, Multilingual Matters) and Beyond Age Effects in Instructional L2 Learning (2017, with Simone Pfenninger, Multilingual Matters).

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      Language Acquisition - David Singleton

      SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

      Series Editor: Professor David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

      This new series will bring together titles dealing with a variety of aspects of language acquisition and processing in situations where a language or languages other than the native language is involved. Second language will thus be interpreted in its broadest possible sense. The volumes included in the series will all in their different ways offer, on the one hand, exposition and discussion of empirical findings and, on the other, some degree of theoretical reflection. In this latter connection, no particular theoretical stance will be privileged in the series; nor will any relevant perspective – sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, etc. – be deemed out of place. The intended readership of the series will be final-year undergraduates working on second language acquisition projects, postgraduate students involved in second language acquisition research, and researchers and teachers in general whose interests include a second language acquisition component.

      Other Books in the Series

      Portraits of the L2 User

      Vivian Cook (ed.)

      Learning to Request in a Second Language: A Study of Child Interlanguage Pragmatics

      Machiko Achiba

      Effects of Second Language on the First

      Vivian Cook (ed.)

      Age and the Acquisition of English as a Foreign Language

      María del Pilar García Mayo and Maria Luisa García Lecumberri (eds)

      Fossilization in Adult Second Language Acquisition

      ZhaoHong Han

      Silence in Second Language Learning: A Psychoanalytic Reading

      Colette A. Granger

      Age, Accent and Experience in Second Language Acquisition

      Alene Moyer

      Studying Speaking to Inform Second Language Learning

      Diana Boxer and Andrew D. Cohen (eds)

      Focus on French as a Foreign Language: Multidisciplinary Approaches

      Jean-Marc Dewaele (ed.)

      Other Books of Interest

      Audible Difference: ESL and Social Identity in Schools

      Jennifer Miller

      Bilingual Children’s Language and Literacy Development

      Roger Barnard and Ted Glynn (eds)

      Developing in Two Languages: Korean Children in America

      Sarah J. Shin

      How Different Are We? Spoken Discourse in Intercultural Communication

      Helen Fitzgerald

      For more details of these or any other of our publications, please contact:

      Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall,

      Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, England

      http://www.multilingual-matters.com

      SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 9

      Series Editor: David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

      Language Acquisition:

      The Age Factor

      2nd edition

      David Singleton and Lisa Ryan

      MULTILINGUAL MATTERS

      Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto

      This book is dedicated to Mary Coward, whose great courage in the face of recent adversity totally belies her name.

      Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

      Singleton, D.M. (David Michael)

      Language Acquisition: The Age Factor/David Singleton and Lisa Ryan, 2nd ed. Second Language Acquisition: 9

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      1. Language acquisition–Age factors. I. Ryan, Lisa. II. Title. III. Series.

      P118.65.S56 2004

      401’.93–dc22 2004002819

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

      ISBN 1-85359-758-9 (hbk)

      ISBN 1-85359-757-0 (pbk)

      Multilingual Matters Ltd

      UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH.

      USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA.

      Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada.

      Copyright © 2004 David Singleton and Lisa Ryan

      All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Typeset by Archetype-IT Ltd (http://www.archetype-it.com).

      Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Ltd.

      Contents

      Foreword

      1 Introduction

      2 Evidence of Speech Milestones

      3 The Critical Period Hypothesis: L1-related Evidence

      4 The Critical Period Hypothesis: L2-related Evidence

      5 Theoretical Perspectives

      6 The L2 Educational Dimension

      7 Concluding Remarks

      Bibliography

      Index

      Foreword

      This book started life as CLCS Occasional Paper No. 3 – entitled The Age Factor in Second Language Acquisition – and the original aim of the first edition of the book, which appeared in 1989, was simply to update and extend the paper in question. However, the product which emerged was in fact new in most respects. It was significantly longer than its predecessor, differently structured and considerably broader in scope. In particular, although the principal focus of the volume was on second language aspects of the age factor question, the sections dealing with the first language aspects were greatly expanded. With regard to the present edition of the book, again this started out as an attempt to update the earlier material, but it has again ended up as in many ways a new creation. A second author, Lisa Ryan, was recruited to revise the first language dimensions of the discussion – especially Chapters 2 and 3 and the neurology-focused section of Chapter 5, which, in consequence, have been significantly re-shaped – and there has been so much research activity around the age factor in second language acquisition since 1989 that revision in this connection too has had to go a long way beyond the mere insertion of more recent references. On the other hand, the overall structure of the 1989 volume has been retained and broadly the same kinds of conclusions emerge from the discussion.

