YEAR TWO

Introduction to Psycholinguistics

#2: The emergence of speech in first language acquisition

PRELINGUISTIC STAGES

1. Cooing (from ca. 3 months)

squealing-gurgling sounds: vowel-like in character and pitch-modulated;

sustained for 15-20 seconds

there is markedly less crying than at 8 weeks; when talked to and nodded at, the baby

smiles, and - at 16 weeks - responds to human sounds more definitely: turns head,

eyes seem to search for speaker; occasionally some chuckling sounds

at 20 weeks: the vowel-like cooing sounds begin to be interspersed with more consonantal

sounds: labial fricatives and nasals are common

2. Babbling (from ca. 4 to 10 months)

a series of identical syllables (CV):

ba-ba-ba

ma-ma-ma

di-di-di

early babblings reveal a preference for voiced stops and a dispreference for fricatives and

liquids

a wider range of syllable types (CVC; VC):

bab-bab

ab-ab

3. Lalling (from ca. 7 months)

This stage is characterised by the child's repeating heard sounds and their combinations.

Although at this stage the child begins to react to other people speaking, the repetitions are

made for the sheer pleasure and not for the purpose of social interaction.

At the age of ca. 9 months lalling turns into echolalia, which is an intensification of lalling. At

this stage, the child engages in constant imitation of speech and non-linguistic sounds

heard in the environment.

vocables/protowords: babbled sounds stabilise and are linked to a consistent referent or are

used for a consistent purpose (e.g. to be handed something), eg.:

Expression

Content

mama

baba

'I want something'

'I don't want something'

Although the child may not be fully conscious of the real significance of the meaning of

these "words", their occurrence marks a transition from the pre-linguistic to the linguistic

stages of language acquisition.

2

LINGUISTIC STAGES

4. One-Word Stage (ca. 12 months)

Expression

Content

'Here comes Daddy!'

'This is for Daddy!'

Dada

'That is where Daddy sits.'

'This shoe is Daddy’s.'

5. Two-Word Stage (from ca. 18 months to 25-30 months)

the early words are primarily concrete nouns and verbs; more abstract words such as

adjectives are acquired later; active vocabulary size: ca. 50 to 200 words

binary semantic-syntactic relations (called by some researchers Pivot Grammar):

Expression

Content

actor + action

Daddy come

'Daddy, he is coming.'

possessor + possessed

Shoe mine

'The shoe, it’s mine.'

action + object

Drink soup

'I want to drink soup.'

other

Apple me

'The apple, give it to me.'

There Daddy

'There is Daddy.'

No cookie

"There are no cookies (left)"

6. Beyond Two Words: Telegraphic Speech (from ca. 25 months)

to be sure, three- or four-word stages can be recognised in child language, but progress is

typically measured by the average number of morphemes and/or words in a child's

utterances

Expression

Content

Me put it back

Yeah, that money Neina.

No do that again!

'I'll put it back.'

'Yeah, that money is Zeina's.'

'Don't do that again!'

Major syntactic operations

Embedding: two-word-stage utterances such as

make cookie and no cookie become make

no cookie, where no cookie is embedded into make cookie

Conjoining: utterances such as

Mommy make and make cookie become Mommy make

cookie; in the conjoining operation, two grammatical relations, e.g. a Subject-Verb relation

and a Verb-Object relation, are conjoined to yield a Subject-Verb-Object utterance.

In general, during this stage of language acquisition (and beyond) the child masters

the major transformational rules (e.g. plural formation, interrogation, passivisation and

relativisation) in a systematic manner.

7. True Speech

3

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Appendix: Of so-called "wolf children"

Acquisition requires interaction with speakers of the language being acquired. As witness to the necessity of
adult input, there is the case of Genie, a child who was not exposed to language while she was growing up.
Genie's parents locked her away in an attic for the first thirteen years of her life and seldom spoke to her. When
Genie was discovered in 1970, she was unable to speak, and linguist Susan Curtiss tried teaching her English,
though without much success. Deprived of linguistic input in the first few years of life, Genie's capacity for
language acquisition had become severely impaired. Her case is a strong argument for the critical period
hypothesis.

Genie may be one of the most famous, relatively recent cases; however, many more are on record in

earlier times—some of them victims of very cruel "experiments". Here is what novelist Paul Auster writes in his
short story City of Glass (1985):

'An earliest account of such an experiment appeared in the writings of Herodotus: the Egyptian pharaoh

Psammetichus (664-610 B.C.) isolated two infants and commanded the servant in charge of them never to utter
a word in their presence. According to Herodotus, a notoriously unreliable chronicler, the children learned to
speak—their first word being the Phrygian word for bread. In the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II repeated the experiment, hoping to discover man's true "natural language" using similar methods,
but the children died before they ever spoke any words. Finally, in what was undoubtedly a hoax, the early-
sixteenth-century King of Scotland, James IV, claimed that Scottish children isolated in the same manner wound
up speaking "very good Hebrew."

Cranks and ideologues, however, were not the only ones interested in the subject. Even so sane and

skeptical a man as Montaigne considered the question carefully, and in his most important essay, the Apology
for Raymond Sebond, he wrote: "I believe that a child who had been brought up in complete solitude, remote
from all association (which would be a hard experiment to make), would have some sort of speech to express his
ideas. And it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals. . .
. But it is yet to be known what language this child would speak; and what has been said about it by conjecture
has not much appearance of truth."

Beyond the cases of such experiments, there were also the cases of accidental isolation—children lost

in the woods, sailors marooned on islands, children brought up by wolves—as well as the cases of cruel and
sadistic parents who locked up their children, chained them to beds, beat them in closets, tortured them for no
other reason than the compulsions of their own madness. There was the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk
(thought by some to be the model for Robinson Crusoe) who had lived for four years alone on an island off the
coast of Chile and who, according to the ship captain who rescued him in 1708, "had so much forgot his
language for want of use, that we could scarce understand him."

'Less than twenty years later, Peter of Hanover, a wild child of about 14, who had been discovered mute

and naked in a forest outside the German town of Hamelin, was brought to the English court under the special
protection of George I. Both Swift and Defoe were given a chance to see him, and the experience led to Defoe's
1726 pamphlet, Mere Nature Delineated. Peter never learned to speak, however, and several months later was
sent to the country, where he lived to the age of 70, with no interest in sex, money, or other worldly matters.
Then there was the case of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, who was found in 1800. Under the patient and
meticulous care of Dr. Itard, Victor learned some of the rudiments of speech, but he never progressed beyond
the level of a small child. Even better known than Victor was Kaspar Hauser, who appeared one after-noon in
Nuremberg in 1828, dressed in an outlandish costume and barely able to utter an intelligent sound. He was able
to write his name, but in all other respects he behaved like an infant. Adopted by the town and entrusted to the
care of a local teacher, he spent his days sitting on the floor playing with toy horses, eating only bread and water.
Kaspar nevertheless developed. He became an excellent horseman, became obsessively neat, had a passion
for the colors red and white, and by all accounts displayed an extraordinary memory for names and faces. Still,
he preferred to remain indoors, shunned bright light, and, like Peter of Hanover, never showed any interest in sex
and money. As the memory of his past gradually came back to him, he was able to recall how he had spent
many years on the floor of a darkened room, fed by a man who never spoke to him or let himself seen. Not long
after the disclosures, Kaspar was murdered by an unknown man with a dagger in a public park.'

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