A Study in the Acquisition of Language: Free Responses to Commands

Abstract

Empirical investigation of the development of language has usually focused on the child as a speaker, and primarily on his spontaneous verbalizations. From this work, a picture of the successive stages of speech of the English-speaking child begins to emerge. The recent studies of Braine 1963, Miller & Ervin 1964, Brown & Fraser 1964, and Weir 1962 describe the period in which the child begins to put two or three words together under a unified intonation contour that sounds to experimenters (and mothers) like a rudimentary sentence. Roger Brown has coined the term 'telegraphese' to describe this kind of speech, for the child's utterances contain precisely those items we would want to keep if we were paying by the word. The psychologists who have chronicled the development of language to this point have attempted to provide a description of the child's organization of linguistic material by inference from these spontaneous telegraphic utterances. For example, these psychologists reason that even at this very primitive stage of speech, the child's utterances seem to be internally structured. The words in the child's utterances are not haphazardly ordered. Words differ in their positional privileges; i.e., the child who says ball throw does not, in general, alternatively say throw ball. Thus, from the evidence of spontaneous speech alone, psychologists infer that there are already classes of words at this stage, though these classes may differ from those of the mature speaker. It seems clear, however, that the study of spontaneous speech does not provide a sufficient basis for understanding what the child 'knows' about language at various stages of development. There is ample evidence, from three decades of failure by the Bloomfieldian linguists, that a study of spontaneous speech, however objective and comprehensive, forms a poor basis even for the study of adult language. Chomsky 1964 has pointed out that the use of this dubious basis for studying children's language multiplies these difficulties by a rather large factor. Therefore, a study of children's verbalizations may not provide the kinds of information needed in developing a theoretical description of the course and process of language acquisition. Linguistic inquiry has succeeded only when,