      The purpose of the book also remains true to that of the 1989 edition. The volume seeks to provide an overview of research and thinking on age-related aspects of language acquisition which will be of service to anyone likely to be in need of such a resource – notably students of linguistics/applied linguistics undertaking projects in this area, researchers in adjacent areas seeking to contextualise their research questions, and educationalists concerned with language/languages in the curriculum. The book is not in a strict sense introductory. Readers coming to it with absolutely no prior experience of linguistics or language acquisition research will find the going hard in places. However, even readers in this category should – with a little perseverance – find the text accessible in all essential respects.

      Our thanks are due to a number of institutions and individuals without whose support and assistance the book would never have appeared:

      • to Trinity College Dublin for granting the first author a number of leaves of absence to pursue research into the age factor in language acquisition;

      • to a number of universities which generously provided the first author with a base and facilities during the leaves of absence in question – notably the University of Southampton, Université Stendhal (Grenoble), the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznañ), the Jagiellonian University (Kraków), the University of Silesia and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen;

      • to the Speech & Language Therapy Department, the General Manager of Community Services Area 7 and other colleagues of the second author at the Northern Area Health Board for their support and encouragement;

      • to the East Dorset Health Authority Library Services for permission to use the library of the Poole General Hospital Postgraduate Centre;

      • to the staff of all the libraries we had occasion to use – those of the institutions mentioned above plus the library of Instititiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann – for their patience and ready help;

      • to the Trinity College Dublin Arts/ESS Benefactions Fund, The Royal Irish Academy and the Polish Academy of Sciences for generous financial support;

      • to a countless array of colleagues and students, who, through their support and encouragement, through their comments on the earlier edition and on papers which fed into the second edition, and/or by giving of their time on various occasions to discuss the relevant issues, have made invaluable contributions to the evolution of the book – in particular (in roughly chronological order) David Little, Sean Devitt, Chris Brumfit, Rose Maclaran, John Saeed, Louise Dabène, Christiane Bourgignon, Mike Long, Vivian Cook, Jennifer Ridley, Eric Kellerman, Janusz Arabski, Kenneth Hyltenstam, Suzanne Flynn, Jim Flege, Theo Bongaerts, Ellen Bialystok, Dawn Duffin, Christine Dimroth, Niclas Abrahamsson, Carmen Muñoz, Jasone Cenoz, Peter Skehan, Anna Cieœlicka, Danuta Gabryœ, Anna Ni¿egorodcew, Robert DeKeyser, Clive Perdue, Clothra Ní Cholmain, Paula Bradley, Max Hills, Susan Lawson and David Birdsong;

      • to Eithne Healy for invaluable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript;

      • and, last but by no means least, to everyone at Multilingual Matters, including the late Derrick Sharpe, who was a a source of excellent guidance and unfailing encouragement during the preparation of the first edition.

      We are all too conscious that, despite the best efforts of those who have given us the benefits of their insights and advice, the book has many weaknesses. For these, of course, we alone are responsible.

      David Singleton

      Lisa Ryan

      Dublin, October 2003

      Chapter 1

      Introduction

      The topic of this book is not only one of the few truly perennial issues in discussion of language acquisition¹, it is also one of the few truly popular issues. On the former point, the age factor has been a constantly recurring theme of language acquisition. Moreover, the connection between age and language development is not something which has only recently been commented on. It has cropped up in writings about language over many centuries. Two examples must stand for many. St Augustine, in his Confessions, uses language development as virtually a defining criterion of maturation:

      Passing hence from infancy I came to boyhood, or rather it came to me, displacing infancy. For I was no longer a speechless infant but a speaking boy. (Confessions:1.13)

      Somewhat closer to our own times Montaigne, writing of the learning of classical languages, tells of ‘a method by which they may be acquired more cheaply than they usually are and which was tried on myself’ (Essays, 1.26). The method in question consisted in exposing him during the first few years of his life to no language other than Latin. The results, according to Montaigne, were excellent as far as his command of Latin went. The results of attempts to teach him Greek formally at a subsequent stage, on the other hand, are depicted as considerably less successful.

