LIN2601 Guide

© 2015 University of South Africa
Revised edition 2023
All rights reserved
Printed and published by the

University of South Africa,
Muckleneuk, Pretoria
LIN2601/2024–2030
10057293
Shutterstock.com images used
Editor and Styler
HSY_Style
CONTENTS
Orientation and Welcome (iv)

Learning unit 1: Language and the Brain 1
Learning unit 2: Studying Language Acquisition 29
Learning unit 3: The Transition to Speech 58
Learning unit 4: Putting Words Together 81
Learning unit 5: Language Input and Individual Differences 109
Learning unit 6: Language Disability 128
Learning unit 7: The Evolution of Language 169
Reference list 203
LIN2601/2024–2030 (iii)
ORIENTATION AND
WELCOME
Contents
i. Introduction
ii. The purpose of this module
iii. The outcomes of this module
iv. Overview
v. Learning material for this module
vi. The course content
vii. Studying in this module
viii. How do I use this study guide?
ix. Assessment in this module
x. Orientation to using myUnisa
xi. Icons
xii. Conclusion
i. Introduction
Welcome to the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and to this module
on Language acquisition of children. Although we all speak at least one language and
can probably understand more than one, particularly in the multilingual South African
situation, we seldom, if ever, ask any questions about this remarkable ability to master
a language or several languages. However, is it important to ask such questions? For
most speakers of a language such questions will probably only become crucial if we
lose this ability for any reason, or if we have a child with an impaired linguistic ability.
Now, you are not an average speaker of a language in at least one significant respect –
you are a student of linguistics. We therefore presume that you do indeed have certain
questions about this uniquely human ability.
Some of your questions will be addressed in this course but let us know if you have
other questions that you feel are important. Unisa, as a comprehensive open distance
e-learning institution (CODeL), is moving towards becoming an online institution.
You will therefore see that all your learning material, assessments and engagements
with your lecturer and fellow students will take place online. The orientation is
intended to offer you some guidance in this regard. Please read it very carefully.
ii. The purpose and outcomes of this module

The purpose of this module is to explore the nature of first language acquisition, as it
relates to cognitive functioning and the natural environment. Students who complete
this module will understand language acquisition from different theoretical
perspectives and will be able to apply their knowledge of first language acquisition to
(iv)
Orientation and Welcome
interact effectively with children in a way that will facilitate and enrich their linguistic
development. This module provides students with the knowledge and skills to develop
an awareness of linguistic complexities in the acquisition of languages. It will also allow
students to develop an understanding, tolerance and sensitivity for children with
disabilities and the way in which language acquisition differs in these children. This
module would therefore be useful for ECD specialists, language teachers, speech
language therapists and educational psychologists.
iii. The outcomes of the module

The outcomes of this module are to:
● Demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between language and the brain.
● Explore different contexts in which language can be acquired.
● Determine the universal patterns and individual differences in language acquisition.
● Analyse the consequences of non-optimal language acquisition.
● Develop an understanding of language development in children and the evolution
of language in the human species.
iv. Overview
In this orientation, I will give you an overview of and some general information about
this module. I will also tell you more about how you can study in this module, how to
use myUnisa, and about the assessment in the module.
Your study guide and tutorial letters contain everything you need to complete this
module. However, you may benefit from also using the module website on myUnisa.
By using the site, you can:
● Submit assignments (please note: all assignments are to be submitted online as this
module is delivered as a fully online module).
● Access your official learning material.
● Have access to the Unisa Library functions.
● “Chat” to your lecturer or e-tutor and fellow students and participate in online
discussion forums, and
● Obtain access to a variety of learning resources.
Check the site regularly for updates, posted announcements and additional resources
uploaded throughout the semester.
v. Learning material for this module

Your learning material for this module includes:
● Tutorial Letter 101.
● Any other tutorial letters you may receive throughout the year.
● Any additional information provided on your module site on myUnisa.
● Any additional electronic communications you may receive, e. g., announcements
from your lecturer or e-tutor. Tutorial Letter 101 will be part of your study pack or
will be posted to you, but you can also access it on myUnisa. You can do this by
clicking on Official Study Material in the menu on the left of the module portal.
HSY2601 (v)
ORIENTATION AND WELCOME
Tutorial Letter 101 is just one of the tutorial letters you will be receiving during the
year. It is extremely important that you read this tutorial letter carefully. You will
also receive follow-up tutorial letters during the course of the year.
vi. The course content

The course content for this module will be presented in the different units posted
online. We encourage you to read through all the units as well as the additional
resources that are recommended in the units.
vii. Studying in this module

Your learning material for this module consists of this study guide (there is no
prescribed book). Learning units 1-5 should take you 14-20 hours to work through.
Learning units 6 and 7 are longer and more challenging and will probably take 20-30
hours to work through. During the course you will be improving your ability to extract,
interpret and evaluate information, practise your reading and writing skills and train
yourself to think like a linguist!
We believe that the best way of learning is by doing. In other words, applying your
knowledge, developing skills and making connections between what you learn in
textbooks and what you observe around you in your everyday interactions with others.
By doing linguistics you will be able to master the theoretical concepts presented in your
learning material. At the same time, we will also try to get you to think analytically and
critically about language and to express your knowledge and ideas about language in a
scientific way.
Distance learning is not easy, and you should not underestimate the time and effort
involved. Once you have received your learning material, please plan how you will
approach and complete this module.
Your work on each learning unit should involve the following:
● Skim through the unit and draw your own basic mind map of the content of the
learning unit. Then expand this map as your knowledge and understanding of the
unit increases. If you have internet access, you can learn more about making mind
maps on the following web sites:
– http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Mind-Map
– http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/make-mind-map.htm
● Make your own summary of every unit.
● Do a reflection exercise at the end of every unit. The learning units contain some
reflective questions that you should answer.
As you work, build your own study and exam preparation file. This study file will not
be assessed, but it will be an extremely valuable tool for you in completing your
assignments and revising for the examination.
(vi)
What is a study file? A study file is a folder or file in which you gather and compile
additional and/or summarised information during the year as you work through the
learning material.
Your study file should comprise:
● Answers to each activity in each learning unit.
● A mind map/summary of each learning unit.
● Your marked assignments (or a copy you made prior to submitting your
assignment).
● Your reflections on each learning unit.
● Where relevant, any extra reading material taken from the internet, additional books,
medical and/or scientific journals.
● A new vocabulary of words or glossary of new terms in your own words.
Compile and revise the contents of your portfolio to ensure that you achieve the
learning outcomes of this module.
viii. How do I use this study guide?

The study guide is your primary source of information, so always start a learning unit
by reading the first page and the introduction. The first page of every unit is a plan of
what the unit is about and provides important information to guide your reading and
learning.
The outcomes for each learning unit are listed at the beginning of the learning unit.
These are important “signposts” as they point you to important sections of the work
and indicate what is expected of you. Come back to these outcomes after you have
worked through the learning unit, and make sure you have achieved each outcome.
The preview box on the first page of each learning unit gives you a short indication of
what the unit is all about. Read the preview so that you know what to expect and can
start thinking about some of the ideas that you will be reading about. An example of a
preview box is given below:
Preview
In this learning unit, we introduce you to the process of language acquisition – how
children acquire their first language. We look at several reasons why we should study
language acquisition, including the fact that it teaches us what to expect during a
child’s crucial first few years and enables us to interact effectively with young
children and meet their language needs. We also take a look at several different
methods that researchers can use to study children’s language. We find out why the
common beliefs that language is acquired by imitation or that it is taught by parents
are misconceptions that seriously underestimate the complexity of the language
acquisition task. Finally, we include an overview of some of the controversies and
theoretical debates that exist between various researchers and how the focus of
interest in the field of language acquisition research has changed over the last 60
years.
HSY2601 (vii)
After the preview, you will find the main information you need to work through and
tasks that you will need to complete. These tasks give you an opportunity to test
yourself and your understanding of what you have read. Space is provided in the box
for you to write your answers. We suggest that you do these tasks as you come across
them so that you familiarise yourself with one concept before moving on to the next.
In section 1, we will look at three interrelated disciplines that study language and the
brain: linguistics, neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. A brief description of each
discipline will be given and then we will look at how these disciplines are related to
each other.
In section 2, we will briefly examine the structure of the brain in order to better
understand the relationship between language and the brain and see how this
relationship affects language use and language acquisition.
In section 3, we will examine whether specific areas in the brain are involved in
language.
In section 4, we will discuss some of the methods used to investigate the brain, and
specifically those used to investigate language areas in the brain.
In sections 5 and 6, we will take a closer look at Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia and in
section 7 we will summarise this learning unit and see whether we can answer the
questions posed in the preview.
ix. Assessment in this module

Activities in the study guide
We would like to meet you and to be able to talk to you, but we realise that this is
unlikely since you are a distance education student. Most of our communication will
therefore be written communication. If we were in a classroom situation, we would ask
questions to which you would be able to respond immediately. But since we are not in
a face-to-face classroom situation, we have set questions, which we would like you to
answer in writing. These activities require you to give your opinion or to link the
content in the study guide with your everyday life, experiences and prior knowledge.
You have the opportunity to be creative, to do practical work, to offer an opinion and
to say when you do or do not agree. You need to post your responses to these
activities onto myUnisa so that other students can also read your views and start a
discussion if necessary.
Testing yourself
It is of the utmost importance that you test yourself on a regular basis in self-
assessment activities. Although each learning unit is concluded with an exercise which
expects you to reflect on what you have learned and whether you have achieved the
outcomes, it is important that you test yourself by constantly asking, “What do I know
now, that I didn’t know before?” By making mind maps of each of the learning units as
explained in the previous section, you are also testing yourself.
(viii)
Assignments and the exam

Your work in this module will be assessed by the following:
● Two written assignments which will give you admission to the examination and also
count for your year mark.
● One written examination of 3 hours.
Please consult Tutorial Letter 101 for details about the assessment in this module. Be
sure to read the following information in the tutorial letter:
● How your assignment and exam marks will be calculated.
● The due dates and unique numbers of your assignments.
● How you should submit your assignments.
● Examination periods, admission and marks.
Tutorial Letter 101 also contains more information on the assignments.
Remember that while Tutorial Letter 101 will be sent to you, you can also access an
electronic version on myUnisa, by clicking on the option Official Study Material.
x. Orientation to using myUnisa/myModule site

You need to be able to use the various menu options on the myUnisa site. They will
enable you to participate actively in the learning process.
These options include the following:
myUnisa menu option What you will find here

Official Study Material Your study guide and tutorial letters will be stored
under this option, as well as past examination papers.
Announcements From time to time the lecturer or your e-tutor will
use this facility to give you important information
about this module. You should receive e-mail
notifications of new announcements placed on
myUnisa.
Calendar This tool shows important dates, such as examination
dates and deadlines for your assignments. You will
need this information to help you manage your time
and plan your own schedule.
Additional resources The lecturer (or your e-tutor) may use this folder to
provide any additional learning support material that
might help you in your studies for this module. You
will receive an announcement to inform you if
anything was added to this folder.
HSY2601 (ix)
myUnisa menu option What you will find here

Discussions This tool allows us to hold discussions as if we were
in a contact setting. Check your e-tutor site for any
topics that the e-tutor might have posted. You can
also post any specific queries to the lecturer (on the
main module site). There will also be a forum for
students, where you can discuss issues among
yourselves, or just support one another.
Assessment info This tool allows you to submit your assignments
electronically, and to monitor your results. If you can,
please submit your assignments via myUnisa. If you
do not know how to do this, consult Tutorial Letter
101.
In interacting online, always remember to be mindful of and respectful towards your

fellow students and your lecturers. The rules of polite behaviour on the internet are
referred to as netiquette – a term that means “online manners”.
You can access the web sites below to learn more about netiquette.
● http://networketiquette.net/
● http://www.studygs.net/netiquette.htm
● http://www. carnegiecyberacademy. com/facultyPages/communication/netiquette.
html
Please observe the rules of netiquette during your normal, everyday online
communications with colleagues, lecturers and friends. In particular, remember to be
courteous to your fellow students when using the Discussions tool.
xi. Icons
Icon Description
1. Learning Outcomes
2. Academic vocabulary building
�
3. Suggested time allocation
(x)
xii. Conclusion
We hope that the information provided in the orientation will assist you in finding
your way through the course. We encourage you to log on to the LIN2601 myUnisa
page regularly for updates and information. We are also looking forward to engaging
with you on the various platforms created.
We trust that you will enjoy this module and find it stimulating. We wish you all the
best!
HSY2601 (xi)
LEARNING UNIT 1
Language and the Brain
Learningunit1
‘Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.’

Jeffrey Eugenides (American novelist 1960-)
�
Suggested time allocation:
14-20 hours
Contents
Outcomes
1.1 Introduction
1.2 The disciplines that study language and the brain
1.3 The structure of the brain
1.4 Language areas in the brain
1.5 Investigating the brain
1.6 Aphasia studies
1.7 Broca’s aphasia
1.8 Wernicke’s aphasia
1.9 Conclusion
LEARNING OUTCOMES
After you have studied this learning unit you should:
● understand the relationship between the brain and language
● understand the disciplines of linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
● be able to describe the ways in which the relationship between brain and language is investigated
HSY2601 1
LEARNING UNIT 1 LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN
Preview
We often take our ability to use language for granted, but when
we realise how complex language is and how intricate brain
structures are, we are faced with fascinating questions such as:
What is the relationship between brain and language? Which
disciplines study the relationship between language and the
brain? Where in the brain is language located? How do we
investigate the language functions of the brain? In this learning
unit, we will address these questions and explore in some detail
how damage to different parts of the brain results in different
language disorders.
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Have you considered the fact that different disciplines can study
the same phenomena? In this learning unit we are interested in two
phenomena, namely the brain and language. You will discover that
several disciplines study the same phenomena, but from different
perspectives.
1.2 THE DISCIPLINES THAT STUDY LANGUAGE AND

THE BRAIN
For the purposes of this module, however, we will discuss only
three disciplines: linguistics, psycholinguistics and
neurolinguistics. Note, there are many other disciplines that study
these two phenomena, but it would be impossible to discuss them
all in one learning unit. It is, however, important that you are aware
that they exist. These disciplines are psychology, neurology,
cognitive psychology, education, philosophy, computer science and
artificial intelligence, to name but a few.
1.2.1 Linguistics
Phenomena are things or Linguistics studies the structure and function of human language.
events that we observe and Every human being knows at least one language. This knowledge
may want to describe within
a scientific discipline. of language is largely unconscious and consists of knowledge about
(Phenomena is the plural of the sounds, words, sentences, meanings and the appropriate use of
phenomenon.) language. These types of knowledge make up a person’s internal
grammar. Our internal grammar enables us to make intuitive
judgements about our mother tongue. For instance, a mother
tongue speaker of English will intuitively know that Man the kicked
ball the is a ‘bad’ or ungrammatical sentence, while The man kicked
the ball is a grammatical sentence. Linguistics attempts to describe
this intuitive, unconscious knowledge. As we saw in the
introduction, Linguistics has the following five subdomains:
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics (see
2
Language and the Brain Learning unit 1
Introduction for brief descriptions of each subdomain). Each of

these subdomains studies a particular component of a person’s
internal grammar.
1.2.2 Psycholinguistics
Cognition refers to our Cognitive psychology is the overarching discipline that
ability to use our minds for investigates the mental processes and operations that are involved
attention, language,
memory, perception, in cognition. Psycholinguistics overlaps with cognitive science
problem solving, creativity, but has a narrower focus in that it studies only the mental
thinking and knowing. processes and skills involved in language, such as speech
production and comprehension, reading and writing. Within
psycholinguistics there are several branches or subdisciplines, i. e.,
specialised fields that focus on a specific aspect of the mind-
language relationship. The branch of psycholinguistics that is of
interest to us here is developmental psycholinguistics, where
scientists study how children’s early language develops through
various stages as well as the later language developments that occur
during the school years and in adult life. Developmental
psycholinguistics, in particular the study of children’s language
acquisition, will be discussed in learning units 2-5. This branch of
psycholinguistics overlaps with developmental psychology, which
examines the biological, social, emotional and cognitive changes
that occur as children develop into mature adults.
1.2.3 Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the scientific discipline that examines the
relationship between language and the brain. It looks at the
biological basis of language, i.e., which brain mechanisms underlie
our ability to acquire and use language. Neurolinguistics is
therefore the study of how the structure and functioning of the
brain enable us to possess and use language. This discipline
combines neurology (the study of the brain) and linguistics (the
study of language). One specific focus of this discipline is the
relationship between brain damage and speech and language
deficits (see section 4.4 below).
Neurolinguists ask questions such as How does the nervous system
function to produce and understand speech and language?, Where
in the brain are speech and language located?, What happens to
language ability when particular areas of the brain are damaged?
and Are the components of language – phonology, morphology,
syntax, semantics – represented in distinct areas of the brain? We
will be looking briefly at some of these questions in this learning
unit.
HSY2601 3
You will have noticed that both psycholinguistics and

neurolinguistics are interdisciplinary undertakings. By interdisciplinary
study we mean that several disciplines are involved in studying the
same phenomenon or phenomena. Knowledge and methodology
from all the disciplines involved are used to investigate the
relationship between language and the brain. In the case of
neurolinguistics, neurology and linguistics are involved, while in the
case of psycholinguistics psychology and linguistics are involved.
Task 1.1
We have seen that different disciplines can study the same
phenomena. Scientists from other disciplines, such as psychology,
neurology, speech therapy and cognitive science, also study
language and/or the brain, although their focus areas are
somewhat different. Try and match the disciplines on the left-
hand side to their definitions on the right-hand side by drawing
lines from one column to the other.
DISCIPLINES DEFINITIONS
1. Developmental psychology A. is the scientific study of
human language
2. Neurolinguistics B. studies children’s language
as it develops through various
stages
3. Psycholinguistics C. investigates what mental
processes are involved in
cognition
4. Developmental D. is the study of how humans
psycholinguistics grow and change across their
lifespans
5. Linguistics E. examines the relationship
between language and the
mind
6. Cognitive science F. studies the relationship
between language and the
brain
Feedback
The correct matches are: 1 and D, 2 and F, 3 and E, 4 and B, 5 and A, 6
and C.
4
Have you noticed how similar the definitions for psycholinguistics and
neurolinguistics are? Psycholinguistics examines the relationship between
language and the mind. Neurolinguistics examines the relationship between
language and the brain. Note that the only difference between these two
definitions is the last word: ‘mind’ / ‘brain’. Mind and brain are two sides
of the same coin: mind has to do with cognitive functions, whilst brain refers
to the biological structure that makes cognitive functions possible.
1.3 THE STRUCTURE OF THE BRAIN

