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How to Do Things With Words

Attachment--and loss.

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels. Both humans and songbirds learn their complex vocalizations early in life, exhibiting a strong dependence on hearing the adults they will imitate, as well as themselves as they practice, and a waning of this dependence as they mature. Innate predispositions for perceiving and learning the correct sounds exist in both groups, although more evidence of innate descriptions of species-specific signals exists in songbirds, where numerous species of vocal learners have been compared. Humans also share with songbirds an early phase of learning that is primarily perceptual, which then serves to guide later vocal production. Both humans and songbirds have evolved a complex hierarchy of specialized forebrain areas in which motor and auditory centers interact closely, and which control the lower vocal motor areas also found in nonlearners. In both these vocal learners, however, how auditory feedback of self is processed in these brain areas is surprisingly unclear. Finally, humans and songbirds have similar critical periods for vocal learning, with a much greater ability to learn early in life. In both groups, the capacity for late vocal learning may be decreased by the act of learning itself, as well as by biological factors such as the hormones of puberty. Although some features of birdsong and speech are clearly not analogous, such as the capacity of language for meaning, abstraction, and flexible associations, there are striking similarities in how sensory experience is internalized and used to shape vocal outputs, and how learning is enhanced during a critical period of development. Similar neural mechanisms may therefore be involved.

/pdf/birdsong-and-human-speech-common-themes-and-mechanisms-39gg3m47d4.pdf

BIRDSONG AND HUMAN SPEECH: Common Themes and Mechanisms

This study compares lexical development in a sample of 25 simultaneous bilingual and 35 monolingual children for whom semilongitudinal data were collected between the ages of 8 and 30 months. A standardized parent report form, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (1989), was used to assess the children's receptive and productive vocabulary in English and/or Spanish. A methodology was devised to assess the degree of overlap between the bilingual children's lexical knowledge in one language and their knowledge in the other. Using the measures presented here, there was no statistical basis for concluding that the bilingual children were slower to develop early vocabulary than was the monolingual comparison group. The wide range of vocabulary sizes observed at these ages in normally developing children (Fenson et al., 1991) was observed in these bilingual children as well. The close correspondence of the pattern of the bilinguals' growth in two languages at once to monolinguals' growth in one suggests that norms for lexical development in bilinguals should be made with reference to the children's performance in two languages together.

/pdf/lexical-development-in-bilingual-infants-and-toddlers-5e8zqb5tal.pdf

Lexical Development in Bilingual Infants and Toddlers: Comparison to Monolingual Norms

The bilingual child is seen as a unique source of information about the relation between input and intake. The strength of the association between language exposure estimates and vocabulary learning was examined for 25 simultaneous bilingual infants (ages 8 to 30 months) with differing patterns of exposure to the languages being learned. Using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, standardized parent report forms in English and Spanish, the percentage of all words that were known in each language was calculated and then plotted against the estimates of language input (also in percentages). A significant correlation was found, r(25) = .82, p < .001. The correlation was also strong when examined pointby-point, even for children whose language environments changed by more than 2O"7o between observations, although it was not reliable at lower levels of exposure to Spanish. Especially for children with less input in the minority language, the factors which appeared to affect the strength of the association between input and amount learned in a language are discussed.

The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants

Recent studies of vocal development in infants have shed new light on old questions of how the speech capacity is founded and how it may have evolved in the human species. Vocalizations in the very first months of life appear to provide previously unrecognized clues to the earliest steps in the process by which language came to exist and the processes by which communicative disorders arise. Perhaps the most interesting sounds made by infants are the uniquely human 'protophones' (loosely, 'babbling'), the precursors to speech. Kimbrough Oller argues that these are most profitably interpreted in the context of a new infrastructural model of speech. The model details the manner in which well-formed speech units are constructed, and it reveals how infant vocalizations mature through the first months of life by increasingly adhering to the rules of well-formed speech. He lays out many advantages of an infrastructural approach. Infrastructural interpretation illuminates the significance of vocal stages, and highlights clinically significant deviations, such as the previously unnoticed delays in vocal development that occur in deaf infants. An infrastructural approach also specifies potential paths of evolution for vocal communicative systems. Infrastructural properties and principles of potential communicative systems prove to be organized according to a natural logic--some properties and principles naturally presuppose others. Consequently some paths of evolution are likely while others can be ruled out. An infrastructural analysis also provides a stable basis for comparisons across species, comparisons that show how human vocal capabilities outstrip those of their primate relatives even during the first months of human infancy. The Emergence of the Speech Capacity will challenge psychologists, linguists, speech pathologists, and primatologists alike to rethink the ways they categorize and describe communication. Oller's infraphonological model permits provocative reconceptualizations of the ways infant vocalizations progress systematically toward speech, insightful comparisons between speech and the vocal systems of other species, and fruitful speculations about the origins of language.

The emergence of the speech capacity

The traditional belief that audition plays only a minor role in infant vocal development depends upon evidence that deaf infants produce the same kinds of babbling sounds as hearing infants. Evidence in support of this position has been very limited. A more extensive comparison of vocal development in deaf and hearing infants indicates that the traditional belief is in error. Well-formed syllable production is established in the first 10 months of life by hearing infants but not by deaf infants, indicating that audition plays an important role in vocal development. The difference between babbling in the deaf and hearing is apparent if infant vocal sounds are observed from a metaphonological perspective, a view that takes account of the articulatory/acoustic patterns of speech sounds in all mature spoken languages.

The role of audition in infant babbling.

The duration of speech segments as a function of position in utterances (initial, medial, final) was studied. In the first experiment seven English speakers read nonsense utterances of the form “say a [bab], say a [babab], say a [babab],” etc. Spectrograms were used to determine the duration of speech segments in the readings. Final syllables were found to be longer than nonfinal syllables. Final‐syllable vowel increments were approximately 100 msec. Final‐syllable consonant increments were less than vowel increments; for instance, absolute final consonant increments were about 20 msec. Also word‐initial consonants were found to be lengthened by 20–30 msec over medial consonants. Subsequent experimentation demonstrated with English nonsense words that (1) final‐syllable and initial‐consonant lengthening occur in utterances with various intonational patterns (imperative, declarative, interrogative); (2) final‐syllable lengthening occurs in word‐final and phrase‐final positions as well as in utterance‐final position; and (3) final‐syllable and initial‐consonant lengthening occur in various kinds of syllables, including syllables with diphthongs, with fricative consonants, with voiceless stops, with consonant cluster, and with no final consonants (i.e., CV syllables). These studies report durational increments of particularly great magnitude for absolute final fricative consonants. Explanations of the lengthening effects are discussed. One theory suggests that lengthening in certain utterance positions is a learned aspect of language which cues listeners concerning the location of boundaries of words, phrases, or sentences. Explanations based on hypothesized properties of the speech production process are also discussed.

D. Kimbrough Oller

Papers

Lexical Development in Bilingual Infants and Toddlers: Comparison to Monolingual Norms

The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants

The emergence of the speech capacity

The role of audition in infant babbling.

The effect of position in utterance on speech segment duration in English