      With regard to popular interest, everyday conversations about child language continually refer to implicit age norms. How often does one hear remarks like ‘Talks very well for her age doesn’t she?’ or ‘Nearly three and he can hardly put two words together!’? Folk wisdom also abounds when it comes to the role of age in second language (henceforth L2)² acquisition, as is evidenced by observations of the type: ‘I could never learn German at my age’ or ‘Beginning French at secondary school is no good; kids need to get started when they’re young and fresh’. As far as beliefs about the emergence of the first language (henceforth L1) are concerned, these are obviously based on the pooled experience of child-rearing. As for the age factor in L2 learning, to the casual observer the differences between younger and older L2 learners appear perfectly clear:

      … young children in suitable environments pick up a second language with little trouble, whereas adults seem to struggle ineffectively with a new language and to impose the phonology of their mother tongue on the new language. (Macnamara, 1973a: 63)

      Scholarly attention to the part age plays in language acquisition has mainly focused on precisely the assumptions which underlie comments such as those cited above, namely (a) the idea that there are age ranges within which certain things should happen in normal L1 development, and (b) the idea that one’s age is a major factor in how efficient one is as a language learner, and in particular as an L2 learner. Approaches to these assumptions have varied from sceptical scrutiny to more or less uncritical acceptance. In the first case the assumptions in question have been the subject of rigorous observation and experimentation; in the second case they have been treated as self-evidently accurate accounts of phenomena to be explained.

      Scientific interest in this area has, as one would expect, both a theoretical and a practical dimension. Each of these is explored more fully in the chapters that follow. However, briefly, on the one hand, arguments relating to the age factor have been tied in to arguments for or against particular models of language acquisition and hence for or against particular conceptions of language. On the other hand, they have been deployed in the debate about language in education.

      Probably the best known example of the theoretical use of age-related arguments is the linkage of the notion of such arguments to the ‘innateness hypothesis’, the idea that language acquisition is only possible because of an inborn ‘language faculty’. The connection between the age question and this hypothesis is fairly straightforward. If there is an innate language faculty and language develops in a way similar to, say, a physical organ or bipedal locomotion (cf. e.g. Chomsky, 1978, 1988), one can expect to be able to identify age-related stages in such development and periods of particular readiness for such development. To the extent that such age-related phases are discoverable, they can be represented as supportive of the innateness hypothesis.

      Nor does the matter rest there. The innateness hypothesis has further ramifications. If there is a faculty concerned specifically with language which is inborn, this not only sets language apart from behaviours which are acquired purely from the nurturing environment, but also suggests that language is an essential, perhaps defining, part of the human make-up, and renders very plausible the notion that language is peculiar to our species. On a slightly different tack, if there is an innate language faculty, it must be constituted in such a way as to be able to cope with any human language to which it is exposed, and, conversely, all human languages must be amenable to its operations. This implies that human languages have or draw on a common core of properties – universals – which are at bottom biologically determined. Accordingly, evidence of an age factor in language acquisition can be seen as appertaining not only to the innateness hypothesis but also to the idea that the language faculty is unique, both within the range of human capacities and across species, and to the universalist conception of language (cf. e.g. Harris, 1980: 179; Smith & Wilson, 1979: 33).

      To turn now to the more applied dimension of scholarly interest in the age question – the relating of the age question to language educational issues – the obvious example of this is the debate about L2s in the elementary curriculum. It is not so long since the wide supposition was that this debate was over, having been lost by the advocates of early L2 instruction some time in the 1970s. Stern (1983: 105) reports, for example, that American interest in foreign languages in the elementary school (FLES) had begun to wane by this time, while in Britain the evaluation of a largescale primary school French project by Burstall et al. (1974) was widely construed as refuting the notion that an early start in a L2 conferred an advantage. However, the idea that the case was closed was premature. There were always researchers who did not accept the way in which Burstall et al.’s findings had been interpreted (see e.g. Buckby, 1976; Potter et al., 1977), and the question continued to receive attention. For example, in 1978, Ekstrand was reporting on a revival of the discussion about English at grade 1 or 2 in Sweden, and ongoing controversy in Finland and Sweden about when to begin teaching the language of the host country to immigrants (Ekstrand, 1978; reprint: 136f; see also Ekstrand, 1985); in the 1980s the Italian government set in motion a national experiment in the early teaching of foreign languages (see e.g. Titone, 1985a, 1986a, 1986b); during the 1990s early L2 programmes were put in place and evaluated in France, Ireland and Scotland (see e.g. Audin et al., 1998; Favard, 1993; Harris & Conway, 2003; Johnstone, 1996); and in Germany a decision was recently taken that from September 2003 a foreign language would henceforth be taught to all primary-school pupils from grade 3 at the latest, and that, on the basis of local determination, such foreign language teaching might commence in grade 1 and/or take the form of content teaching via the L2 (Niemeier, 2003).