In this section you will come across some rather daunting
terminology concerning the structure of the brain. However, you
need not memorise all the terms. You should regard this section as
a reference section that you can refer back to when reading the
other learning units. All the important terms that you need to know
and be able to define are in the box on page 1.
The brain has a very complex structure and in the limited time
available to us, we cannot study the brain in a comprehensive or
very detailed way. However, we can gain some basic idea of the
brain structures that affect language. It is important to realise that
we are dealing with different parts of the brain that interact and
communicate with each other, and with different parts of the body.
Let’s start with the most basic unit, the neuron.
Neurons are the brain cells that make up the building blocks of the
nervous system. Neurons are specialised to transmit information.
Every neuron consists of a cell body and at least two extensions
that receive and transmit impulses to other neurons. A neuron can
have connections with many other neurons and can pass on
information to other neurons using electrochemical processes.
Convoluted means highly The brain is made up of white and grey matter, with the grey
folded.
matter on the outside and the white matter on the inside. The grey
matter is also called the cortex. The cortex is a convoluted
structure about 6 mm thick and is packed with approximately ten
billion neurons. The cortex is really ‘the brain of the brain’ – it
integrates all the functions of the nervous system. It is the decision-
making organ of the body because it receives and transmits
messages to and from all the sensory organs and controls all
voluntary actions.
HSY2601 5
Figure 1.1: Cross-section of the brain (Based on Akmajian 1990:444)
The brain has three main parts: the brain stem, the cerebellum and
the cerebrum. The brain stem is the structure at the base of the
brain that controls vital functions such as respiration and heartbeat,
as well as auditory input. In front of the brain stem is the
cerebellum, which regulates and maintains functions such as
balance and coordination of body movements, including those of
the speech organs such as the tongue, lips and vocal cords. The
cerebrum is situated above the much smaller cerebellum and
consists of two asymmetrical halves known as cerebral
hemispheres. These two hemispheres are linked by a bundle of
nerve fibres called the corpus callosum, which acts as a bridge
between the two hemispheres. This is a very important part of the
brain because it allows the two hemispheres to communicate with
each other.
In each of the hemispheres the following four lobes can be
identified:
● the temporal lobe
● the frontal lobe
● the occipital lobe
● the parietal lobe
In the following diagram you will note the position of the different
lobes. The deep cleft separating the temporal and frontal lobes is
known as the Sylvian fissure. It is also important to note the
position of the motor cortex because it is this area that controls
our muscles. In other words, if this area of your brain is injured,
you will not be able to move your body or any body parts such as
the lips, jaw and tongue and you will thus not be able to speak.
6
Figure 1.2: The left hemisphere of the brain (Hudson 2000:152)
An important fact about our brain is that the two hemispheres

control opposite sides of our bodies. This is called contralateral
control, and it means that the left hemisphere controls the right
side of the body, while the right hemisphere controls the left side
of the body. In other words, if you move your right hand the
message was sent by your left hemisphere, and if you move your
left hand the message was sent by your right hemisphere. If
someone suddenly loses the use of their right hand after a brain
injury, we know that a certain area of the person’s left hemisphere
has been damaged.
Task 1.2
Complete the following statements:
1. Neurons are the _____ of the nervous system.
2. Every neuron consists of a _____ and at least two
extensions.
3. The ___________________ consists of two hemispheres.
4. The bridge between the two hemispheres is called the
_____.
5. The grey matter of the brain is also called the _____.
6. The area of the brain that controls muscle movement of the
face, tongue and larynx is the
_____________________________________.
7. Contralateral control means that the _____ and the _____.
Feedback
Neurons are the building block of the nervous system.
Every neuron consists of a cell body and at least two extensions.
HSY2601 7
The cerebrum consists of two hemispheres.

The bridge between the two hemispheres is called the corpus callosum.
The grey matter of the brain is also called the cortex.
The area of the brain that controls muscle movement of the face, tongue and
larynx is the motor cortex.
Contralateral control means that the left hemisphere controls the right side of
the body and the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body.
1.4 LANGUAGE AREAS IN THE BRAIN

In this section, we want to find out which part of the brain (if any)
is most involved in language. Many scientists have tried to find the
exact location of different cognitive functions, including the
language faculty, in the brain. This attempt to localise specific
cognitive functions is known as localisation.
Localisation and lateralisation are two related concepts.
Lateralisation is a process whereby one of the two hemispheres
becomes dominant for certain cognitive functions and becomes
responsible for handedness (left-handedness or right-handedness).
Lateralisation is an important process, because we want to know
whether one hemisphere becomes dominant for language and if so,
whether we can locate particular language areas in that hemisphere.
Task 1.3
Read the following extract from Akmajian et al. (1990:440-41)
and then answer the questions that follow:
For over a century scholars have debated the question of
speech and language localisation within the brain. In the
1860’s, scientists known as localisationists speculated that
the functioning of specific regions in the brain was
responsible for language. Antilocalisationists argued that
speech and language were the consequence of the brain
functioning as a whole.
8
In 1861, Paul Broca, a French surgeon and anatomist,

described to the Société d’Anthropologie in Paris a patient
who in life had had extreme difficulty in producing speech.
Later, at autopsy, the patient was found to have damage in
the posterior inferior part of the frontal lobe in the left
cerebral hemisphere, now known as Broca’s area [see Figure
1.2 above]. With the publication of this report Broca
became the first individual to substantiate the claim that
damage to a specific area of the brain results in a speech
deficit. In 1865, Broca extended his claim about speech
localization by reporting that damage to sites in the left
cerebral hemisphere produced aphasia [an acquired language
disorder], whereas destruction of corresponding sites in the
right hemisphere left linguistic capacities intact.
In 1874, Carl Wernicke, a young German physician,
published a monograph describing patients with speech
comprehension deficits who had damage (lesions) outside
Broca’s area, in the left posterior temporal lobe. Wernicke’s
work strengthened Broca’s claim that left hemispheric
structures are essential for speech and generated intense
interest in the hypothesis that different areas within the left
hemisphere fulfil different linguistic functions.
Today scientists agree that specific neuroanatomic structures,
generally of the left hemisphere, are vital for speech and
language, but debate continues as to which structures are
committed to the various linguistic capacities. For most
individuals the left cerebral hemisphere is dominant for
language, regardless of handedness. Approximately 70
percent of all individuals with damage to the left hemisphere
will experience some type of aphasia, as compared to only 1
percent of these with right hemispheric lesions.
1. What do localisationists claim?
2. What do the antilocalisationists claim?
3. What kind of deficit is caused by damage to Broca’s area?
4. What kind of deficit is caused by damage to Wernicke’s
area?
5. Which hemisphere is vital for speech and language?
HSY2601 9
Feedback
You will have noticed that the localisationists and antilocalisationists hold
opposing views regarding the location of language. The localisationists claim
that language functions are located in specific areas of the brain, while the
antilocalisationists claim that the whole brain is responsible for speech and
language. Both Broca and Wernicke were localisationists. Damage to Broca’s
area results in a speech production deficit. Damage to Wernicke’s area results
in a speech comprehension deficit. We will look at these deficits more closely
in later sections. From the above reading it is clear that the left hemisphere is
the dominant hemisphere for language. Berko Gleason (2005:16) explains
that about 85% of people are right-handed and almost all right-handed
people have their language functions represented in the left hemisphere.
Studies such as those of Knecht et al. (2000) show that about half of left-
handed people also have their language functions lateralised for language in
the left hemisphere. However, as you will discover below, the left hemisphere
cannot function on its own to produce language and speech – the right
hemisphere does play a part. Remember what links the two hemispheres?
The corpus callosum acts as a bridge between the hemispheres and enables
them to communicate with each other.
Something is bilateral when Since the 1990s, it has been recognised that both hemispheres
it involves both sides.
contribute to many aspects of language and the interaction between
hemispheres is now starting to receive more focus. Focus has
therefore shifted to the brain’s integrating (rather than lateralised)
abilities. Research has shown that there are several language
activities (such as reading and speech comprehension) that involve
both hemispheres (Cook 2002, Mundale 2002). Although speech
production is strongly lateralised to the left hemisphere, language
understanding is more of a bilateral activity, with the right
hemisphere contributing through processing intonation, word
connotations, metaphor and humour (Cook 2002:171).
Berko Gleason (2005:16) also reports on gender differences related
to language processing: females have been shown to activate areas
in both hemispheres while processing speech sounds, whereas males
use a much more restricted section of the left hemisphere. It is also
important to realise that there is considerable variability in the way
different individuals represent language in their brains. This is
partly due to the fact that our brains are plastic, which means that
the brain can change over the course of our lives. The brain can
reorganise its neural pathways and make new connections between
neurons as we age, as we learn new things or in response to a brain
injury in which certain brain functions are lost.
In the following section we will look at some of the techniques that
can be used for studying language and the brain.
10
1.5 INVESTIGATING THE BRAIN

There are various ways in which we can investigate the brain. One
way would be to ‘open up’ someone’s brain while they are alive. (It
would be impossible to see how language functions in a corpse.)
However, to open up someone’s brain when they’re alive and
healthy is risky and highly unethical! Therefore, scientists have
devised different methods of studying brain functions without
harming the subjects. There are at least four ways in which we can
study brain function and hemispheric dominance. These include
sodium amytal tests, dichotic listening tests, brain-imaging
techniques and aphasia studies. Each of these will be discussed in a
sub-section below.
1.5.1 Sodium amytal test

In order to determine which hemisphere is dominant for language,
a test called the sodium amytal test is used on some patients
before brain surgery. Performing the sodium amytal test before
brain surgery allows doctors to mimic the effect that the surgery
might have (Troster & Parsons 2006:500). An anaesthetic, sodium
amytal, is injected into one of the two carotid arteries in the neck.
Carotid arteries supply the brain with blood. The left carotid artery
leads to the left hemisphere, and the right carotid artery leads to
the right hemisphere.
Obler and Gjerlow (1999:28-29) explain that ‘if the drug is
delivered to the language side of the brain, a temporary paralysis of
language function is experienced. The patient cannot speak at all
for several minutes and in the minutes after that, language sounds
aphasic.’ They also claim that the results of this test show that 95%
of right-handers and 70% of left-handers experience temporary
paralysis of language function when the anaesthetic is injected into
the left carotid artery leading to the left hemisphere. This indicates
that language is located in the left hemisphere for all these people.
1.5.2 Dichotic listening tests

A dichotic listening test is a way of determining which of the two
hemispheres is dominant for language. Hudson (2000:155)
describes the test as follows:
In dichotic listening, subjects listen to a two-track stereo
recording, one track per ear, of a random list of syllables,
numbers, or words, hearing different signals on each track, so
that different syllables, numbers, or words, are heard
simultaneously in the two ears. For most subjects, dichotic
listening of such pairs reveals a right ear advantage: the signal
heard in the right ear tends to be recalled. Right-handers have
HSY2601 11
shown about 80% left-dominance for language in dichotic

listening.
These results of the dichotic listening tests can be explained as
follows: the fact that the signals heard by the right ear are
remembered more often means that the left hemisphere is the one
processing the signal. You will recall that contralateral control
means that the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body,
and the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body. If the
signals received in the right ear are processed better, we can assume
that the left hemisphere is doing the processing, i. e., it is the
language-dominant hemisphere.
Hudson (2000:157) claims that ‘dichotic listening in children shows
that hemisphere dominance for language is typically well
established by about five years of age’. This tells us something
about lateralisation. You will recall from section 2.3 above that
lateralisation entails a process whereby one of the two hemispheres
becomes dominant for language and handedness. If Hudson’s claim
is correct, we can assume that lateralisation has taken place by the
age of 5 years.
1.5.3 Brain-imaging techniques

Since the 1970s, technological innovations in medicine have
enabled us to display images of the live brain. These have provided
important new and detailed information about brain function.
Brain-imaging techniques are an ideal way of investigating
structure-function relationships within the brain as studies can be
performed on normal subjects as well as brain-damaged patients
and the techniques can explore activated regions across the whole
brain during the performance of language-related tasks (Scott &
Wise 2003:9).
PET-scans (positron emission tomography) are a kind of X-ray of
the brain, allowing us to observe how areas of the brain operate. At
the start of a scan, a harmless radioactive molecule is injected into
the blood. The subject lies on a table with their head in the scanner.
As Obler and Gjerlow (1999:9-10) explain:
In this sophisticated form of dynamic ‘X-ray’, a picture of the
subject’s brain can be seen on a computer screen. Different
areas of the brain appear to light up while a healthy person is
undertaking certain language tasks whereas others light up
less or not at all, depending on the amount of activity in a
given brain area.
An fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) is a non-
invasive way of obtaining images of the brain (or other tissues) by
12
observing how magnetic fields pass through it. In an fMRI

experiment the subject’s whole body is inserted into a scanner and
changes in the blood flow in the brain are measured. Blood oxygen
level is assumed to be related to brain activity, and comparisons can
therefore be made between fluid patterns as the subject engages in
various language-related tasks. This technique is allowing gradually
more detailed information to emerge about exactly which areas of
the brain relate to which aspects of language processing.
Figure 1.3: fMRIs of language tasks

(http://cmudesignfiction.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/image011.gif)
Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) are another non-invasive way

of measuring what happens in the brain during language processing
in babies, children or adults. These use a cap fitted with electrodes
to record voltage fluctuations on the surface of the scalp in
response to an external stimulus such as listening to words or
sounds (Rispens & Krikhaar 2010). ERPs reflect how long (in
milliseconds) it takes us to process a stimulus, and whether the
stimulus is expected or unexpected. For example, the technique can
be used to measure the response to possible and implausible
sentences, with ERP measurements getting stronger as sentences
become less and less plausible, as in the three sentences below
(Rispens & Krikhaar 2010:100):
1. The pizza was too hot to eat. (no negative deflection)
2. The pizza was too hot to drink. (weak negative deflection)
3. The pizza was too hot to read. (strong negative deflection)
HSY2601 13
Some other examples in Shona are:

1. Nyama yaipisisa kuti idyike. (The meat was too hot to eat) (no
negative deflection)
2. Nyama yaipisisa kuti inwike. (The meat was too hot to drink)
(weak negative defection
3. Nyama yaipisisa kuti iravike. (The meat was too hot to read)
(strong negative deflection)
1.6 APHASIA STUDIES

Aphasia can be defined as a language impairment resulting from a
brain lesion caused by a stroke, a tumour, an infection or a head
injury. There are many people who suffer some form of damage to
the left side of their brain and due to this injury lose part of their
ability to use or understand speech. In fact, aphasia affects about 1
in 250 people (Mirman et al. 2015). Most commonly this damage is
caused by a stroke – a blood clot prevents blood from flowing into
a certain area of the brain which then swells up and disrupts the
functioning of the surrounding areas of the brain. Stroke patients
show fairly serious symptoms during the first few days, but typically
show some improvement due to the recovery of areas surrounding
the affected area.
By studying language in people with aphasia, we can try to improve
our clinical understanding of aphasia and get new insights into the
various language centres in the brain. The areas that have been
identified so far are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. However,
before we look at different types of aphasia in more detail, let’s find
out more about writing paragraphs in linguistics.
Writing a paragraph
In this course you will not be expected to write essays, but you
will be expected to write a coherent paragraph (10-20 lines) in
which you describe a process, present an argument, discuss a
theoretical viewpoint, etc. Writing paragraphs is an important
skill that you will need in assignments and the exam. Some
suggestions are given for you below:
Read the question carefully. This is absolutely vital, and requires
you to do two things:
● Identify the topic of the question (the content that you will
have to discuss). Ask yourself what is the question about?
Which section of the work does it relate to?
14
● Identify the instructional keywords in your question (discuss,

describe, explain, etc.) Ask yourself how should my answer be
presented? If you are unsure of the meaning of the
instructional keyword, look it up in a dictionary to make sure
that you know what is expected of you. For example, discuss
means talk about the topic and define the important concepts
and ideas.
Plan your paragraph:

● List the main ideas you will mention and decide in which
order these should come. Make sure these ideas relate directly
to the question.
Write your paragraph:

● In a way a paragraph is like a miniature essay – the first
sentence is the introduction or topic sentence that
introduces the issues you will be discussing.
● Write a continuous text, not a list of points.
● Make sure you include definitions of all key terms and that
you spell them correctly.
● Make sure your ideas follow logically and that you use
linking words like and, however, in contrast, etc. appropriately to
indicate the structure of your argument.
● Be concise and stick to the topic – there is no space to
include irrelevant information in a paragraph.
● Don’t copy word-for-word from your learning material. Use
your own words to explain and summarise.
● Include examples to support the points you make. You will
get more marks for including original examples from your
own language (with glosses) than from simply repeating
examples in the learning material.
Reread your paragraph to see that it answers the question
directly and that it follows all the guidelines above.
Task 1.4 a)
The author of the following paragraph has not followed the
guidelines above. Read the paragraph critically, and comment on
the structure of the paragraph and the writing style:
Question:
Write a paragraph in which you summarise the ways in which the
brain can be investigated.
HSY2601 15
Answer:
1. The sodium amytal test is used on some patients before the
brain surgery. This test is done to determine which
hemisphere is dominant for language in patients who must
undergo brain surgery. The left carotid artery leads to the
left hemisphere, and the right carotid artery leads to the
right hemisphere.
2. Dichotic listening test is another way of determining which
of the two hemispheres is dominant for language in other
words which hemisphere contains the language centre. The
fact that the signals heard by the right ear are remembered
more often means that the left hemisphere is the one
processing the signal.
3. Aphasias is a language disorder that follows a brain lesion
caused by a stroke, a tumour, an infection or a head injury.
This damage is caused by a blood clot that prevents blood
from flowing into a certain area of the brain.
b) Feedback
● There is no introductory sentence that overviews the whole paragraph.
Instead, the writer jumps straight into the content.
● There is repetition – the writer tells us twice that the sodium amytal test
is used on patients before brain surgery.
● Irrelevant information is included. The sentence about the carotid arteries
does not relate to the topic – ways of investigating the brain.
● Important information is omitted. There is no mention of brain-imaging
techniques.
● There are three paragraphs instead of one. Make sure that your text
runs on as one coherent whole.
● Terms are spelled incorrectly – the word dichotic should have an h in it.
● There are some grammatical errors such as ‘Aphasias is ....’ (You will
not be penalised if your English is not perfect, as long as your language is
clear and comprehensible.)
● The section on aphasia does not explain how the study of aphasia can tell
us more about the brain (i.e., it does not relate directly back to the
question). It is important to add that by studying the language of patients
with damage to different areas of the brain, we can identify the specific
functions of these areas with respect to language.
16
Here is a better answer to the same question:

There are four ways in which we can investigate brain function and
hemispheric dominance. The first way is through a sodium amytal test
which temporarily paralyses one hemisphere of the brain and can tell us
whether language is located in the left or right hemisphere for a
particular patient. Dichotic listening tests are another way of
determining which of the two hemispheres is dominant for language. In
dichotic listening, subjects listen to a two-track stereo recording, so that
different syllables, numbers, or words, are heard in each ear
simultaneously. For most subjects, the signal heard in the right ear
tends to be recalled, showing that the left hemisphere is the one
processing the signal. Thirdly, sophisticated brain-imaging techniques
like positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) and ERPs (Event-Related Potentials) can
provide visual images of the brain and brain activity during language
use. The fourth method is to study the language of aphasic patients, i.e.,
patients who have a brain lesion resulting from a stroke, a tumour, a
gunshot wound, or an infection. By studying the different kinds of
language problems experienced by patients with different damaged
brain areas, we can find out the functions of various areas of the brain
such as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area.
1.7 BROCA’S APHASIA

There are a few observations we can make about Broca’s area of
the brain that seem to indicate that it is associated with speech:
a) It is an area of the brain that is underdeveloped at birth and
only reaches full development when the child is about four
years old.
b) It is an area of the brain that developed relatively late in the
evolution of man.
c) It is an area of the brain that is underdeveloped in the brains
of higher primates such as chimpanzees.
1.7.1 Characteristics of Broca’s aphasia

Look at the following example of an utterance produced by a
Broca’s aphasic (from Goodglass 1976). What do you notice about
this person’s use of language?
My uh mother died ...uh ...me ...fi’teen. Uh, oh, I guess six month ...
my mother pass away. An’ uh ... an’en ... uh ... seventeen ...seventeen ...
go ... uh high school. An uh ... Christmas ... well, uh, I uh ... Pitt’burg.
If you have internet access, watch the YouTube video entitled
Broca aphasia on
HSY2601 17
https://youtu. be/gocIUW3E-go in which a patient attempts to

describe what is happening in the ‘cookie-theft’ picture below:
Figure 1.4: The ‘cookie-theft’ picture
You should have noticed that Broca’s aphasics talk slowly and with
some difficulty as if they have trouble finding the correct words.
Severe cases of Broca’s aphasia show a great reduction in the flow
of their speech. Most Broca’s aphasics do not make use of
intonation patterns or stress patterns and their speech is therefore
rather monotonous.
Also note that in this type of aphasia there are many words missing,
including many of the verbs. The speech of Broca’s aphasics also
tends to lack function words, including articles (e.g., this, that, the,
a), prepositions, pronouns, auxiliaries, conjunctions, plural markers
and the possessive -s. These kinds of elements serve a grammatical
function and are characterised by their low semantic content (e. g.,
what does the mean?). Due to the loss of these grammatical words
and morphemes this type of aphasic speech is also referred to as
agrammatism, a term meaning ‘without grammar’. The loss of
articles and other function words makes their speech seem like a
telegram. However, the basic structure of the sentence is usually
preserved, and with a bit of practice a listener can learn to add in
the missing words when conversing with a Broca patient. Menn et
al. (1989:168) quote an example from a patient who begins the red
18
Riding Hood story as follows: Red Riding Hood. Pretty girl. Mother,
grandmother stick, uh wolf, um eat, um grandmother, uh wolves, wolf eat
grandmothers. How would you express the same message?
Mild forms of Broca’s aphasia consist only of the loss of the
ability to embed sentences. An embedded sentence is a sentence
that is included in another, for example in the sentence The man that
kicked the dog came to my house, the main sentence is The man came to my
house and the embedded sentence is (the man) kicked the dog). A
Broca’s aphasic might produce utterances such as The man is my boss
and the man brought me to the hospital instead of The man who brought me
to the hospital is my boss. Instead of embedding the sentence The man
brought me to the hospital into the first sentence (The man is my boss),
the patient simply joins the two sentences with the conjunction and.
The lack of embedded sentences and the excessive use of the word
and to link sentences is typical of Broca aphasics’ speech.
Damage to Broca’s area seems to result mainly in problems with
the production of speech, including reading out loud. They typically
read slowly and with many hesitations and have particular difficulty
reading grammatical elements such as prepositions and articles. In
some cases, they are unable to read these words – i. e., they will
either pretend that the articles are not printed or, when forced to
comment on the articles, they will say something like One of those
little words again! Menn et al. (1989:162-163) give the following
example of an agrammatic Broca patient reading aloud (the actual
text is given above, and the patient’s read-aloud version is below it):
I baked a basket of goodies. I want you to take them to your
grandmother’s house because she is sick in bed… At last she got to her
grandmother’s house. She knocked at the door, but there was no answer,
so she walked into the house, and there she found someone. (actual text)
I baked the basket of goodies. I want to y’ [long pause] to take them to
her your granma house because he, she is sick in bed... At last he, she
got to her gramma, granma house. She knocked at the door, but they
was no uh answer, so uh she walked, walked in, she walked in the door,
and they here she found sometimes someone. (patient’s version)
So far we’ve looked at English, but similar types of errors occur in
the speech of Broca aphasics who speak other languages. For
example, a Dutch patient describing the cookie-theft picture gave
the following explanation, lacking articles and pronouns and
joining sentences with and to avoid embedding:
En krukje bijna omgevallen. En binnen in pakt iets, koekjes of zo.
‘And [the] stool almost fell over. And inside in [the cupboard]
[he] takes something, cookies or something.
(Menn et al. 1989:271)
HSY2601 19
English and Dutch are not morphologically rich languages, so

function words are separate words that are often just omitted.
What happens in morphologically rich languages such as the
African languages? Let’s look at what happens when an isiZulu-
speaker or isiNdebele-speaker suffers from Broca’s aphasia. Our
model predicts that he or she will lose the grammatical morphemes
in his or her language. In isiZulu and isiNdebele each noun is
marked by a class prefix, and we can regard these prefixes as
serving a grammatical function not unlike articles in English. Traill
(1970) found that in the speech of an isiNdebele-speaking patient
with Broca’s aphasia the noun class prefixes either disappeared or
they were incorrectly used.
Thus, a Ndebele patient said (the class prefixes are in bold):
ntwana inye
instead of:
umtwana munye(‘the child is one’).
In milder cases of Broca’s aphasia where patients still have some
speech left, they are able to compensate for some of their problems
in the following ways:
1. Using a series of simple sentences joined with and to
compensate for the loss of sentence embedding.
2. Using direct quotations since indirect speech requires the use
of embedded sentences. For example, in a story-completion
test, patients were asked to complete the following sentence:
The children were being too noisy and mother was annoyed, so she told ...
(them to be quiet). Because agrammatic patients cannot use
embedded sentences, they use direct quotations: The mother
told them: ‘Little kids, be quiet man!’
3. Stringing nouns together in the same sequence that they
would be if there were verbs and hoping that the listener can
add in the missing verbs.
4. Using gestures to compensate for their lack of language.
1.7.2 Summary
We have seen that when Broca’s area of the brain is damaged, the
patient experiences syntactic problems and produces a form of
language in which most of the function words are absent. This
characteristic of this type of aphasic speech has earned it the label
agrammatism. Broca’s aphasics also tend to lose the ability to
embed sentences. Broca’s aphasics also experience phonological
problems – they lose the intonation and stress patterns in their
speech.
20
Task 1.5
The following statements are incorrect. Use the spaces between
statements to write the correct versions of the statements.
1. Broca’s area lies in the temporal lobe of the right
hemisphere.
2. All Broca’s aphasics have problems reading aloud.
3. Sentence embedding entails two sentences linked by the
word and.
4. Broca’s aphasia is characterised only by the loss of articles.
5. Function words are words like nouns and verbs.
6. Broca’s aphasics use direct quotations because they can use
embedded clauses.
7. Broca’s aphasics do not use gestures.
8. Agrammatism means the overuse of function words that
serve a grammatical function.
9. Broca’s aphasics compensate for the loss of nouns by
stringing verbs together.
Feedback
Broca’s area lies in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. Only some Broca’s
aphasics have problems reading aloud. Sentence embedding does not entail
two sentences linked by the word ‘and’. Sentence embedding entails one
sentence ‘embracing’ another sentence, e.g., in ‘The girl who cries is her sister’
the sentence ‘The girl is her sister’ embraces the sentence ‘who cries’. Broca’s
aphasia is characterised by the loss of grammatical elements, the loss of
intonation and stress patterns and an inability to use embedded sentences.
Function words are not content words like nouns and verbs, but are articles,
prepositions, pronouns, auxiliaries and conjunctions. Broca’s aphasics use
direct quotations because they cannot use embedded clauses. Broca’s aphasics
do use gestures to compensate for their lack of language. Agrammatism
means the loss of the function words that serve a grammatical function.
Broca’s aphasics compensate for the loss of verbs by stringing nouns together.
1.8 WERNICKE’S APHASIA

In this section we will analyse the type of speech that is produced
when the area of the brain known as Wernicke’s area is damaged.
Wernicke’s area lies at the upper back part of the temporal lobe.
There are a few observations we can make about this part of the
brain that seem to indicate that it must be associated with speech:
1. This is an area of the brain in which sensory data, particularly
auditory data (such as speech sounds) are processed.
2. It is also an area of the brain that developed relatively late in
the evolution of humans.
HSY2601 21
3. This area is also underdeveloped in the brains of higher

primates.
Since Wernicke’s area lies so close to the sensory area of the brain (i.
e., the part of the brain that assimilates and interprets stimuli that
the body receives from the outside world) one would expect
language comprehension problems to occur in these patients.
1.8.1 Characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia

Look at the following utterance produced by a Wernicke’s aphasic
and see if you can identify some of the characteristics of this type
of aphasia:
He wife saw the wonting to wofin to a house with the umbledor. Then he
left the wonding then he too to the womin and to the umbella upstairs...
(Goodglass and Kaplan 1972: 59)
Or watch a YouTube clip of a patient with Wernicke’s aphasia on
https://youtu.be/dKTdMV6cOZw
In severe cases of Wernicke’s aphasia like this it is impossible to
understand what the patient is saying because of the meaningless
words that occur in the utterance. Although Wernicke’s aphasics
speak fluently and with well-preserved rhythm and intonation, it is
very difficult to understand what they are saying, and they often do
not seem to understand what others are saying to them. Whereas
Broca’s area is associated with syntactic and phonological language
abilities such as intonation, embedding, function words and
difficulty accessing verbs, Wernicke’s area seems to be associated
with the semantic and phonological components of language. Most
of these patients are not able to hear that they are making mistakes.
The following characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia can be
identified:
As you saw in the examples above, Wernicke’s aphasics tend to use
formal, technical terms and ‘made-up’ or nonsensical words, also
called neologisms. These (new) combinations of speech sounds
tend to follow the phonological rules of the patient’s (original)
language. Because of the high incidence of formal, scientific jargon
in their speech as well as the frequent occurrence of non-existent
words or neologisms (such as wofin), this type of aphasia is also
known as jargon aphasia. Weinstein et al. (1972:96) describe the
jargon as consisting of mispronounced words, neologisms, and
standard English words put together in meaningless sequence. As
pointed out above, patients seem unaware that they are using these
strange words. In fact, the more jargon a patient uses, the less it
seems to worry them. The jargon occurs in the writing of some
patients while other patients write the word correctly but then read
22
it as a jargon word. It is as if words have lost their meaning to these

patients.
Weinstein et al. (1972:99-100) give a very good example of jargon
aphasia – the patient, an American army sergeant, had a car
accident in Germany (the neologisms have been underlined):
Doctor: What is your main trouble?

Patient: Just my arms and my one leg. It has been ripped open and it’s
getting pretty good now.
Doctor: How did it come about?
Patient: They sent me back, sir, on my one arm. I had one arm here in
Koreejit and this one here on for a corgent. They took part of
that on the way back in (motioning to his cast) and my
rove was renetted up and we got a crane secker that’s where I
got my injury in my head and my base. Both of my eyes were
blacked and this lady that brought me back took it out. She
was a captain, a nurse.
Note that the initial part of the patient’s sentences seem

grammatical, while the neologisms tend to appear later in the
sentence. A similar pattern can be seen in our first example: the
noun phrases are always well structured and the first part of the
sentence (up to the verb), seems correct. The neologisms tend to
occur after the verb. This seems to be a typical structure found in
the language of many jargon aphasics – the relatively well-formed
sentence structure contrasts sharply with the meaningless lexical
material.
He wife saw the wonting to wofin to a house with the umbledor. Then he
left the wonding then he too to the womin and to the umbella upstairs...
(Goodglass & Kaplan 1972: 59).
Wernicke’s aphasics also tend to use indefinites such as thing, one, it,
person, something, anything, sometime, etc. The high incidence of these
words (that have very little meaning of their own) contributes to
the difficulty that the listener has in trying to understand the speech
of these patients. Notice the use of indefinites such as here, this one,
that, it in the patient’s utterances in the example above. Interpreting
the patient’s utterances is extremely difficult as there is generally no
preceding noun to which these words refer. Since Wernicke’s
aphasics are usually not aware of their errors, they do not attempt
to compensate for the shortcomings in their speech.
HSY2601 23
1.8.2 Summary
Wernicke’s area seems to be involved in the semantic integration of
speech, and damage to this area of the brain leads to speech that is
fluent and well-structured but often incomprehensible due to the
number of neologisms and indefinites it contains. Patients are
typically unaware of the mistakes they are making.
This suggests that semantic information on the meaning of words
and syntactic information on how to combine them into sentences
are stored in different places in the brain. We also get the
impression that the meaning of a word and the phonological
information on how to pronounce the word are not stored in the
same place in the brain. It seems that the Broca area stores
knowledge on how to structure simple sentences and that the
Wernicke area links concepts to words. Thus, in a Wernicke’s
aphasic a concept is incorrectly linked to various strings of sounds
(resulting in neologisms), which are then syntactically organised by
the (intact) Broca’s area.
In a recent study that continues the localisationist tradition,
Mirman et al. (2015) examined fMRI data from 99 people who had
persistent language impairments after a left-hemisphere stroke.
They found further evidence that damage to different areas of the
brain resulted in different types of language problems: damage
above the Sylvian fissure was linked with phonological problems
with speech production (like saying ‘girappe’ for ‘giraffe’), while
damage below the Sylvian fissure caused phonological problems
with speech recognition (like an inability to distinguish /b/ from
/d/). As expected, semantic production errors (like saying ‘zebra’
instead of ‘giraffe’) were linked to lesions around Wernicke’s area,
while difficulty recognising the semantic relationship between
concepts (such as matching words to pictures) was associated with
damage to an area deep in the frontal lobe known as a ‘white
matter bottleneck’. The white matter bottleneck is a point of
convergence among multiple pathways in the brain, where a small
amount of damage can have serious effects on semantic processing,
both visual and verbal. Mirman et al. (2015:5) conclude that
production and comprehension, as well as semantic and
phonological processing all occur in separate parts of the brain.
Task 1.6
Complete the following statements:
1. Wernicke’s area lies at the _____ part of the lobe.
2. Wernicke’s area is associated with the _____ component
and the _____ component of the grammar.
24
3. Wernicke’s aphasia is characterised by fluent but _____

speech.
4. Wernicke’s aphasics tend to use _____ such as thing, anytime
and something.
5. Jargon can be described as consisting of _____ and
standard English words put together in _____.
6. Neologisms tend to occur after the _____.
7. Wernicke’s aphasics do not attempt to compensate for their
mistakes, because they _____.
8. It is as if words have lost their _____ to Wernicke’s aphasics.
9. Wernicke’s aphasia indicates that information on the _____
of words and the information on how to _____ are stored
in different places in the brain.
10. In Wernicke’s aphasia thoughts are linked to strings of
sounds.
Feedback
Wernicke’s area lies at the upper back part of the temporal lobe. Wernicke’s
area is associated with the semantic component and the phonological
component of the grammar. Wernicke’s aphasia is characterised by fluent but
incomprehensible speech. Wernicke’s aphasics tend to use indefinites such as
‘thing’, ‘anytime’ and ‘something’. Jargon can be described as consisting of
mispronounced words, neologisms and standard English words put together
in meaningless sequence. Neologisms tend to occur after the verb. Wernicke’s
aphasics do not attempt to compensate for their mistakes, because they are
usually not aware of their errors. It is as if words have lost their meaning to
Wernicke’s aphasics. Wernicke’s aphasia indicates that information on the
meaning of words and the information on how to combine them into sentences
are stored in different places in the brain. In Wernicke’s aphasia thoughts
are incorrectly linked to strings of sounds.
HSY2601 25
Task 1.7
Summarise your understanding of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia
by completing the following table:
Type of Location in Characteris- Linguistic
aphasia the brain tics component
and (s) affected
alternative
name
Broca’s 1.
aphasia/ 2.
Agramma-
tism 3.
4.
Wernicke’s Wernicke’s 1. Fluent Semantic and
aphasia/ area, temporal 2. phonological
lobe of the left components
hemisphere 3.
Use the information above to help you identify the type of

aphasia in each of the following examples and justify your answer.
1. Pinker (1995:47) cites an example of a man who suffered a
stroke at age 39:
‘Why, yes ... Thursday , er, er, er, no, er, Friday ... Bar-ba-ra ... wife ..
and, oh, car ... drive ... purnpike ... you know ... rest and ... TV’
2. ‘Boy, I’m sweating, I’m awful nervous, you know, once in a while I get
caught up, I can’t mention the tarripoi, a month ago, quite a little, I’ve
done a lot well, I impose a lot, while, on the other hand, you know
what I mean, I have to run around, look it over, trebbin and all that
stuff.’ (Pinker 1995:310)
3. Examiner: Tell me about how you got sick, what it was like.
Patient: It was, it was uh, we’ [well] I had a stroke an’ uh, it’s uh,
um, when I woke up it wa [was], I didn’ know my name, anything
like that. An’ uh I can’t, I can’t speak, my right side was blunt, lump
[limp?] an’ I was crying uh any, anything. (Menn et al. 1989:154)
4. Patient describing the ‘cookie-theft’ picture (See figure 1.4

above)
‘I can’t see well enough but I believe that either she or will have some
food that’s not good for you and she’s to get some for her, too ... and
that you get it there because they shouldn’t go up there and get it unless
you tell them that they could have it.’ (Pinker 1995:312)
26
Feedback
The table you completed should have the following information:
Broca’s aphasia/agrammatism is characterised by: 1. Slow, hesitant speech, 2.
the loss of the ability to embed sentences, 3. the loss of function words and 4.
the loss of intonation and stress patterns. Broca’s area is located in the
frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. The linguistic components associated with
this area are the syntactic and phonological components.
Wernicke’s aphasia/jargon aphasia is characterised by: 1. fluency, 2. the use
of jargon and 3. the use of indefinites. Wernicke’s area is located in the
temporal lobe of the left hemisphere. The linguistic components that are
associated with this area are the semantic and phonological components.
1. This is an example of Broca’s aphasia, because of the lack of articles,
some missing verbs and the fact that it is not fluent.
2. This is an example of Wernicke’s aphasia, because of the fluency, the
use of the neologisms ‘tarripoi’ and ‘trebbin’ and the indefinite ‘all that
stuff ’.
3. This is an example of Broca’s aphasia, because of the lack of fluency,
hesitations and difficulty finding words. The patient uses ‘an’ (‘and’)
frequently because he cannot use embedded sentences.
4. This is an example of Wernicke’s aphasia, because of the fluency and
the use of indefinites like ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘some’, ‘it’ and ‘there’.
Academic vocabulary building