      One reason why early L2 instruction has remained such a live issue arises from the notion of a ‘critical period’ for language development – the notion that language acquisition is only fully possible if begun in the childhood years. This idea, which is quite widespread in the community at large, undoubtedly underlies the pressure to introduce early L2 instruction which has been exerted on politicians – in Europe at least – by that portion of the population with children. Among linguists the idea of a critical period for language acquisition was in the past accepted for the most part without question. Thus Lenneberg’s (1967) discussion of the critical period is much more an attempt to provide an explanation for its existence than actually to demonstrate its existence. Likewise, Corder’s (1973) treatment of the topic (113ff.) is in the main focused on implications of the critical period rather than on the evidence relating to it (to which he devotes just one sentence). Although it is still true that for many linguists the critical period idea remains axiomatic, others conclude that the case for the existence of a critical period is not proven (see e.g. Clark & Clark, 1977: 520; Elliot, 1981: 27; Klein, 1986: 10; Marinova-Todd et al., 2000: 27; Van Els et al., 1984: 109); that, as far as L2 learning is concerned, older beginners in fact do better (see e.g. Burstall, 1975a; reprint: 17; Cook, 1978; reprint: 12); or that younger L2 beginners outperform adult beginners only in respect of oral skills (see e.g. Faerch et al., 1984: 211; Scovel, 1988) or in the long run (see e.g. Krashen, 1982a: 43; Long, 1990).

      The other major facet of the age question in receipt of scholarly attention, namely the notion of maturational ‘milestones’ in the emergence of speech in young children, is less controversial insofar as no one seriously disputes the proposition that in the normal development of vocal activity and early speech there is both a predictable sequence of events and, within certain limits, a predictable chronology. Nevertheless, even in this area there have long been divergences of view, notably with regard to the relationship between the very earliest vocalisations – ‘cooing’ and ‘babbling’ – and later speech. Thus Clark and Clark (1977: 389f.) refer to the division of opinion between the continuity approach, represented by, for example, Mowrer (1960), and the discontinuity approach, represented by, for example, Jakobson (1968). According to the former the development from early vocalisations to later speech is gradual and continuous, whereas according to the latter later speech is unrelated to early vocalisations. In fact, this debate leads us back to the Critical Period Hypothesis, or at least to that version of it which postulates a lower limit as well as an upper limit to language readiness. It is therefore in the context of a discussion of the evidence relating to the onset of the critical period that we shall return to the continuity-discontinuity question.

      Given the amount of debate and uncertainty relating to the question of the age factor in language acquisition, there certainly seems to be room for a survey of the relevant research and arguments which goes beyond the article- or chapter-length treatment they usually receive. Just such a survey is attempted in the present work, which sets out to explore impartially the pertinent data, proposals and speculations in all their diversity. Clearly, there are limits to the extent to which even a book-length review can be exhaustive. However, all the points touched on in the foregoing are addressed in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 examines the evidence relating to speech milestones; Chapter 3 reviews L1-related evidence appertaining to the Critical Period Hypothesis; Chapter 4 looks at L2 evidence of an optimum age for language learning; Chapter 5 outlines and appraises the various explanations that have been offered for the evidence of an age-related factor in language acquisition; and Chapter 6 explores two major language educational issues that are linked to the age question: the question of L2 instruction at elementary level and that of L2s for older adult learners. The concluding remarks in Chapter 7 briefly recapitulate the points emerging from Chapters 2–6, and indicate where, in particular, further research is needed.

      Notes

      1. Language acquisition is not here distinguished from language learning (cf. Krashen, 1981a, 1981b, 1982a, 1982b, 1985), both expressions being used throughout the book, unless context indicates otherwise, in a comprehensive sense.

      2. Second language (L2) refers here and throughout to any language being learned other than the first language.

      Chapter 2

      Evidence of Speech Milestones

      Introductory

      The investigation of the development of language in infants and children has a long history. Leopold (1948) states (reprint, pp. 2f.) that the ‘exact study of child language began in Germany in the middle of the nine-teenth century under the impetus of the philosophy of Herbart’, but also mentions ‘forerunners’ working earlier in that century and indeed at the end of the 18th century (Tiedemann, 1787). Accordingly, we have in this area a database of diary studies which extends back some 200 years (cf. Ingram, 1989), although there is, it has to be said, some variation in the quality of the early data collected up to about the middle of the 20th century (see e.g. Leopold’s comments, 1948; reprint: lf.).

      Research conducted during the early part of the twentieth century tended to focus on small groups of individual children in an attempt to establish developmental norms for acquisition, and tended not to be undertaken by professional linguists. The data emerging from such studies will be examined in the sections that follow. From the late 1950s onwards language acquisition became a very active research topic in linguistics because of the influence of the writings of Noam Chomsky (e.g. 1959, 1965) and the excitement aroused by his claims regarding universal aspects of language acquisition and his postulation of an innate mechanism for language development (commonly referred to as the Language Acquisition Device or LAD) as one dimension of a self-contained language faculty or module.

      Within psychology too, language acquisition had by the second half of the 20th century become a much-researched topic. The initial emphasis in this case was on the centrality of cognition in the acquisition process, an approach inspired by the work of Jean Piaget (1926), who claimed that language acquisition could be accounted for in terms of general cognitive developmental processes. Within a few years, social explanations for language acquisition gained prominence, with researchers such as Bruner (1975) and Snow (1979) suggesting that the foundations of all aspects of language lay in the social interaction between infants and their caregivers. According to this ‘social-interactionist’ perspective, all aspects of language, including syntactic categories and rules, are discovered in the formats of parent–child interaction and/or are derived from the specialised linguistic input provided by the caregiver. Productive as the cognitive and social-interactionist accounts of language development were in respect of research generation, they were seen by researchers such as Cromer (1988) and Shatz (1982) as having rather limited explanatory power as far as both the detail and the overall phenomenon of language acquisition was concerned.

      Partly owing to the criticisms levelled at the aforementioned cognitive and social-interactionist approaches, the Chomskyan position that language is encapsulated in a discrete innate module gained further credence as a topic for empirical investigation. Advances in linguistic theory, particularly the Government and Binding Framework and Principles and Parameters Theory (Chomsky, 1981), triggered a considerable amount of research based on linguistic approaches to acquisition (see, e.g. Goodluck, 1991; Pinker, 1989; Radford, 1990). Linguists and psycholinguists embarked on a search for the universals which were assumed to characterise the language acquisition process for all children and all languages.

      Most textbook accounts of language acquisition describe a general course of L1 development, characterised by a stable and readily identifiable sequence of stages. This course of development is portrayed as proceeding from first words near the first birthday to brief phrases about six months later and then on to more elaborated sentences in the third year. (cf. Ingram, 1989). Health professionals have been eager to make use of such notions of common sequences and stages because disorders of higher cognitive functions in toddlers and preschoolers often initially manifest themselves as language delays/disorders (Tuchman et al., 1991). However, not all research has been keen to associate age norms with these stages, and researchers have frequently taken refuge in statements like: ‘the rate of progression will vary radically among children’ (Brown, 1973: 408). Crystal et al. (1976) treat such caution somewhat briskly, arguing that age norms are an indispensable tool for those involved in the assessment of child language delays/disorders, and that, in any case, to reject the notion of chronological norms would be absurd.

      All of us have clear intuitions about norms of fluency and expressiveness in young children. We are aware that some children are ‘very advanced for their age’ and that others are not very talkative. In the light of this, it is likely that the emphasis on rate variability in the literature is at least partly due to analysis so far having been restricted to intensive studies of a very few children; differences between individuals become more marked under the microscope, and as a larger range of children come to be studied, we predict that striking similarities in rate of acquisition of structures will emerge. When one compares the empirical findings of language acquisition studies, in fact, it is surprising how similar dates of predominant development of the various syntactic structures turn out to be. Onset time may indeed vary, but means display a remarkable correspondence. (Crystal et al., 1976: 31)

      As it turns out, Crystal et al.’s prediction that future research with larger samples would reveal greater regularity in the course of acquisition has proved to be unfounded. With the advent of computer technology, there has been a substantial increase in sample sizes and a much greater degree of sharing of child language data. However, while studies have documented some measure of regularity in the development of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, considerable diversity has also been noted. This will be discussed in greater detail in the following sections.