Learning a few Latin and Greek prefixes will help you work out the
meaning of many technical terms. Here are some useful ones that we
came across in this learning unit:
uni- or mono- means ‘one’ as in words like monolingual, universal
di- or bi- means ‘two’ as in words like bicycle, bilingual, dichotic listening
tri- means ‘three’ as in words like tricycle, triangle, triad, triplet, etc.
hemi- means ‘half’ as in words like hemisphere (half a sphere)
a- means ‘without’ or ‘lacking’ as in words like agrammatism (lacking

grammar) and asymmetry (lacking symmetry)
Use your knowledge of prefixes to work out the answers to these

questions:
1. How many legs does a tripod have? _____________________
2. How many languages does a bilingual speak?
____________________
3. In a dichotic listening test sounds are presented to ____________
ears simultaneously.
HSY2601 27
4. If -phasia is the Greek word for speech, then an aphasic person is a

person ____________ speech, i.e., who has suffered a loss of lan-
guage abilities.
5. When a voice is described as monotonous it has only ___________
tone or pitch.
You should also know the following position words:
posterior – the back part, behind
anterior – the front part, in front
inferior – the bottom or lower part
superior – the top or higher part
1.9 CONCLUSION
You will remember the questions we posed in the preview were:
What is the relationship between the brain and language? Which
disciplines study the relationship between the brain and language?
Where in the brain is language located? and How do we investigate
language functions in the brain?
We now know that language functions are located primarily in the
left hemisphere and that disciplines such as linguistics,
neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics are involved in studying the
relationship between language and the brain. Furthermore, we have
seen that there are various methods of studying language-related
brain functions, namely, by studying people who are aphasic or by
using procedures such as sodium amytal tests, dichotic listening
tests and the various brain-imaging scans.
You will also be aware of some of the debates in neurolinguistics.
You will recall that early scientists claimed that language abilities
were localised in the left hemisphere while others viewed language
as an activity that involved the whole brain. There is still general
agreement that Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are the most
important centres for language, but as technology has become
increasingly sophisticated and precise, it is becoming clear that
multiple different areas of both hemispheres of the brain are
involved in an interconnected way when we speak, listen, read and
write.
In the following units, you will need your knowledge of brain
structures in order to better understand language acquisition, when
things go wrong in the brain and how the human brain evolved.
28
LEARNING UNIT 2
Studying Language Acquisition
Learningunit2
‘Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.’
Abbé Dimnet (French priest and writer of Art of Thinking, 1866-1954)
�
14-18 hours
Contents
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Why we study language acquisition
2.2.1 How we study language acquisition
2.3 Issues in language acquisition research
2.4 Dominant theories in developmental psycholinguistics
2.5 Nativism
2.6 Overview of 70 years of language acquisition research
2.7 Conclusion
LEARNING OUTCOMES
After you have studied this learning unit you should be able to:
● understand the study of language acquisition in children
● discuss various tools and methods used to carry out research in language acquisition
● determine the relationship between observations, explanations and theories
● understand the theories and controversial areas of debate in the field of language acquisition
research
HSY2601 29
LEARNING UNIT 2 STUDYING LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Preview
In this learning unit, we introduce you to the process of language
acquisition – how children acquire their first language. We look at
several reasons why we should study language acquisition and
take a look at several different methods that researchers can use
to study children’s language. We find out why the common
beliefs that language is acquired by imitation or that it is taught
by parents are misconceptions that seriously underestimate the
complexity of the language acquisition task. Finally, we include an
overview of some of the controversies and theoretical debates
that exist among various researchers and at how the focus of
interest has changed over the last 70 years in the field of language
acquisition research.
2.1 INTRODUCTION
Learning to speak our mother tongues is an amazing intellectual
achievement. It is one of the most difficult tasks that humans are
faced with, and yet children learn to speak a language during the
first few years of life. The question of how this happens is a
problem that has always fascinated not only linguists, but also
parents, psychologists, philosophers and educators. Try answering
these questions to see how much you know about children’s
language learning.
Do children need to be taught language?
........................................................
At approximately what age do children start to use recognisable
words?
........................................................
Do adults and children learn language in the same way?
........................................................
Here are the answers to the test-yourself questions: Children do
not require any explicit teaching, but simply seem to pick up
language quickly and effortlessly from hearing it spoken around
them and participating in conversational interaction with others.
On average, first words emerge when children are about a year old,
although this differs from child to child. Children seem to be better
equipped for picking up languages than adults, as you will know if
you have experienced the hard work, slow progress and
frustrations of learning a new language in later life. But adults have
an advantage over children in that they have more advanced
30
Studying Language Acquisition Learning unit 2
academic abilities and better concentration spans. Because the

process of language learning differs markedly between adults and
children, linguists use two different terms. The unconscious and
informal process by which a child learns language in the preschool
years is known as language acquisition. Linguists use the term
language learning to refer to the more conscious or formal
learning process that takes place when people learn a second (or
additional) language after puberty. At primary school level, children
learn through a combination of conscious and unconscious
processes, in other words partly through language acquisition and
partly through language learning.
The focus in this learning unit will be on why language acquisition is
important, what it can tell us about the human mind, and how we
study this topic. If you are interested in second language learning
you should consider taking the 3rd year module on ‘Learning and
teaching an additional language’ (LIN3703).
The scientific study of how children learn language in the
preschool years falls into the area of study known as
psycholinguistics. Although people have always been interested in
the miraculous way in which children’s language unfolds, it was
only during the 1950s that psycholinguistics became a recognised
field of study. As you learnt in learning unit 1, psycholinguistics
uses theories and research methods from both linguistics (the study
of language) and psychology (the study of the mind) in order to
explore the mental processes that are involved in using language
and in learning to speak. The particular area of psycholinguistics
that we focus on in this course is known as developmental
psycholinguistics as it deals with the ways that children’s knowledge
of language develops over time.
Many of you will have some idea of the various linguistic stages
through which children progress from general knowledge or from
your own experience with younger brothers and sisters. Some of
you may have observed the development of your own children, or
the pupils that you teach, while others may have taken previous
psychology or linguistics modules such as LIN1502. This
knowledge will assist you in making sense of the course and getting
the most out of it. However, since many of you may not have spent
lengthy periods of time with young children, this course doesn’t
assume any prior knowledge about language acquisition. All the
various terms and concepts you need to know will be explained as
you come across them.
HSY2601 31
2.2 WHY WE STUDY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Why is it important to study children’s language development?
Firstly, knowledge of the way in which children acquire language is
important for anyone involved in the care and education of
children. It provides greater insight into the way the child develops
and enables parents, caretakers and teachers to provide the rich
speech environment children need to develop to their full potential.
Secondly, as students and academics, we take an interest in the
world around us and are continually questioning why and how
things happen. Instead of simply taking things for granted, we
consider it a challenge to gain a greater understanding of a
phenomenon that forms such an important part of human life.
Thirdly, the more we know about language development, the better
we will be at recognising and addressing a variety of educational
problems such as delayed language development. Finally,
researchers interested in artificial intelligence (programming
computers to ‘understand’ and generate language) can learn a lot
from studying children’s language acquisition. As Bloom (1993:6)
puts it: ‘Computer scientists interested in language might study
children for the same reason that Leonardo da Vinci, who was
interested in building a flying machine, chose to study birds.’ Once
we know enough about children’s language to make valid
statements and come to valid conclusions, these conclusions can be
related to real-world issues. Our knowledge of the process of child
language acquisition can therefore help us come up with
meaningful solutions to language problems.
2.2.1 How we study language acquisition

How exactly does one go about investigating how children acquire
language? For the same reasons we saw earlier, one cannot open up
their heads to see what is happening inside, nor can we simply ask
young children to answer questions about their language use. It’s
important to notice that adult language can be investigated in
several ways that are not open to child language researchers. For
example, I could find out about your language competence by
asking you whether you consider various sentences to be
grammatical or not, or by asking you to provide sentences in your
language which demonstrate a particular grammatical construction
like the past tense rule. Children do not have the specialised
vocabulary or sophisticated knowledge of how language works
(known as metalinguistic awareness) that is necessary to understand
and answer these questions. Instead of simply asking children what
they know, we have to be more indirect in our investigations, and
work out what they know by looking closely at what they say. Most
of what we know about language acquisition comes from studying
32
what children actually say, i. e., from collecting and analysing the
utterances children produce.
According to Foster-Cohen (1999:1-2)
An utterance is any sound, Perhaps the most hotly debated topic in child language
word or sentence that research today concerns how children’s mental and physical
someone produces.
capabilities help them learn languages, and what they know in
those months and years before their talk is recognisable.
There are those who believe that children ‘know’ a great deal
about language – much more than might at first appear from
what they say (or are able to say). There are others, however,
who believe that children know very little about language,
and must work it all out from hearing (or seeing, in the case
of sign languages) the language of others and from their own
attempts to use language.
The reason why we can’t decide what infants know or don’t
know is that we cannot observe their language directly. We
can’t get inside children’s heads but have to use more or less
subtle methods of observation and experimentation that we
hope will give us the clues we need. However, children’s
behaviour, even in response to the most controlled
experiment, is often ambiguous and could be interpreted in
more than one way. And they certainly can’t sit down and tell
us any of what they know, until they are at least three or so.
In fact, even then, they can only tell us what is available to
conscious reflection. Most of what anyone, child or adult,
‘knows’ about language is not directly accessible, and must be
probed in ways only slightly less direct than with small
children.
2.2.1.1 Ethical aspects of research in language acquisition

Ethics are moral principles An important point to bear in mind when undertaking research is
or rules about what is right the question of ethics. Crystal (1997:230) tells the story of the
and wrong.
Mogul Emperor of India, Akbar the Great (1542-1605), who
undertook an experiment to find out whether children who were
isolated from human contact would learn language. He built a
mansion where newborn babies were kept in isolated captivity, with
nurses who were instructed not to utter a word in the children’s
presence. After some years he visited the house to find out the
results of his experiment. No speech or even cries were heard in
the house – despite the fact that the children were already four
years old.
The ethical problem with this kind of research is obvious – no-one
has the right to deliberately deprive others of their human rights,
such as the right to liberty and the right to grow up in a family or
HSY2601 33
society that encourages communication. Although this kind of

experiment would never be allowed to happen nowadays,
researchers still have to consider ethical questions. To give one
example, making recordings of people’s speech using a hidden
microphone that they know nothing about is also viewed by many
as ethically questionable, as people have the right to know when
their conversations are being recorded and for what purpose the
recordings will be used.
2.2.1.2 Research methods and research design

One of the first tasks a language acquisition researcher faces is to
decide on a research question. For example, a researcher might
decide that they want to try and find out the answer to the
following question: At approximately what age do children start to
ask questions? When scholars undertake research they do not do so
with a blank mind. Instead, they will usually formulate a
hypothesis, which is an educated guess at what the answer to the
question might be or how/when something happens. The
hypothesis is then tested to find out whether it was correct or
incorrect. In our example, the researcher might hypothesise that
children’s first questions emerge at about 18 months.
In order to answer the research question and find out whether the
hypothesis was right or wrong, he or she has to collect data
(examples of children’s language). Any researcher must decide on
the methodology he or she will use in the study. To a large extent,
the aims of the study will determine the methodology used.
Methodology basically refers to the way in which the study is
carried out, for example, how many children are included in the
study, how the children are selected, how long the study will last,
how data will be collected, what kind of recording equipment will
be used, etc. While researchers formerly used notebooks to write
down children’s utterances, a more accurate, objective and up-to-
date recording method is to use a smartphone or video camera to
record children’s utterances. Of course, anyone who has spent time
with young children will know that they seldom sit still for long,
and that recording sustained sections of speech is very difficult
when the subjects keep disappearing out of range of the recording
equipment!
The next stage involves making a transcription of the data. A
transcription is a written version of the spoken data, and often
contains detailed additional information such as the context within
which the utterance occurred, the pronunciation used, the pauses
within and between utterances, etc., whether words were
whispered/shouted/inaudible on the tape, etc. Take a look at the
34
following sample transcription (based on Berko Gleason &

Bernstein Ratner 1998:352):
Participants: CHI Adami Child, MOT Nan Mother
Age of child: 4;3
Date: 10-APR-1991
Coder: Rachel Brown
CHI: toys
CHI: af ’er (2) my book.
CHI: dis is not my book
MOT: this is not your book?
CHI: you’re just saying it
MOT: Well, these are the pictures of our trip to Disney
World.
CHI: i want two Aprils in my ( )
You will see that the participants in the conversation are listed at
the top of the page in abbreviations so that the transcription
doesn’t have to include the full name for each utterance. In this
case the participants are the child and the mother. Information is
provided on the age of the child, date on which the recording was
made and who transcribed the information from the tape. Notice
that there is very little punctuation as punctuation is associated
with written language rather than spoken language. Punctuation is
used occasionally where it is clearly audible, e.g., the question mark
indicates the rising intonation associated with a question. The
English spelling is modified so as to provide information about the
pronunciation used by the child. If a researcher wants to be even
more precise about transcribing the exact sounds used by the child,
he or she can use the International Phonetic Alphabet, which
assigns a separate symbol to all the speech sounds in human
language. The (2) in the child’s second utterance indicates a 2-
second pause at that point. At the end of the transcription, you will
notice an empty set of brackets. These indicate that the child’s
utterance was unclear. Transcriptions also often include
information about which words are stressed (e.g., by writing these
in capital letters), and about non-verbal responses such as laughter.
As Wardhaugh (1992:152) points out, ‘The conclusions you draw
about the behaviour of any group are only as good as the sample
on which you base your conclusions’. In this case, the sample is the
number of children that the researcher investigates. The larger the
sample, i.e., the more children used in the study, the more valid the
results are likely to be. The children who are studied are known as
subjects. In order to come up with valid generalisations about
language acquisition, researchers also need to ensure that their
sample includes a wide range of different subjects – girls, boys,
HSY2601 35
urban and rural children, children from differing language groups,

cultures and social classes, etc.
A database contains An important development in the study of language acquisition was
information stored in an
the setting up of a large, computerised database known as
organised form on
computer. CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) by
psycholinguists Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow in the
1980s. This database is growing all the time and contains
transcriptions from thousands of research projects in many
different languages, including Afrikaans and Sesotho. This resource
allows researchers to study large amounts of data without having to
collect it themselves. The CHILDES database can be found on the
internet at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu
2.2.1.3 Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies

Research into children’s language can be undertaken in different
ways, depending on the aims and the time available. The earliest
studies of children’s language were diary records of the language
development of an individual child, usually kept by the parents.
Charles Darwin, for example, kept detailed notes on his son’s
language development. From about the 1960s researchers began to
collect tape-recorded data on children’s language. One of the first
major studies was that of Roger Brown at Harvard University, who
recorded the language development of three children (Adam, Eve
and Sarah) every month for several years and transcribed the
recordings for researchers to study.
Longitudinal studies involve a detailed record of the utterances of
a particular child or children. By continuing to collect data from the
same children over a period of months or even years, researchers
develop a good idea of how their language changes and develops
over time. Longitudinal studies thus come back to the same group
of children at a later period or periods. Because longitudinal studies
are so time-consuming, they are also expensive and can only study
a limited number of individual children.
Longitudinal studies are necessary to answer certain kinds of
questions, such as those that deal with the effects of
children’s early linguistic environment on their later
acquisition of language. For instance, a longitudinal design
was used to show that infants whose mothers spoke to them
frequently and in short sentences at 9 months (time 1)
performed better on tests of language comprehension at 18
months (time 2) than did infants of less talkative mothers
(Murray, Johnson, & Peters, 1990).
(Berko Gleason & Bernstein Ratner 1998:353)
36
Cross-sectional studies, on the other hand, look at the language of

at least two groups of subjects at one particular point in time. An
example of a cross-sectional study is one which aims to find out
how the questions produced by 2-year-olds and 3-year-olds differ.
By comparing two groups of children (2-year-olds and 3-year-olds)
we would be able to see whether we could make any generalisations
about the kinds of questions they produce at each age. Cross-
sectional studies enable researchers to obtain a great deal of data in
a short time, rather than over months or years. Studying many
subjects also makes it more likely that study results can be
generalised.
Task 2.1
Match each statement below with a type of research design
(longitudinal or cross-sectional).
1. This kind of study is often completed in a short period of
time.
2. Brown’s study of Adam, Eve and Sarah.
3. This kind of study compares children of different age
groups on a particular language task at a particular point in
time.
4. This kind of study looks at the language of the same
children at various different points in time.
5. Parent diaries are an example of this kind of study.
Feedback
1. A cross-sectional study is often completed in a short period of time.
2. Brown’s study of Adam, Eve and Sarah is a longitudinal study as it
traces the language ability of a small group of children over a long
period of time.
3. A cross-sectional study compares children of different age groups on a
particular language task at a particular point in time.
4. A longitudinal study looks at the language of the same children at
various different points in time.
5. Parent diaries are an example of a longitudinal study.
Task 2.2
If you wanted to carry out the following research, would you
choose a longitudinal or cross-sectional research design?
1. Aim: To find out how many new words a particular child
learns to use between age 2 and 3.
2. Aim: To find out whether bilingual children have bigger/
smaller vocabularies than monolinguals of the same age.
3. Aim: To find out whether children who talk early also learn
to read early.
HSY2601 37
Feedback
1. To find out how many new words a particular child learns to use in a
year, we would have to use a longitudinal study.
2. To find out whether bilingual children have bigger/smaller
vocabularies than monolinguals of the same age you would need a
cross-sectional study. A group of monolingual children would have to
be observed and their vocabularies compared with a group of bilingual
children at the same developmental stage.
3. To find out whether children who talk early also learn to read early, we
would need a longitudinal study as we are studying the same group of
children at two different points in time, namely at age 1-2 when they
learn to talk, and at ages 5-8 when they learn to read.
Interestingly, one of the oldest methods of studying child language

is making a come-back, namely the parent report. While parents are
certainly not as objective as researchers should ideally be, they are
ideally placed to engage in detailed long-term data collection. Dale
and Goodman (2005:42) believe that ‘one of the most striking
developments in the study of child language, and indeed
developmental psychology more generally, over the past 20 years is
the revival of the parent report as a trustworthy, and trusted,
research technique’.
The type of parent report most often used in recent research
follows a set format and is known as the MacArthur-Bates
Communicative Development Inventories or MCDI (Fenson et al
2007). There are two forms of MCDI, one for itemising the words
and gestures of children aged 8-16 months and the other for the
words and sentences of children aged 16-30 months. In the 8–16-
month MCDI, parents complete a checklist of 396 words and 63
gestures, indicating for each item if the child understands the word/
gesture or if the child understands and uses that word/gesture. In the
case of the 16– 30-month MCDI, there are 680 words in the
checklist, and a grammatical component in which parents look at
sentence pairs like kitty sleep and kitty sleeping and indicate which one
is closest to their children’s own language use.
The MCDI can be used cross-sectionally to compare large samples
in order to identify commonalities and individual differences. It can
also be used longitudinally, for example as a monthly report used to
trace developing vocabulary and syntax. The MCDI has also
proved to be a good predictor of children’s later development. For
example, children with language delay (MCDI scores in the lowest
10 per cent) at 24 months generally continue to experience
difficulties at age 4, though a few children overcome their slow
starts and catch up to normal children (Dale & Goodman 2005:50).
38
2.2.1.4 Observational and experimental studies

An observation is a piece of Naturalistic observational studies focus on collecting children’s
information obtained by
spontaneous speech. Researchers can learn a lot from recording
studying or watching
something children’s utterances in natural everyday situations. However,
people tend to talk in a different way when they are being recorded,
and researchers are thus faced with the ‘observer’s paradox’ – they
have to try and observe people’s normal behaviour, but simply by
being there as an observer they are altering the ‘normal’ situation.
Even though the speech behaviour collected in these circumstances
can never be truly natural, the researcher has to make every effort
to be unobtrusive and not to interfere with the child’s natural
everyday use of language. A child that feels uncomfortable, shy or
threatened will probably talk very little, while the microphone can
also be distracting. One solution is to help the children get used to
the recording equipment for a few sessions before recording
actually begins. Other techniques may be to keep the video
recorder in the corner of the room or out of sight, or to provide a
topic or toy that the child is very interested in, as people tend to be
less self-conscious and talk more when they are excited.
Let’s see how Katherine Demuth tried to ensure that she did not
affect the Sesotho children’s natural use of language during her
research:
After having visited the children’s homes a number of times,
becoming familiar with the household routine and giving the
children an opportunity to get to know me, audio recording
was commenced. I would check with the mother about her
next day’s activities and then visit with tape recorder, pen and
notebook. I generally sat off to the side while children
interacted with members of the family or with playmates ...
Questions directed to me by a third party or by the child were
answered, while initiation on my part was practically nil.
Task 2.3
Read 2.2.1.4 and identify three ways in which Demuth tried to
minimise her influence on the children’s language:
Feedback
Demuth made sure the children knew her and were familiar with her, she sat
off to the side, so she did not intrude too much on the conversation, and she
did not initiate (start) any conversation. Demuth (no date :10-11) states
‘While my influence on the children’s verbal and social interaction must be
taken into account, it was a least minimized by being familiar to the family
and the children and by playing a background rather than a major
participant role in the interaction which took place.’
HSY2601 39
Another problem with naturalistic observation is that often there

are certain types of sentences or grammatical structures that don’t
appear in the data a researcher has collected. For example, a child
may have uttered many questions starting with the words What and
Why, but no questions starting with the word How. In cases like this,
it is difficult to know whether the child has not yet learnt this
particular form, or whether it is simply accidental that the data
didn’t include an example of this form.
In order to address this problem, semi-structured elicitation can
be a useful way of getting children to say things and use
grammatical forms that would be infrequent in naturalistic
conversation. Elicitation means ‘to draw out’ language data by
asking specific questions or providing specific tasks. The researcher
plays a game, watches a silent movie or looks at an object together
with the child in an effort to encourage speech production, while
still keeping the situation as natural as possible. For example,
researchers in many countries have used the wordless ‘frog story’
picture book entitled ‘Frog, where are you?’ as a tool for eliciting
narrative descriptions (Berman & Slobin 1994). The first three
pictures in this story are shown in figure 2.1 below:
Figure 2.1: The ‘Frog story’
Another way of supplementing naturalistic data is to undertake

experimental research. Experimental research is basically a
controlled way of collecting information about specific aspects of
language, and usually involves researchers asking children to
perform specific activities in a laboratory setting. The technique of
elicitation is frequently used in language acquisition experiments.
For example, children may be asked to complete a word or phrase
to see whether or not they can use a particular grammatical
structure. A famous example of this kind of study is Jean Berko
Gleason’s ‘wug test’, designed to test how children used English
plural forms (Berko 1958). Researchers taught children several
nonsense words by showing them pictures of non-existent
creatures and repeating the name, e. g. This is a wug. Children’s
knowledge of the plural form was then tested by asking them to
complete a phrase like ‘This picture shows two ____’.
40
Figure 2.2: Sample picture from the ‘wug-test’ (Berko 1958)
Another way of testing children’s knowledge of grammatical forms

is to ask them to repeat various sentences. It has been found that
children cannot repeat complex sentences that are above their level
of language development, i. e., sentences that they could not have
produced themselves at that stage. Thus, a child who has not yet
learnt the plural form would hear the phrase two potatoes but would
say two potato. (You would experience a similar thing yourself if you
tried to repeat a sentence in a language you did not know!)
Children’s understanding of various sentences, e. g., passive
constructions such as The boy was hit by the girl, can be tested by
asking them to act out sentences using puppets or other toys, or to
point out the correct one of a series of pictures.
Children’s errors are also an extremely important source of
information on the language acquisition process. Linguistic errors
can tell us a lot about the child’s grammar and the hypotheses he or
she is making about language structure. When faced with children’s
errors, psycholinguists typically ask themselves the following
questions: Do children learning language X typically make this kind
of error? Why do children make this error? How long do errors of
this kind persist? When do they disappear from the child’s speech?
Note that children do not make errors in all areas of language –
some parts of grammar seem to be more susceptible to errors than
others. For example, many children have trouble acquiring the past-
tense form, but hardly ever make errors in acquiring the word
order rules of their language (Bloom 1993:32).
Experimental testing procedures can even be used on babies as
young as 6 months. For example, the headturn preference
procedure, developed in 1985, is used to test differentiation of
grammatical as opposed to ungrammatical forms or familiar as
opposed to unfamiliar forms (Johnson & Zamuner 2010). Two
different sound files are played to the baby while it sits on the
caregiver’s lap and the researcher measures how long the baby
HSY2601 41
focuses on each sound before looking away. Babies typically listen

for longer periods to stimuli that are grammatical or familiar than
stimuli which are ungrammatical or unfamiliar. Since babies have
short attention spans, the entire test seldom lasts more than 5
minutes.
2.3 ISSUES IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION RESEARCH

As with any subject which is not yet fully understood, many
different theories relating to language acquisition have emerged
over the last 50 years or so. The ultimate aim of any theory of
language acquisition is to account for children’s language at any
point in their development (i. e., to explain why they say certain
things and make certain errors) and to explain the processes
responsible for the gradual increase in language competence (i.e., to
explain how children eventually end up speaking like adults). If the
average person in the street were asked how children acquire
language, they would probably reply that their parents teach them
the language or that they learn it by imitation. Common knowledge
about language acquisition is thus based on two viewpoints:
Parents teach their children language.
Children acquire language by imitating the language of their
parents.
Do you agree with the statements above? What are your own ideas
on the subject?
........................................................
........................................................
........................................................
We will look at possible answers to these questions in a minute, but
let’s reflect first on the differences between opinions, theories and
facts. You should be aware that theories are not factual, they are
basically different people’s informed opinions about how language
acquisition works. The opinions you gave above wouldn’t be
considered theories as you probably don’t know enough about the
subject to give an informed opinion based on extensive
observation of the facts. Theories use facts (data) to support their
arguments, but different theorists undertake different kinds of
research and interpret the research findings in different ways.
Theories may differ quite widely and give rise to lively and
sometimes heated debate between psycholinguists. In your reading,
you need to be able to identify when the author is giving you facts
and when the author is describing how various theories interpret
these facts. Look out for phrases like According to X, X claims that ...,
42
In X’s view ..., as these indicate that we are talking about a particular
theoretical point of view rather than a fact.
2.3.1 Focus of research in language acquisition

Most of what we know about language acquisition comes from
studying what children actually say, i.e., from their output, and to a
lesser extent from looking at the speech addressed to children
during their interactions with other people, i. e., the input that
children hear. After decades of intensive research psycholinguists
now have a fairly comprehensive picture of the course of language
development, especially of English since this is the most intensively
studied language in the world. This means that we have a fairly
clear picture of the various stages that children go through, the
types of words they learn first and the types of mistakes they make.
However, despite the accumulation of a fairly detailed corpus of
data on language development, we still don’t really know how it
happens. The mechanisms that produce these accomplishments are
still being debated and are not yet well understood.
It is important to bear in mind that observations or data relating to
children’s language are not self-explanatory, i.e., they do not ‘speak
for themselves’. They have to be interpreted, and as you well know,
the same set of data can be interpreted in different ways. Take for
example, the following developmental observation:
When children enter the one-word stage shortly after their
first birthday, they initially produce a few words only. At
about the age of 18 months, they suddenly seem to undergo a
vocabulary spurt, after which they start learning and
producing new words at quite a remarkable rate.
This observation is informative because it tells us something about
the way in which the child’s language is progressing, but it doesn’t
tell us why progress suddenly speeds up, i.e., it is a description not
an explanation. This observation must be interpreted (i. e.,
explained), and interpretations may involve speculation about
factors that are not observable or testable. The vocabulary spurt
itself is testable – we can observe other children who are about the
same age, and we will find a similar marked increase in the
children’s output. However, we do not know what is happening
inside the child’s head in terms of cognitive development or
language development. We still don’t really know how it happens.
The mechanisms that produce these accomplishments are still
being debated and are not yet well understood.
It is important to bear in mind that observations or data relating to
children’s language are not self-explanatory, i.e., they do not ‘speak
for themselves’. They have to be interpreted, and as you know, the
HSY2601 43
same set of data can be interpreted in different ways. Take for

example, the following developmental observation:
When children enter the one-word stage shortly after their
first birthday, they initially produce a few words only. At
about the age of 18 months, they suddenly seem to undergo a
vocabulary spurt, after which they start learning and
producing new words at quite a remarkable rate.
This observation is informative because it tells us something about
the way in which the child’s language is progressing, but it doesn’t
tell us why progress suddenly speeds up, i.e., it is a description not an
explanation. This observation must be interpreted (i. e., explained),
and interpretations may involve speculation about factors that are
not observable or testable. The vocabulary spurt itself is testable –
we can observe other children who are about the same age, and we
will find a similar marked increase in the children’s output.
However, we do not know what is happening inside the child’s
head in terms of cognitive development or mental processes,
because these factors are not observable.
You postulate that One explanation for this vocabulary spurt is that the child reaches a
something is true when you crucial stage of development at which she/he realises
assume it.
(unconsciously) that sounds can be used to represent concepts or
Empirical means based on things in the world. Once they make this discovery, they
practical experience rather purposefully start naming or labelling objects and events they
than theory.
encounter in their environment. Now this is not an observation (i.e.,
a ‘fact’), it is an explanation. This explanation postulates that there
are unobservable forces underlying the vocabulary spurt (such as
the discovery that words can represent concepts). This explanation
is a hypothesis or informed scientific guess rather than a
description of observable factors. A hypothesis (being a guess) can
be wrong. Not all psycholinguists accept the explanation given
above and other explanations have been put forward to account for
the same observation, i. e., different interpretations of this
observation or different theoretical viewpoints have been proposed.
A theory is therefore not part of the phenomenon being studied; it
is an explanation of (aspects of) that phenomenon. A theory is thus
not a truth, nor is it an observation or empirical ‘fact’; it is simply
one explanation (among many others) of a particular phenomenon.
Observations and theories are obviously intimately interrelated:
data are continuously used to support or falsify theories, to test
their validity, while theories are continuously being formulated and
modified to interpret and explain data.
Contrasting viewpoints in child language research are often
formulated as questions, e. g., Do parents teach their children
language, or does language simply unfold according to a genetic
44
programme? Many of these questions are still unanswered, and

different theories emphasise different answers to each question. In
many cases the most realistic answer lies somewhere in between the
two options. In the following section we look at some of these
questions or debates in more detail.
The word nurture means to One of the major tasks in psycholinguistics is to find out how
look after a growing child.
much of our language ability is innate or inborn and how much is
shaped by environmental factors such as the conditions or
surroundings in which we grow up. This question is known as the
nature-nurture debate. In order to understand what language is,
how it works, and how young children can acquire such a complex
system, we need to try and sort out how language relates to factors
internal to us (our minds) and external to us (our environment).
Most researchers nowadays agree that both innate and
environmental factors play a role in language development but
argue as to which is the more important of the two. Some scholars
believe that internal or innate factors – the nature factors – are the
most dominant factors in this relationship, while others believe that
external or environmental factors – the nurture factors – are
dominant.
2.4 DOMINANT THEORIES IN DEVELOPMENTAL

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
The nature-nurture debate is part of a larger, longstanding
philosophical debate about how knowledge is acquired. The
argument basically hinges on the part played in this process by the
mind and human reasoning ability on one hand and human senses
and experiences on the other. Those who emphasise the role of
reason are known as rationalists, while those who emphasise the
role of experiences and information obtained through our senses
are known as empiricists (remember that something is empirical
when it is based on practical experience rather than theory). Early
empiricists believed that the mind of a newborn baby is like a blank
slate (tabula rasa is the Latin term) until his or her experiences of
the world leave their imprint upon it. Rationalists disagree with this
view, believing that the mind of a newborn already has a particular
structure that imposes constraints on the way in which knowledge,
including language, is acquired.
Another fundamental difference is that empiricists undertake active
research to find out more about children’s language and use only
observable and measurable data in their explanations. Rationalists,
on the other hand, do not mind using evidence that is not directly
observable, e.g., making claims about the structure of the mind and
mental processes. The rationalist approach relies more on
HSY2601 45
theoretical deductions and assumptions about what children know,

rather than on actual empirical research. The rationalist approach
believes that although young children produce very limited
utterances, they have a complex system of abstract language
knowledge. This is known as the competence-performance
distinction. Competence is basically the abstract linguistic
knowledge stored in our brains. Performance involves putting that
knowledge into practice by actually speaking or using language, and
may be less than perfect due to factors like lack of concentration,
slips of the tongue, a bad cold, etc. Researchers in the empiricist
tradition are interested only in performance and refuse to deal with
such non-observable and non-measurable concepts as
‘competence’.
2.4.1 Behaviourism
This debate between rationalism and empiricism has played a very
important part in the history of psycholinguistics. One version of
empiricism that dominated psychology and linguistics from the
1930s to the 1960s is known as behaviourism. Behaviourists
believed that internal mechanisms (like the language acquisition
process) cannot be studied except through their observable outputs.
The most famous behaviourist in linguistics was BF Skinner.
Skinner published a book in 1957 entitled Verbal Behavior, which
claimed that speech was a learned behaviour that develops through
imitating and interacting with others. He claimed that children
acquire language as a result of parents reinforcing and shaping
children’s utterances – in the same way as laboratory rats can be
trained to run through a maze. Behaviourists believed that parents
and caretakers teach children language through negative and
positive reinforcement, demonstrating language use, correcting
errors and offering them opportunities to practise their new skills.
2.5 NATIVISM
At the other end of the spectrum are the researchers who take a
rationalist view and emphasise the nature factors in the acquisition
of language knowledge. This view is known as nativism. Some of
the evidence that has been put forward to support the nativist
viewpoint includes the following:
● All children acquire the language to which they are exposed,
which means that a child has the potential to acquire any
language.
● Children acquire language at a time when they are intellectually
immature and most other intellectual tasks are beyond them.
● Children acquire language fairly effortlessly and in a short
period of time. This contrasts strikingly with adult learners, who
46
need to make a conscious effort over several years in order to

become proficient in a new language.
● All children go through the same stages of development within
the first 12-18 months, irrespective of what language they are
learning.
● Children acquire language without being explicitly taught.
● All children achieve basic linguistic competence at
approximately the same age (6 or 7).
● Children continually come up with new words and sentences
that they have never heard before.
From the observations above it is evident that nature (internal
factors) plays an important role in language acquisition. It seems
fairly clear that children have some kind of natural capacity to
acquire language. No one tells a baby when and how to sit up,
crawl and walk; similarly, no one tells a young child when and how
to talk, yet children all over the world successfully learn that behind
the directly observable stream of speech sounds they hear around
them there is an underlying system or set of patterns that
determines how these speech sounds combine into words and how
words combine into phrases and sentences. This suggests that the
nativists are correct, and that the ability to learn language is an
innate or inborn human ability in the same way as learning to walk.
The most important researcher in the nativist tradition is the

American linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was born in 1928 and
is one of the most important men in the field of linguistics. His
radical and often controversial ideas have revolutionised linguistics
and have had an important influence on other fields including
philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence. In 1959 Chomsky
wrote an extremely critical review of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior,
suggesting that behaviourist theory focused too much on the role
Noam Chomsky of parents and caretakers, rather than on the child’s innate language
knowledge. This review marked a turning point in language
acquisition research, and a shift away from behaviourism as a
convincing theory of language acquisition. Since 1960 almost all
theories of language acquisition have assumed at least some degree
of innate linguistic knowledge. As we have mentioned, extreme
versions of nativism or empiricism are seldom found in current
theories of language acquisition. Researchers now agree that
language acquisition is determined both by a child’s innate
capacities and his or her linguistic experiences, although they
typically stress one factor at the expense of the other.
HSY2601 47
Some of Chomsky’s arguments against behaviourism are

summarised below:
Chomsky argued convincingly against imitation as a language
acquisition strategy, showing that if language were learned in
this way, it would place a large burden on memory, since
every utterance would have to be stored separately in the
memory (rather than simply storing one rule for constructing
all similar sentences). Secondly, if language were learned by
imitation, children would not be able to use language
creatively to say and understand new things not heard before.
As we know, children often produce utterances that never
occur in adult speech. Consider the child who looked out of
the window at night and said All gone outside. Bye bye outside.
He/she must obviously have heard the words all, gone, outside
and bye bye, but he was unlikely to ever have heard an adult
utter these words in the order in which he uttered them.
These utterances cannot be considered to be imitated
language, nor is it likely that his parents taught him sentences
like these.
A third piece of evidence against imitation is the fact that children
seem unable to imitate adult utterances that are too complex for
their current level of development. Crystal (1997:236) cites the
following example:
Child: Nobody don’t like me.