      The first section of the chapter will look at evidence for speech milestones in the first year of life; the subsequent section investigates speech milestones during the second year of life; the third section looks at evidence beyond the second year; and the final section reviews the evidence for milestones in the development of speech processing skills.

      The Very Early Stages: First Year Vocalisations

      Crystal et al.’s (1976) contention that age norms are impossible to ignore clearly holds up for the very early stages. Although stage models referring to the first year of life may not apply uniformly, they do capture genuine regularity and provide an ordered and broadly valid account of the events that mark vocalisations in the first year of life. While different researchers’ proposals diverge in some respects, five main stages are generally recognised in the child language acquisition literature (see Kent & Miolo, 1995):

      (1) Birth–1 month: Crying and reflexive vocalisations, for example grunts, belches and coughs.

      (2) 1–2 months: Vocal play, cooing or phonation. The child starts producing vocalisations with a vowel-like quality.¹

      (3) 2–6 months: Vocal play with an increasing degree of supralaryngeal articulatory behaviour.

      (4) 6 months +: Emergence of multisyllabic babbling known as repetitive, reduplicated or canonical babbling. The child starts combining vowel-like and consonant-like sounds

      (5) ~9–12 months: More complex babbling or jargon babbling. These utterances can be highly complex in their phonetic and acoustic structure.

      Thal and Bates (1990) cite Jakobson’s (1942) proposals relating to universals in phonological development, which were based on the concept of ‘markedness’. According to Jakobson, all children begin to babble at approximately the same age and start by babbling a set of unmarked phonetic contrasts that are present in every language; every successive stage of phonological development follows a universal markedness hierarchy, with the most complex sounds coming last.

      Table 2.1 sets out the relevant pronouncements of a selection of summaries of some early studies of language development during the first year of life and includes the age ranges specified for each individual stage.

      Table 2.2 compares a number of the relevant claims regarding very early language development arising from a selection of more recent summaries of child language acquisition research. It includes several stage descriptions of infant phonetic development during the first year of life. The approximate duration of the individual stages reported is shown for each system.

      It may be noted that the categories of the studies tabulated are not always unambiguously identifiable with the stages currently under discussion and that the terms used to describe the various types of output differs from study to study. However, with a little reflection, appropriate connections can be made. For example in Table 2.1 ‘vocalisations’ almost certainly refers to utterances other than crying, and in the absence of further qualification can probably be assumed to denote what we have labelled as ‘cooing’. Likewise, the expressions ‘many syllables’, ‘several well-defined syllables’, etc. very probably include perceived consonant + vowel syllables and can therefore be taken as signalling the onset of babbling. There are also two more specific terminological divergences. Gesell et al. (1938) clearly do not use ‘coos’ simply in the above-defined sense of producing vowel-like sounds, since they differentiate it from ‘vocalises ah, uh, eh’. Cattell, for his part, appears to employ ‘babbles’ in a rather loose sense, assimilating it to ‘coos’. We have dealt with these divergences by (a) giving Gesell et al.’s findings in relation both to the vocalising of ah, uh, and eh and to ‘cooing’, and (b) interpreting Cattell’s ‘babbles or coos’ as referring to cooing in our sense. In Table 2.2, various terms are used to describe the various types of output. For example, the stage of development reached after that of the production of basic biological sounds such as crying is referred to by Stark (1986) as ‘cooing and laughter’, and by Oller (1978) as ‘GOOing’, while Holmgren et al. (1996) use the term ‘interrupted phonation with no articulation’, Elbers (1982) refers to all development prior to babbling at eight months as ‘vocalising’, Kent (1990) talks about ‘late phonation’, and Nakazima (1980) terms this phase ‘development of phonatory-articulatory-auditory mechanisms of babbling’. However, there is a broad consensus evident among the various studies cited in Tables 2,1 and 2.2 concerning speech progress in the first year of life, and three distinct stages, or milestones, of development in the first year of life are identified. The order of the stages is as follows: vocalisation/phonation, phonation with intonation, babbling. There are also broad age-ranges that appear to correlate with these three basic stages; vocalisation/phonation occurs up to around the first two months, phonation with intonation can continue up until six months and babbling occurs post the six-month range in the normally developing child. The phonological features included in babbling become more varied as the child approaches 12 months of age.