Mother: No, say ‘Nobody likes me’.
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
(Eight repetitions of this dialogue)
Mother: No, now listen carefully: say ‘Nobody likes me’.
Child: Oh! Nobody don’t likes me.
These observations suggest that imitation cannot explain all the

facts of child language development. In fact, imitation operates
only on a very simplistic level (such as learning words and certain
basic fixed phrases).
Chomsky also criticised the behaviourist view that parents teach
their children language. It is true that parents spend a lot of time
teaching children the names of things (Look, here’s a cat ... this is a
kitty-cat, and here’s a doggie is not an uncommon form of conversation
with a two-year-old!) and they provide the child with formulaic
politeness phrases like Say ‘Thank you for the present, Granny’. In some
cultures, caretakers provide the child with many prompts, i. e.,
getting the child to repeat verbal routines used in certain social
48
situations. Consider the following Sesotho examples of a mother

(M) interacting with her daughter (D), aged 30 months, prompting
her to ask questions in a routine format (Demuth no date: 32-33).
The daughter repeats her version of the mother’s utterances.
M: Ere: ke ngoan’a mang?

Say ‘whose child is he?’
D: ana mang?
M: Ere: o moholo?
Say ‘Is he big?’
D: o holo?
The routine nature of such formats obviously provides the child

with practice in asking questions, but the actual structural
components of the sentence and their functions are never explicitly
taught (as they would be to an adult learning Sesotho as a second
language, for example). Although the child is repeating her version
of what the adult says, she still needs to convert this input into a
form that can be used to construct new questions not heard before.
Behaviourists claimed that children learnt language partly through
having their mistakes corrected by their parents. However, research
has subsequently shown that parents seldom correct their children’s
grammar although they may correct errors of fact. For example, if
the child points to a picture of a lion and says Dere kitty cat the
caretaker may say No, that’s not a kitty cat, that’s a lion. Chomsky
refers to this as the ‘absence of negative evidence’, i. e., although
children receive positive evidence of grammatical utterances by
hearing well-formed sentences around them, they seldom receive
an overt correction (negative evidence) alerting them to the fact
that they have made a grammatical error. Research such as that of
Strapp (1999:377) suggests that correcting children is not very
effective – children are unlikely to adopt an adult form after overt
teaching or being corrected. Although practically all the utterances
that young children produce up to the age of about 3½ years of age
contain errors of some kind, parents do not correct every utterance.
The child would probably be so demotivated that he or she would
stop talking altogether if this were to happen! Because children are
corrected so infrequently, it seems unlikely that corrections and
indirect teaching can account for language acquisition.
HSY2601 49
Task 2.4
Paragraph questions may require you to agree or disagree with a
statement and then justify your answer. This means that you must
explain why you agree/disagree with the statement and give
further information on the topic. Look back at pp 13-14 for
some hints on writing paragraphs and then write a paragraph on
whether you agree or disagree with the statement below:
Children learn language by imitating their parents’
utterances.
Feedback
Here is one possible answer.
I disagree. While behaviourists believed that language was acquired mainly
by imitation and reinforcement, the nativist view is that imitation is only of
limited use in the language acquisition process, e.g., for learning words and
set phrases. Firstly, children often make errors and make up words that they
would not have heard and use sentences that they are unlikely to have heard.
This suggests that children have an innate capacity to learn language.
Another piece of evidence against imitation, is that it would place a large
burden on memory, since every utterance would have to be memorised
separately (rather than simply storing one rule for constructing all similar
sentences.) Thirdly, children do not seem to be able to imitate utterances that
are far more complex than their current level of development. These
observations suggest that imitation cannot explain all the facts of language
acquisition.
Something is idiosyncratic You should be aware that Chomsky’s version of nativist theory is
when it is unusual and
both idiosyncratic and controversial. While his contribution to the
associated with a particular
individual. field of psycholinguistics cannot be denied, certain aspects of his
theory are not generally accepted. One of his most central (and
most controversial) beliefs is that knowledge of grammatical principles
is to a large extent innate. Chomsky claims that children use many
grammatical features that they could not possibly have learned on
the basis of language exposure alone, and that this knowledge must
therefore be innate. Chomsky claims that children are born with a
‘language acquisition device’ or abstract mental blueprint of
universal linguistic rules and principles known (also referred to as
Universal Grammar or UG). This ‘language acquisition device’,
which is assumed to be a physiological part of the brain, allows
children to detect underlying regularities in the language around
them and construct a set of basic rules that allows them to be
infinitely creative in the way they use their language. Foster-Cohen
(1999:108-9) says:
50
Clearly, whatever UG is, it must be very flexible. It cannot

contain information about any particular language, or we
would be led to the obviously silly position of saying that
children are born ‘knowing’ all the world’s languages. Clearly,
the form of linguistic knowledge children possess must be
abstract. It must be able to recognise the specifics of
particular languages once they are presented, and to cope
with what appear to be pretty extreme differences between
languages.
Since the aspects that are common to all languages (the linguistic
universals) are already present in the mind, Chomsky views
language acquisition as basically a matter of filling in the language-
specific details in order to become competent speakers. Even the
language-specific details he believes are not learned from scratch by
listening to the language of the environment but are selected from
a set of options present in the ‘language acquisition device’. These
options are known as parameters, and the process of selecting the
appropriate option for a particular language is known as parameter
setting. When all the parameters have been set, the child has a core
grammar of his or her particular language.
The establishment of core grammar completes the work of
UG in language acquisition. It does not, however, complete
the work of language acquisition itself. There’s a lot more to
be done – lots more to really learn from the input: all the
vocabulary of the language, the bound morphemes, the
idioms etc. The list may be very long. Language acquisition is
thus a co-operative effort between UG and learning from the
input, both in the sense of the input triggering the parameter
settings and in the sense of the input providing language
forms from which rules can be deduced by general learning
mechanisms not special to language. (Foster-Cohen
1999:109-110)
Chomsky has devoted much of his life to spelling out the nature of
the language acquisition device and to detailed investigations into
the structure and rules of language and what languages have in
common. He is first and foremost a theoretical linguist rather than
a psycholinguist and is often criticised by other psycholinguists for
making sweeping claims about the language acquisition process
without consulting empirical research on children’s language to
back up his assumptions.
Chomsky believes strongly that the development of language is a
completely different process from other kinds of cognitive
development such as the ability to think and reason, including
categorising, problem-solving and increasing the number of items
HSY2601 51
that can be stored in memory. He believes that language

development and cognitive development are autonomous
processes (i. e., they develop separately without influencing each
other). This question of whether language is a separate,
autonomous faculty of the human mind, or is dependent on other
kinds of cognitive development is still a matter of considerable
debate.
Something is autonomous Another controversial element of Chomsky’s theory is his claim
when it is separate from
that the language input that children hear around them provides
other parts and functions
independently. insufficient evidence for language acquisition to take place:
Consider first the nature of primary linguistic data. This
consists of a finite amount of information about sentences,
which, furthermore, must be rather restricted in scope,
considering the time limitations that are in effect, and fairly
degenerate in quality. For example, certain signals might be
accepted as properly formed sentences, while others are
classed as nonsentences ... (Chomsky 1965:31)
Something is degenerate This argument is termed the poverty of the stimulus argument,
when it is atypical or of poor as it stresses the limitations of input in the language acquisition
quality.
process. The claim is that the language children hear is degenerate
– full of errors and short sentence fragments rather than perfect
grammatical sentences – and so does not form a good enough
model for children to use as the basis for deducing linguistic rules.
Chomsky thus concludes that most of these rules are unlearnable
and must be innate.
Task 2.5
As you read through any textbook or academic journal you need
to remember that the authors may not be neutral and may be
adopting a particular theoretical perspective on certain issues. In
other words, they may have certain assumptions that influence
the way they talk about language acquisition. Read the following
extract and see if you can identify whether the author is an
empiricist or a rationalist:
I am persuaded that some aspects of the linguistic system
are innate and specific to language . . . I think there is
reasonable evidence that certain parts of syntax (the way
sentences are structured out of words), morphology (the
way words are structured out of smaller units known as
morphemes), phonology (the way morphemes are
structured out of sound units) and semantics (the meanings
that words and sentences encode) are so ‘weird’ that only
accidents of genetics could account for them.
(Foster-Cohen 1999:11)
52
Feedback
You should have picked up that Foster-Cohen is not writing from a neutral
position but from a rationalist perspective. Words like ‘innate’, ‘specific to
language’ and ‘accidents of genetics’ indicate that she has adopted a
Chomskyan nativist perspective on certain issues.
Let’s turn now to some of the other major theories and

developments that have shaped the field of language acquisition
over the last 70 years.
2.6 OVERVIEW OF 70 YEARS OF LANGUAGE

ACQUISITION RESEARCH
2.6.1 The 1950s – behaviourism, nativism and cognitive
theory
As we have mentioned, it was in the 1950s that researchers first
began to interest themselves in language acquisition as an area of
study. During the early years the focus was primarily on the nature-
nurture debate, with behaviourists arguing with nativists such as
Chomsky about whether language was a learned behaviour or an
innate ability.
Another argument was going on in the 1950s between Chomsky
and the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. As we have said, Chomsky
believed that language was an autonomous process, separate from
other aspects of cognitive development. Piaget and his followers,
on the other hand, believed that language was dependent on
thought, i. e., that language could not develop unless certain
cognitive skills had developed first. This theory of language
acquisition is known as cognitive theory.
The cognitive theory aims to identify the sequence of cognitive
development and illustrate how these developments are reflected in
language acquisition. For example, Piaget (1926) refers to the
period from birth to 2 years as the sensorimotor period because
this is the time when children interact with and learn about their
environment through their senses and through physical (‘motor’)
activity. Some of the important cognitive developments during this
period include the child’s gradual realisation that when something
disappears from view, it doesn’t cease to exist. This concept is
known as object permanence. Very young children cannot conceive
of things that are not physically present in their environments, but
by the end of the sensorimotor period, children realise that
concepts and objects can exist without being physically present.
The development of object permanence is a prerequisite for the
HSY2601 53
emergence of words like gone, and in fact, for the emergence of

words in general since children cannot learn words unless they can
conceptualise objects and activities that are not physically present
and use words to symbolise concepts.
2.6.2 The 1960s

In the 1960s, researchers began to put these theories to the test,
and undertook research into children’s acquisition of syntax
(grammar). Longitudinal studies of children provided detailed
information about the order in which various grammatical
constructions were acquired. Roger Brown’s (1973) study of the
language of Adam, Eve and Sarah was based on research carried
out once a month for several years, and provided a great deal of
what we now know about the language acquisition process. Cross-
linguistic studies of language acquisition in various parts of the
world were undertaken and these studies revealed that many
aspects of the process were universal.
2.6.3 The 1970s and the emergence of social

interactionism
In the 1970s and 1980s research began to focus on issues other
than grammar, including the meanings and functions of children’s
utterances. Researchers began to take an interest in input, in other
words, the language addressed to children by their parents and
caretakers. The aim of this research was to find out what kind of
language children heard around them in their everyday
environment and whether or not the language addressed to
children was ‘degenerate’ as Chomsky claimed.
Psychologists such as Vygotsky and psycholinguists such as Jerome
Bruner and Catherine Snow carried out research that suggested
that language acquisition can only occur through interaction with
others, and a theory known as social interactionism emerged
which is still current today. Social interactionists believe that mere
exposure to language on the radio or television or from hearing
adults talking to each other is not enough – it is the special
language used by caretakers to children that enables children to
process and produce language. While social interactionism is similar
to behaviourism in the stress laid on the role of the environment, it
differs from behaviourism in two ways. Firstly, it does accept a
certain innate language ability as a given and secondly, it sees the
child as interacting actively with his or her environment rather than
as a passive participant whose language is ‘shaped’ by parents.
Through their communicative attempts and their responses to
parents’ utterances, children cue their parents to adapt their
54
language and supply the appropriate level of language input the

child requires at that point in his or her development. Social
interactionists study the communicative function of language, the
ways that adults tailor their input to meet children’s needs and the
effects of different kinds of input on children’s developing language
(Berko Gleason & Bernstein Ratner 1998:386). In learning unit 5
we will look in detail at some of the characteristics of language
addressed to children.
2.6.4 The 1980 and 1990s

A feature of the decades since 1980 has been the increase in cross-
linguistic research, including a shift of focus from identifying cross-
linguistic similarities to identifying cross-linguistic differences in the
language acquisition process. Dan Slobin has led this initiative, with
a research project that compared the acquisition of 28 languages
from a wide range of language families (Slobin 1997). The main
question that cross-linguistic research addresses is whether and
how the actual course of language acquisition is influenced by the
syntactic and other differences that exist between languages. Stoll
(2009) points out that we only have acquisition data for about 2%
of the world’s 6 000-7 000 languages, with the vast majority of
studies focusing on English, so there is plenty of scope for
additional cross-linguistic research.
Another important development in the 1980s was the emergence
of connectionist models such as those of Bates and McWhinney
(1987). These models see language development as a matter of
developing connections between the neurons in the brain and are
thus more empirical than nativist. However, unlike Chomsky, they
argue that general cognitive processes can account for language
learning. Using language is seen as a matter of activating certain
neurons in the brain that then activate a whole series of related
concepts. Here is Berko-Gleason & Bernstein Ratner’s (1998:386)
explanation of how connectionist models work:
A child develops such connections over time through
exposure to the forms of language associated with external
events. For example, a child may hear the word bottle under
varying circumstances and thereby establish neural
associations to the word, to the initial sound /b/, to the word
milk and so forth. Ultimately those interconnected
associations become the ‘meaning’ of the word. Information
in such a neural network is conveyed through many
interconnected units or nodes. The nodes have activation
levels or thresholds that can turn them on or off, and
learning consists essentially of adjusting the strengths of the
connections in a direction that produces the desired outputs.
HSY2601 55
Language learning is thus seen as a process of detecting regularities

and patterns in the input. As the child is exposed to more and
more language input, correct patterns are strengthened, and
incorrect patterns are weakened so that errors eventually disappear.
Since this view of learning is similar to the way in which a
computer ‘learns’, connectionists use computers to simulate human
learning in order to test their theories.
2.6.5 2000 to the present

A widely adopted approach to language acquisition in the last two
decades is emergentism, an approach which has its roots in social
interactionism and connectionist models (see 5.3 and 5.4 above).
Emergentism explains the development of particular new aspects
of language as resulting from the interaction of other more general
learning mechanisms and social experiences. In this view, language
is neither innate nor triggered, but emerges gradually as the child
constructs a new system using strategies they have already learnt.
Learning language is thus not seen as an autonomous task, but as a
task in which multiple sources of information are integrated and
coordinated for communicative purposes while children are
engaged in doing everyday things. For example, Hollich et al.
(2000) offer an emergentist explanation for word learning, based
on children’s existing general abilities such as paying attention to
novel forms, following an adult’s eye gaze, and recognising the link
between pointing and labelling. Children also exploit linguistic clues
such as the presence of articles and other morphemes – children as
young as 17 months will pay attention to an object when asked to
look at ‘the blick’ and will pay attention to an action when ‘blicking’
is requested (Hollich et al. 2000:20). As children’s word learning
principles emerge and develop, word learning becomes increasingly
effective over the course of the second year of life.
If language emerges or is constructed in individual children and
does not simply uncover an innate set of knowledge, then it follows
that there will be many different routes in the course of language
acquisition. The last twenty years have therefore also seen an
increased interest in individual differences rather than
generalisations about language learning. For example, while, on
average, vocabulary development does indeed involve a vocabulary
spurt at around 16 months, when word learning accelerates
dramatically, this pattern does not hold for all children. Some
children accumulate words in a steady fashion with no spurt, or
display two vocabulary spurts, or start their spurts much earlier or
later. The study of individual differences has confirmed many of
the early findings and generalisations about child language, while
56
allowing a much more fine-grained analysis of early language to

take place (Dale & Goodman 2005: 67).
2.7 CONCLUSION
It should be clear to you by now that theories are not fixed, but
change over time as new questions are asked, new research
evidence emerges or new techniques for investigating the human
mind are invented. In this learning unit, we have focused on some
of the theories that dominate the field of developmental
psycholinguistics and seen that each of these theories stresses one
side of the nature-nurture equation at the expense of the other.
However, it is generally acknowledged that both nature and nurture
influence the process, and that none of the theories can account for
the whole story of child language development and how it works.
Psycholinguists still have much work to do before this fascinating
process is fully understood! As Crystal (1997:237) reminds us:
It is not possible in the present state of knowledge, to choose
between these various approaches ... Doubtless imitative
skills, a general language-learning-mechanism, cognitive
awareness and structured input all play their part in guiding
the course of language acquisition. Unravelling the
interdependence of these factors constitutes the main goal of
future child language research.
HSY2601 57
LEARNING UNIT 3
The Transition to Speech
Learningunit3
�
14-18 hours
Contents
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The stages of language acquisition
3.3 Children’s acquisition of speech sounds
3.4 Order in which children acquire words
3.5 Conclusion
LEARNING OUTCOMES
● distinguish between the prelinguistic and linguistic stages of language development and describe
their characteristic features
● distinguish between children’s perception and production of speech sounds and explain why
children’s production is less advanced than their perception
● describe the expected order in which words emerge, based on their meanings
● identify different kinds of errors in children’s early use of words
● provide definitions for the following important terms:
prelinguistic stage linguistic stage

joint attention babbling
reduplication variegated babbling
protoword one-word stage
holophras substitution
assimilation reduction
underextension overextension
58
The Transition to Speech Learning unit 3
Preview
In this learning unit, we look at a child’s early years and discuss
the question of when children’s utterances move from
meaningless cooing and babbling to meaningful use of language
as a system for conveying messages. We look at children’s early
ability to perceive and distinguish different speech sounds and at
the development of the ability to produce speech sounds in the
babbling stage and throughout the preschool years. The child’s
early words are also investigated in terms of both their meanings
and pronunciation.
3.1 INTRODUCTION
The earliest sounds that babies make include crying, cooing,
gurgling, coughing, sneezing, etc. Would you consider these sounds
as examples of language or not? Take a minute or two to think
about this question and fill in your answers in the space provided
before you continue reading.
........................................................
........................................................
........................................................
These early sounds are not viewed as language because they are
usually involuntary responses to various sensations such as hunger,
discomfort or well-being. Language, in contrast, is voluntary and
non-automatic – we say what we choose to say and are not
controlled by our physical state or environment. Psycholinguists
refer to the earliest period of language development, which covers
approximately the first 12-18 months of the child’s life, as the
prelinguistic stage. Although early vocalisations like cooing and
crying can be seen as the precursors of linguistic communication,
they differ from language in that the sounds do not yet have the
formal structure and symbolic characteristics of language.
A precursor is something What do we mean when we say language has a symbolic function?
that comes before and is a Symbolism means using one thing (a symbol) to represent another
sign of a coming event.
thing or idea, which is exactly what language does. Language uses
strings of sounds (words) to represent various objects and actions
in the world. The task that children face is to learn to attach a label
(a string of sounds, i.e., a word) to a referent (i.e., object/event) and
then to generalise this label to all other objects that belong to the
same class or category. For example, the child first associates the
sound string d-o-g with a specific dog and later learns to call all
animals that belong to the class ‘dog’ by this label, irrespective of
HSY2601 59
LEARNING UNIT 3 THE TRANSITION TO SPEECH
their shape, size or colour, and irrespective of whether they are

animate (i.e., alive) or inanimate (e.g., a toy dog, a picture of a dog,
etc.). The emergence of the child’s first words marks the beginning
of the linguistic stage – the stage at which children have worked
out the symbolic function of language and start using language to
communicate intentionally and purposefully.
In this learning unit we focus on the prelinguistic stage of language
development and the transition from the prelinguistic to the
linguistic stage. The child’s language development during this
period is placed in the broader context of the child’s overall
development and maturation.
Task 3.1 (5 minutes)

Instead of writing a child’s age in months, e. g., 18 months,
psycholinguists frequently use the notation 1;6. The first number
(before the semicolon) is the child’s age in years, and the second
number (the number after the semicolon) is the additional
number of months, so in this case the child is one year and six
months old, i.e., 18 months. Try writing the following ages using
the semicolon notation explained above.
a) 2 months
b) 12 months
c) 18 months
d) 2 years
e) 4 years and 3 months
Feedback
Make sure that you use a semicolon and not just a comma when you use this
notation.
a) 0;2 b) 1;0 c) 1;6 d) 2;0 e) 4;3
3.2 THE STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

3.2.1 The prelinguistic stage
Before a baby learns to match words and the concepts they refer to,
they have to pass through several important preliminary stages and
familiarise themselves with nonlinguistic forms of communication
such as facial expressions, gaze and gestures.
Gaze refers to the direction In their first year, children are often heavily dependent on non-
in which someone is looking.
linguistic methods of communication such as actions, gestures,
facial expressions and tone of voice. Some of the earliest sounds
include involuntary grunts and sighs. Smiling begins within the first
couple of months and is initially an involuntary muscle spasm.
Gradually babies realise that smiling can elicit a response from
60
other people and begin to use it as a conscious behaviour. Crying is

also initially a response to an internal physical state – to hunger,
discomfort, etc. – but soon becomes used as a way to elicit
responses from others. From the second month of life babies also
start to use voluntary contented cooing sounds, similar to the
Afrikaans ‘g’-sound. Months 4-7 are characterised by vocal play,
with the baby experimenting with the vocal organs, producing
shrieks, murmurs, growls and shouts.
Throughout these early stages of vocalisation, children show
quite a lot of responsiveness to other people. They prefer to
vocalise when the other person is not, rather than at the same
time (i.e., they engage in rudimentary turn-taking), to imitate
sounds produced by others, and generally behave more and
more as if they are in genuine conversation. (Foster-Cohen
1999:20)
Task 3.2
On the basis of your reading, fill in the types of vocalisation you
would expect the child to produce at each of the ages below.
Child’s age Types of vocalisation
0-2 months
2-4 months
4-7 months
Feedback
At 0-2 months vocalisations mainly involve crying and involuntary grunts
and sighs. By 2-4 months babies can produce voluntary cooing in response to
another person, and by 4-7 months the child can engage in vocal play
including squealing, shouting and snorting.
Pointing and reaching are two of the earliest gestures used by

children. Again, they are initially used merely to grasp or to explore
objects with a fingertip – without any communicative intention. A
while after 9 months these gestures become associated with a
meaning – ‘give me that’ in the case of reaching and ‘look at that’ in
the case of pointing. These gestures are then used intentionally to
interact with others.
Children who don’t realise that they can get adults to do their
bidding, i.e. who don’t realise that gestures communicate, will
simply gaze at the object reached for or pointed at. Children
who realise that these gestures communicate will glance to
check that the person they are with has seen the gesture and
is either complying with the request or responding to the
point. Children who realise that gestures communicate will
HSY2601 61
also tend to continue pointing or reaching until a response is

forthcoming, and may also show distress at an object or
person until there is a response. (Foster-Cohen 1999:27-8)
Cerebral palsy is a disease An important milestone is reached when children realise that smiles,
resulting from brain damage
cries, coos and gestures such as reaching and pointing can be used
and causes muscle spasms
and paralysis. intentionally to communicate with others. Children are then able to
share interest in an object with another person, a phenomenon
known as joint attention. The realisation that sounds and gestures
can be used in a symbolic way to convey a particular message is an
important step on the way to realising that sound strings (words)
can be used symbolically. Non-verbal communication precedes
linguistic communication. However, you should note that gestures
are not a requirement for genuine linguistic development. Children
with muscular disorders like cerebral palsy cannot produce gestures
but still acquire language in the normal way (Foster-Cohen 1999:28).
Task 3.3
Classify each of the following behaviours as either unintentional
or intentional communication.
1. The child shakes her head to signal ‘no’.
2. The child smiles to get the caretaker to interact with her.
3. The child uses a reaching gesture to grasp objects.
4. The child uses pointing to direct the caretaker’s attention to
something.
5. The child ‘smiles’ because of indigestion.
6. The child produces cooing sounds in response to the
caretaker’s utterances.
7. The child cries as a result of the discomfort of a wet nappy.
Feedback
Behaviours 3, 5 and 7 are examples of unintentional communication. These
actions are responses to environmental sensations and are not intended to
communicate a message to anyone else. Behaviours 1, 2, 4 and 6 are
examples of intentional communication. The child uses these behaviours in a
voluntary way to communicate something or to elicit particular behaviours
from others. Note that there are three elements in the intentional behaviours
– the child, the message and the caretaker, indicating the child’s ability to
engage in joint attention.
3.2.1.1 Early perception and production of speech sounds

There is strong biological evidence that indicates that the ability to
perceive human speech sounds is operative from birth. Ingenious
techniques have been devised to measure speech perception
abilities in newborn babies. One technique is to use a dummy
62
connected to a sound system. Every time the baby sucks on the

dummy, a sound is produced. Babies tend to suck frequently at first,
an action which researchers interpret as an indication that the baby
is attending to the sound. As they lose interest or get bored with
the sound, the sucking becomes less frequent. As soon as the
researcher changes the sound that is produced, the baby starts to
suck more vigorously again (Berko Gleason 2005:71). Experiments
that use these techniques show that newborn babies can
discriminate between human speech sounds and all other sounds
that occur in their environment.
The ability to hear and distinguish between various sounds is an
important prerequisite for acquiring language. It seems that from
birth children are genetically capable of ‘tuning into’ human speech
and ‘tuning out’ nonspeech. (In learning unit 6, you will read about
autistic children whose ability to ‘tune into’ human speech is
seriously impaired.) It also appears that babies’ speech perception is
fairly refined. For example, babies as young as three days old can
distinguish their own mother’s voice from other female voices. This
not only helps in the fight for survival, but it also ensures that
babies are particularly receptive to the speech of the person who is
most likely to interact and talk to them the most, i. e., the mother.
Furthermore, infants can perceive contrasts between sounds just as
adults can. For example, one-month-old infants can perceive
differences between various consonants (e.g., pa : ba), and vowels (e.
g., pa : pi). Kuhl (1980) observes that infants can also categorise
speech sounds, i.e., group sounds together on the basis of common
or shared features. In her research she found that babies who were
5-10 months old could recognise the same vowel although speaker
voices differed with regard to pitch and sex of speaker.
This natural ability to distinguish certain contrasts between sounds
seems to diminish as the child grows older and gains more
exposure to the sounds of the particular languages spoken in his or
her linguistic community. It was found, for example, that English
babies of about six months could discriminate between different
kinds of r-sounds used in Hindi but not in English. In other words,
these babies had the potential to distinguish subtle contrasts
between sounds even though these sounds did not occur in their
own language environment. However, when these babies were
tested a couple of months later, they failed to distinguish the
differences between these same sounds. Researchers concluded that
from about the age of eight months children lose the ability to
discriminate between sounds that are non-functional (not used to
distinguish words) in the language they are acquiring (Foster-Cohen
1999:22).
HSY2601 63
Auditory means related to From the above evidence it is clear that children are born with
our sense of hearing.
fairly sophisticated auditory mechanisms and brain functions that
enable them to focus on human speech sounds and to be able to
categorise these sounds. However, children’s ability to produce
speech sounds takes longer to develop. Even though the ability to
perceive speech sounds is present from birth, the ability to produce
sounds that resemble human speech sounds only emerges gradually
as a result of maturational changes in the first months. A newborn
baby’s articulatory system is not the same as an adult’s. In particular,
a baby’s tongue is relatively large in proportion to the oral cavity
and fills almost the entire mouth, allowing little room for
movement. This is to prevent the baby from choking when
drinking milk. The tongue size and fairly inflexible position means
that a baby’s earliest crying consists mostly of the [æ] sound as in
the word cat. In adults the tongue can assume a much larger variety
of configurations. The larynx or voice box is also much higher in
babies, which makes it impossible to produce all the vowels that
occur in adult speech. Compare the size and position of the infant’s
vocal organs (on the left) with those of an adult (on the right) in
figure 3.1 below.
Figure 3.1: Cross-section of vocal tract of infant and adult (Reich 1986:28)
During the second and third month of life, the head and neck areas
grow fairly rapidly, enabling the baby to raise his or her tongue and
move it around with greater flexibility and to change the shape of
the lips, allowing more varied sound production. Between the third
and fourth month consonants start to appear in children’s cooing
sounds.
The adjective cortical is Another reason why children’s ability to produce speech sounds
derived from the noun takes time to develop is that the brain weighs only about 300g at
cortex.
birth because the brain cells (neurons) are not all connected to each
other. Babies are born with all their brain cells and do not develop
any additional ones after birth. However, from about the fifth
month until about 2 years, brain development occurs as more and
more neuronal connections are made. The brain gradually increases
in weight to about a kilogram. This allows greater communication
64
between the brain and the articulatory organs and therefore greater
control over the speech sounds produced.
Figure 3.2: Cortical development in Broca’s area (Foss & Hakes 1978:226-
27)
(a) newborn (b) 3 months (c) 6 months (d) 24 months
3.2.2 Babbling
The babbling stage begins when children are about six months old.
Children start to explore the abilities of their vocal organs, and
soon discover that they can make loud and soft noises and can alter
the pitch of their utterances from high shrieks to deep grumbles.
The early period of babbling does not seem to be intentional or
communicative. The first stage of babbling often involves
reduplication, i. e., producing vocalisations containing repeated
sequences of consonants and vowels such as baba, mama, papa, nana,
tata, wawa or dadada. Most babbling consists of open syllables, i. e.,
syllables that consist of a consonant followed by a vowel (CV).
Babbled syllables ending in a consonant (closed syllables) or
containing consonant clusters (two consonants next to each other)
are less frequent. Consonants like /b/, /p/, /m/, /w/, /n/, /t/
and /d/ are amongst the first to be used, and are an important
milestone, indicating that the baby has gained considerable control
over the vocal organs – tongue, lips and vocal cords.
The forward slashes around the speech sounds above are used for
transcriptions which accurately reflect the child’s pronunciation.
Square brackets are sometimes used instead of forward slashes, but
the principle is the same. Some of you may have been introduced
to phonetic transcription in other language courses, or in the
LIN2603 course on sound and sound structure. Phonetic
transcription is basically a way of writing utterances using symbols
to represent sounds. Each symbol represents one sound, so these
HSY2601 65
transcriptions are clear and unambiguous, unlike normal spelling.

Phonetic transcriptions provide a useful way of indicating the
actual pronunciation of the child. You do not need to know how to
write sounds using phonetic symbols, but we will gradually start
introducing you to phonetic transcriptions together with
explanations of the pronunciation these transcriptions represent.
Children often produce sounds that do not occur in the languages
spoken around them. Babbling occurs spontaneously and
universally and the sounds that are babbled tend to be similar in all
children, irrespective of the language they hear around them, i. e.,
the babbling of babies from speech communities as diverse as Zulu,
English, Chinese or Arabic will sound the same. Deaf babies also
coo and babble in the same way as hearing babies even though they
cannot perceive auditory stimuli. Some studies have shown that
parents’ attention and responsiveness to children’s babbling can
increase the quantity but not the quality of babbling, i. e., the
children may babble more but they do not increase the range of
sounds that are produced. This evidence suggests that the
emergence of babbling relies largely on internal biological factors,
rather than on external factors such as linguistic input and
encouragement from parents and caretakers.
From about the ninth month children’s babbling becomes
variegated (i.e., consonants and vowels are not repeated but vary
from syllable to syllable). For example, instead of the reduplicative
baba one may hear babbled utterances like maba, titu, anadi, etc. New
consonants like /f/, /s/ and /r/ also start emerging. During this
stage children also learn to imitate the stress or intonation patterns
of the sentences they hear around them. Babbled strings of sounds
are produced with a variety of stress and intonation patterns that
resemble those of simple sentences, for example, rising intonation
at the end of a sequence to signal a question. Children often babble
like this in play situations, for example when they talk on a toy
phone or when they page through books – from their vocalisations
they appear to be talking to someone, commenting on the pictures
in the books or telling a story.
There is no clear break between the prelinguistic and the linguistic
stages, between babbling and the emergence of the child’s first
words. Even when children start to use words, they do not
suddenly cease babbling. There is a period of overlap between the
two during which babbling is interspersed with real words.
Babbling gradually decreases as the child acquires more words and
speech increases in frequency. The following table gives data on the
percentage of babble in two children’s utterances from 11 months
to 16 months (Vihman 1996:132). The two columns do not add up
66
to 100% as some of the children’s vocalisations were grunts of

various kinds.
Age in months Babble (%) Words (%)
Alice
11 7.36167423e+23 18
12 8
13 12
14 49
15 52
16 51
Aurie
1112 00
13 4
14 10
15 12
16 24
Task 3.4
Look at the table above and then answer the following questions.
1. At what age did Alice start to include words in her
utterances? Give your answers using the semicolon notation
explained on p. 63.
2. At what age was there a sudden surge in the percentage of
words used by Alice?
3. At what age did Alice’s utterances contain more words than
babble?
4. At what age did Aurie start to include words in his
utterances?
5. How do the two children compare in terms of their rate of
development?
Feedback
1. Alice started including words in her utterances before 11 months
(0;11). We are not given data before this so we cannot be sure exactly
when.
2. There was a sudden surge in the percentage of words used by Alice at
14 months (1;2). At 13 months only 12% of her utterances were
words and at 14 months 49% of her utterances were words.
HSY2601 67
3. Alice’s utterances contained more words (49%) than babble (42%)

from 14 months (1;2).
4. Aurie started including words in his utterances at 13 months (1;1).
5. Alice’s development is slightly faster than Aurie’s. Alice used words
earlier and has a smaller proportion of babble in her speech at each age.
Note that the difference is only a few months though – Alice was 13
months old, and Aurie was 15 months old when 12% of their
utterances were words. The basic pattern of development is the same
although the rate may differ slightly from child to child.
Behaviour is idiosyncratic if During the later stage of babbling certain forms start being used
it is unusual and associated fairly consistently in certain contexts, accompanied by eye contact
with a particular individual.
with the caretaker and gestures like reaching, pointing, grasping and
rejection movements. These word-like forms are known as
protowords and are basically idiosyncratic words invented by the
child rather than modelled on actual adult words. Protowords are
used fairly consistently to refer to a particular concept in an
attempt to communicate. Reich (1986:37) gives the example of his
son, Quentin, who at age 1;1 used the sound ‘uhuh’ together with a
pointing gesture to mean something like What is this called? or Give
me the name of this object.
Task 3.5
The data below (Reich 1986:56) gives information about the
forms and meanings of Joan’s first few words. Which of Joan’s
words (in the first column) are protowords, and which are
attempts to produce the adult word? Place a tick next to the
words that you consider to be protowords. (The symbol /a/
represents the sound u as in cup.)
Child’s word Meaning
/ap/ up
/ba/ bottle
/bas/ bus
/baza/ put on
/da/ down
/bat/ pocket
/ba/ pie
/bap/ lamb
/nas/ nice
68
Feedback
You should have ticked the protowords /baza/ ‘put on’ and /bap/ ‘lamb’
as these appear to be made-up words that are unique to the child and are not
based on adult words. The other words all appear to be genuine attempts to
produce the adult forms, although many of these are simplified in some way
as a result of the child’s limited control over their vocal organs.
3.2.3 The one-word stage