      On the other hand, as can be seen from the tables, there can be substantial amounts of variation in the timing of children’s cooing and babbling. Normally developing children can begin to produce canonical babbling – i.e. meaningless consonant-vowel strings – anywhere between six and ten months. The content and course of babbling also vary considerably (Kent & Miolo, 1995; Locke, 1988; Vihman et al., 1986). As Thal and Bates (1990) observe, some children have a very small repertoire of phonetic contrasts for many weeks, while others have a much larger phonetic repertoire from the outset. Some consonant phonemes are more likely to be present in early output – e.g. bilabial and alveolar stops and nasals. However, some children’s early output includes phonemes that are further down Jakobson’s markedness hierarchy – e.g. fricative-vowel combinations. While it is clear that individual differences are considerable, there are also obvious convergences. It is difficult to ignore in this connection the possibility that phonetic tendencies in first year vocalisations are biologically determined. In particular, one notes that during the first few years of life, when children are learning to use their vocal apparatus, the apparatus in question is subject to considerable modification (see Kent & Miolo, 1995), a gradual remodelling in a striking evolutionary progression.

      Not all phonemes appear in babbling with the same frequency of occurrence. Certain sounds such as plosives and nasals are more likely to occur than others and it is these sounds that crop up more frequently in early lexicons. On the other hand, environmental influences have also been shown to exert considerable influence. While strong cross-language commonalities have been observed in the types of phonemes that children use in the first year of life, there is also evidence that children younger than one begin to adjust their sound patterns to reflect characteristics of their parent language. In order to tune into the parent language, the infant has to ascertain which sounds are contrastive in the language in question (although there is some research that suggests that the new-born is already biased to a certain degree to a particular linguistic system – Kent & Miolo, 1995). Tomasello and Bates (2001: 18) see this process as explaining effects sometimes attributed to maturational constraints: ‘the infant’s open mind about languages she can learn is closed not by some mysterious maturational process depending on an invariant and inflexible critical period but by the very act of learning her own native language’.

      In sum, while there is some evidence of variation, in general the very early stages of acquisition point to a stable sequence of speech milestones (crying and reflexive vocalisations → cooing → babbling) occurring within fairly well-defined age-ranges.

      First Words

      Discussion of language milestones in L1 development tends to focus mainly on production milestones. Comprehension milestones are more difficult to quantify, and distinguishing contextual comprehension from linguistic comprehension in infants can prove difficult. Jusczyk (2001) reviews a number of studies which demonstrate that lexical comprehension begins to develop relatively early in the second half of the first year of life. Thal and Bates (1990), for their part, argue that, while there is very little systematic evidence for word comprehension under nine months of age, there is considerable variability in rate beyond this age. With regard to production, the consensus is that in normally developing children one-word utterances begin to appear between 12 and 18 months and that the onset of two-word utterances follows between 18 and 24 months².

      Until 20 years ago, the main method for studying early lexical development was the parental diary. Long-term studies that document early vocabulary growth, a selection of which are cited below, reveal that young children often exhibit a sudden upturn in the rate of acquisition of new words during the second year of life (see, e.g. Benedict, 1979; Dromi, 1987; Halliday, 1975). The first words are acquired at a slow rate, with only one, two or three new words being acquired each week. However, around the time when the child’s vocabulary has grown to between 20 and 40 words, there is often a vocabulary spurt in which the rate of vocabulary acquisition begins to increase rapidly, and within a few weeks the child may be acquiring eight or more new words a week (Barrett, 1995). Some relevant results from a number of other frequently cited studies are summarised below. The last three studies summarised below – Wells (1985), Bates et al. (1988), and Fenson et al. (1994) – are examples of larger-scale studies and more variability is demonstrated in these findings.

      Bateman (1914) found that 75% of his 35 subjects produced their first word before the end of their first year.

      Smith’s (1926) subjects had an average productive vocabulary of one word at 10 months (N = 17), three words at 12 months (N = 52), 19 words at 15 months (N = 19), and 22 words at 18 months (N = 14). At 24 months their average length of response was 1.7 words (N = 25).

      Stern and Stern (1928) found that for

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