The period from the child’s first word to the time when the child
starts to put two words together is known as the one-word stage.
This period lasts roughly from age 1 to 2. Why does language
emerge in all children at about the same time? Nativists answer this
question by suggesting that language is set in motion by an internal
‘alarm clock’, preprogrammed to go off at a certain time, in the
same way as our bodies are preprogrammed to mature sexually at
about age 13. Like sexual development, language development
cannot take place before this ‘alarm clock’ has gone off, i.e., before
the necessary maturation of body and brain has taken place.
Imagine language as a seed that is planted in our minds before birth.
The seed contains the potential to be a mature tree, but it only
starts to grow after a period of time has passed. In the same way,
the emergence of language is not the result of a conscious decision
made by the baby, but of the inner biological clock that
preprogrammes the pace of development.
One of the major problems in the study of the one-word stage is
determining what the child actually means when they use a word.
Because context, gestures and intonation patterns always
accompany early word use; they provide caretakers (and
researchers) with clues as to what the child might possibly be
talking about. Even so, we cannot always be sure about the child’s
meaning. For example, if a child points to the bath, on the edge of
which her yellow rubber duck is sitting, and says barf, she could be
referring to (i.e., naming or labelling) the concrete object ‘bath’, the
activity of bathing, or the rubber duck which she associates with
the activity of bathing. The child’s early words are referred to as
holophrases (holo means ‘complete’) because the child seems to
compress so much meaning into a single word. A holophrase is
basically a one-word sentence – using a single word to express a
complex idea.
3.3 CHILDREN’S ACQUISITION OF SPEECH SOUNDS

Children’s first words follow the same articulatory patterns as
babbling, i. e., a preference for reduplication and open syllables,
HSY2601 69
with the crucial difference being that words have a fairly stable
form and are used to communicate a particular meaning.
Consonants made with the lips and the tip of the tongue, such as
/p/, /b/, /m/, /w/, /t/, /d/ and /n/ are the most common. As
we have seen with babbling, the vowel sounds used by children in
their early words usually include /a/ (pronounced a as in mama),
/i/ (pronounced ee as in see) and /u/ (pronounced oo as in spoon).
The syllable structure of children’s words is also fairly simple. If we
use C as the abbreviation for a consonant, and V as the
abbreviation for a vowel, the most likely patterns are V (a vowel on
its own), CV (consonant followed by a vowel) and VC (a vowel
followed by a consonant). Reduplicated CVCV also occurs
frequently, where the second syllable is the same as the first, e. g.,
baba, dada, etc.
Task 3.6
The following data list the sounds and syllable structures used by a child called Jennika
Ingram in her first 25 words (data adapted from Reich 1986:56). Look at the data and then
answer the questions that follow. The phonetic symbols you need to know are:
/a/ = cup
/i/ = see
/o/ = no
/æ/ = cat
/ai/ = my
FORM MEANING FORM MEANING
/ba/ blanket /mama/ mommy
/babi/ blanket /no/ no
/ba/
byebye /si/ see
/baba/
/da/ byebye /siæt/ see that
/dada/ daddy /da/ that
/dadi/ daddy /hat/ hot
/dat/
daddy /haidi/ hi
/dati/
dot /ap/ up
/hai/
/ma/ dot /api/ up
/mami/ hi /nodi/ no
mommy /dodi/ no
mommy /noni/ no
70
1. Give an example of a word with a CV syllable structure in

Jennika’s vocabulary. _______________
2. Give an example of a word with a VC syllable structure in
Jennika’s vocabulary. _______________
3. Give an example of a word with a CVCV syllable structure
in Jennika’s vocabulary. _______________
4. Which of these three syllable structures is the most
common in Jennika’s early words? _______________
5. Give an example of a reduplicated word in Jennika’s
vocabulary._______________
6. What are the most common consonant sounds in Jennika’s
early words? _______________
7. What are the most common vowel sounds in Jennika’s early
words? _______________
Feedback
1. In Jennika’s first 25 words, /ba/ /da/, /ma/ etc. have a CV
syllable structure.
2. /ap/ has a VC syllable structure.
3. /babi/, /dati/, /nodi/ etc. have a CVCV syllable structure. (You
only had to give one example in each case.)
4. Jennika produces 10 words with a CVCV syllable structure, so this
is the most common syllable structure for this child.
5. Reduplication is the repetition of syllables, as in Jennika’s words
/baba/, /dada/ and /mama/.
6. As expected, the most common consonant sounds in Jennika’s early
words are /b/, /m/ and /d/, all produced with the lips or tongue tip.
7. The most common vowel sounds in Jennika’s early words are /a/, /i/
and /o/.
Usually, children’s pronunciation improves gradually, and their

words come to sound increasingly like the adult target words.
However, children’s pronunciation sometimes gets worse before it
gets better (Foster-Cohen 1999:35). The following example (Reich
1986:55) shows that a child who could pronounce the word pretty
correctly at 10 months, later goes through almost a year of various
incorrect attempts to pronounce this word.
0;10 pretty (adult-like pronunciation)

1;0 prrty (with no vowel)
1;1 pretty, retty
1;3 pshitty
1;4 pwitty, pity, yitty
1;9 biddy
HSY2601 71
The thing to notice here is that although children can often

produce sounds from an early age, it takes several months to master
a sound, i. e., to gain sufficient control over their vocal organs to
produce the same sound every time it is required. Some sounds
take longer to master than others. We have already mentioned that
sounds produced with the lips and the tip of the tongue are the
earliest to be used and are mastered by the age of two in the
average child. Sounds like r, l and s are only mastered at about 3
years, while the sound /z/ (the consonant in the middle of the
word Asia) is only mastered by about 6 years. Of course, not all
languages use all of these sounds, but the sounds that occur very
frequently in the world’s languages tend to be the ones that
children learn first. In contrast, rare sounds like /t/ and the click
sounds of isiZulu, isiXhosa and other Nguni languages are often
mastered fairly late by children learning these languages. The table
below (adapted from Reich 1986:57) illustrates the approximate
sequence and age at which various consonants are mastered.
Examples of words containing each sound are given if it is non-
obvious.
Consonant Average age mastered
/p/ /m/ /n/ /h/ /w/ /b/ 1;6
/k/ /f/ /d/ /t/ /_/ as in sing 2
/f/ /j/ as in you 2;6
/r/ /l/ /s/ 3
/_/ as in chew, /R/ as in shoe 3;6
/z/ /v/ /�/ as in jump 4
/t/ as in thing 4;6
/ð/ as in then 5
/z/ as in Asia 6
Task 3.7
Which of the following words would you expect a 3-year-old
child to have difficulty producing? Consult the table above to
help you answer this question.
Pig zip cat bath
72
Feedback
The p and g sounds of ‘pig’ should not pose a problem to a 3-year-old as
these sounds are acquired at approximately age 1;6 and 2, respectively. A 3-
year-old may have problems saying ‘zip’ as the [z] sound is only mastered
round about 4 years. The /k/ and /t/ sounds in ‘cat’ are acquired at
about age 2. However, the /t/ in ‘bath’ is one of the last sounds to be
mastered, at about 4;6 years. ‘Bath’ and ‘zip’ may thus pose pronunciation
difficulties for a 3-year-old.
Since we have shown that children’s perception abilities are well-

developed from birth, it appears to be children’s control over their
vocal organs that prevents them mastering certain sounds, rather
than an inability to discriminate between sounds. Children often
understand words and sound contrasts that they are not yet able to
pronounce themselves. For example, a child may be able to point
correctly to a picture of a coat or a goat when each is mentioned,
while pronouncing both as coat.
What strategies do children use when they cannot yet produce a
certain speech sound? One option is simply to avoid using words
that contain the problematic sound. Here are some other strategies,
with examples from Jennika’s first 25 words listed earlier.
● Substitution occurs when one sound is replaced by another
one, e. g., that becomes /dat/ (d is substituted for the more
difficult /t/-sound.)
● Assimilation occurs when a sound becomes more like the one
next to it, e.g., when mommy becomes /mama/ the child makes
the second vowel the same as the first one. Assimilation can
also affect consonants, e. g., when rabbit is pronounced as
/bæbit/ the child makes the first consonant the same as the
second one.
● Reduction occurs when children omit sounds, e. g., see that
becomes /siæt/. This often happens in unstressed syllables or at
the end of a word.
Which of the three strategies mentioned above are used in the
following child pronunciations? Hint: Some of the words may
make use of more than one simplification strategy.
/da/ down
/ba/ bottle
/bus/ push
/za/ that
HSY2601 73
/bat/ pocket
/dodi/ doggy
Feedback
/da/ involves reduction (deletion) of sounds at the end of a word, a very
typical strategy in children’s early speech. /ba/ involves reduction of the
unstressed second syllable of ‘bottle’. /bus/ involves two instances of
substitution – /p/ is pronounced /b/ and the sh-sound /R/ is pronounced
/s/. /za/ uses sound substitution as the initial sound of ‘that’ is a late
sound to be acquired, and also uses reduction of the final consonant. /bat/
involves reduction of the unstressed second syllable and substitution as the
initial /p/ of ‘pocket’ becomes a /b/. Assimilation takes place in the word
/dodi/ as the /g/ is changed so that the two consonants are pronounced the
same.
3.4 ORDER IN WHICH CHILDREN ACQUIRE WORDS

Children’s first words refer to objects in their immediate
environment, actions or states, and words that facilitate social
interaction. Reich (1986:44) classifies children’s words into slightly
more detailed categories. The categories at the top of the list are
the most common, and the categories towards the bottom of the
list occur less frequently:
● Objects and living things that move, e.g., mama, dog.
● Objects that the child can manipulate, e.g., ball, juice.
● Action words (verbs), e.g., give, up.
● Modifiers (e. g., adjectives and adverbs that describe
characteristics of something), e.g., dirty, outside.
● Personal-social words (words that express emotional states and
perform social functions), e.g., no, please.
● Function words (short words like to, the, can, is, etc. that serve a
grammatical function). Although function words occur very
frequently in a language, children tend to ignore them. Two
possible reasons include the fact that function words are
generally unstressed and therefore more difficult for children to
perceive than other words, and the fact that they add little to the
meaning and may be omitted without affecting communication.
● Names for clothing the child cannot easily manipulate, e.g., nappy,
trousers.
● Names for places or objects in the environment, e.g., bedroom.
more common
less common
74

Classify each of Jennika’s first words into the 8 categories listed above. Do your findings
agree with the frequency ratings of each of these categories in children’s early speech? (i.e.,
do the word categories at the top of Reich’s list occur more frequently than those further
down the list?)
Jennika Ingram (data adapted from Reich 1986:56)
Form Meaning Word Type Form Meaning Word Type
/ba/ blanket /i/ see
/babi/ blanket /iæt/ see that
/ba/ byebye /a/ that
/baba/ byebye /hat/ hot
/da/ daddy /ap/ up
/dada/ daddy /api/ up
/dadi/ daddy /no/ no
/hai/ hi /nodi/ no
/haidi/ hi /noni/ no
/ma/ mommy /dodi/ no
/mami/ mommy
/mama/ mommy
Feedback
The first thing we notice about Jennika’s vocabulary is that she has several different forms that all have the
same meaning, e. g., /da/, /dada/ and /dadi/ all mean ‘daddy’. This indicates that she has not yet
mastered the pronunciation of these words. Jennika has 6 words for objects (and living things) that move (3
words for ‘mommy’ and 3 words for ‘daddy’). She has 2 words for objects she can manipulate, in this case
her blanket. She has 4 action words (the words for ‘see’ and ‘see that’ and 2 words for ‘up’). She uses only 1
modifier (/hat/ = ‘hot’), 8 personal-social words (the words for ‘no’, ‘hi’ and ‘byebye’) and 1 function word
(/da/ = ‘that’). It seems to be true that most of children’s early words refer to objects (8 out of 22).
However, Jennika also has many personal-social words in her vocabulary (8 out of 22) – perhaps more
than we would expect. As Reich suggests, there are not many modifiers or action words, and there is only 1
function word in her vocabulary.
Evidence from children’s early words show that children do not

merely imitate the language of the environment. If they did, we
would expect them to use the most frequently used words that
occur in adult language first. In a language such as English, articles
and pronouns like the, a, which and that would then be amongst the
first words they would imitate. Yet in most languages these are the
words that are usually acquired late. Everywhere in the world
HSY2601 75
children begin by acquiring content words such as nouns and verbs.

Chomsky would argue that children are born with an advanced idea
of what language looks like and that they therefore ‘know’ what
types of structures they are looking for when they begin to acquire
language. On the other hand, social interactionists would argue that
children learn content words like nouns and verbs first because
these are particularly salient or observable in the environment, are
frequently pointed out or labelled by parents and are particularly
useful for communicative purposes.
The culture in which a child grows up affects the acquisition of
early words. For example, Pye (1988:137) points out that in Chinese
and Kaluli, kinship is an important cultural feature, and the words
of various kinship relations are among the first to be acquired. In
societies where material possessions such as toys form an
important part of child culture, children quickly acquire the names
of various toy objects in their environment.
When children acquire their first words, they may use them in a
rather restricted way, e. g., the word apple may initially be used to
refer only to reddish apples and not also to green or yellow apples.
A word like doggie may initially refer only to the family dog and not
to dogs in general. The technical term for this is underextension,
as the child’s range of referents for a word is narrower than in adult
language. The opposite can also happen. When the child
overextends words, the range of referents is greater than that of
adult language, e.g., the word apple may be used to refer to all kinds
of roundish looking fruit like apples, pears, peaches and apricots.
To give another example, one 22-month old child used the word
bunny to refer to rabbits, pictures of kangaroos in a book, and long-
haired cats, due most probably to the common features of hopping
(rabbits and kangaroos) and long fur (rabbits and cats). According
to Foster-Cohen (1999:136), children overextend over 40% of their
first words.
Try and identify whether the following are examples of
overextension or underextension.
(a) The child says Spot (his dog’s name) to refer to all dogs.
(b) The child says car to refer to cars, buses and motorbikes.
(c) The child says ice cream to refer to ice cream in a cone but
not in a bowl.
(d) The child says Gogo (‘granny’) to refer to everyone with grey
hair.
(e) The child says flower to refer to real flowers but not to
pictures of flowers.
76
(f) The child says pen to refer only to his favourite blue
ballpoint pen.
(g) The child says ball to refer to balls and balloons.
Feedback
(a), (b), (d) and (g) illustrate overextension, and (c), (e) and (f) are examples
of underextension.
A spurt is a sudden The number of words in a child’s vocabulary increases rapidly, and
increase in speed that lasts a vocabulary spurt (i.e., a sudden increase in the rate at which new
for a short time.
words are learnt) has been observed to occur at around 50 words.
Current researchers disagree as to whether all children experience
this vocabulary spurt at some point, or whether some children
acquire new words gradually and never experience a spurt. Figure
3.3 gives an indication of vocabulary growth and the number of
words in a child’s productive vocabulary at each age. Remember,
however, that these are average values and that children differ in
their rate of acquisition. Some children start developing later than
others and some move through the developmental stages faster
than others.
Figure 3.3: Vocabulary growth by age (Reich 1986:43)
HSY2601 77

Figure 3.3 plots the number of words in children’s productive
vocabulary (on the vertical axis [left-hand side] of the graph) as
against the age of the child (on the horizontal axis [the bottom of
the graph]). Use a ruler to draw an imaginary line upwards from
the child’s age at the bottom to the graph itself. Make sure the
ruler is straight. Then estimate how many words a child knows at
that age by comparing the position on the graph with other
marked points. For example, at age 2 the ruler intersects the
graph about halfway between the points marked 118 and 272.
This means that a child knows approximately 200 words at age 2.
Now fill in the approximate number of words a child can
produce at the following ages, by reading this information off the
graph. Notice that you can also work out approximately how
many new words a child learns in each year of life, by subtracting
the total number of words used at a particular age from the
number of words used the previous year. (This figure won’t be
100% accurate as some words drop out of the child’s vocabulary
at various stages.) The first few have been done for you as an
example.
Age Approx. number of Approx. number of new
words in child’s words learnt in a year
productive vocabulary
1 3 3 (3-0)
2 200 197 (200 - 3)
3 900 700 (900 - 200)
4
5
6
78
Feedback
At age 4 the child has a vocabulary of about 1 600 words. Since this is just
an estimate, don’t worry if your answer differs by 50 or 100 words, but read
the instructions and check the graph again if your answer differs by more
than this. Since the child knows about 900 words at age 3, this means the
child learns about 700 words (1 600-900) in the fourth year. By age 5 there
are about 2 100 words in the child’s vocabulary, which means that 500
words (2 100-1 600) are learnt in the fifth year. At age 6 the child knows
about 2 500 words and thus learns approximately 400 new words (2 500-2
100) in the fifth year. Notice that the real ‘explosion’ in vocabulary comes
when the child is between 2 and 4 years old. Also remember that a child’s
comprehension of words (not indicated on the graph) is always higher than his
or her productive vocabulary. For example, at age 6 a child’s comprehension
has been estimated at 8 000 words (Reich 1986:43).

Choose the correct word from the left column to complete the definitions
on the right-hand side. Look up the remaining words in a dictionary if you
are unsure of their meanings and write down their definitions in the margin.
references/ Your _______________ are the

preferences things you like or prefer.
strategies/ ______________ are plans about
strategists how to do something.
perceive/ You ________________ something
receive when you notice it or become aware
of it.
unique/ Something is ________________
universal when it is very widespread or found
all over the world.
evidence/ ______________ is anything that
evident suggests or proves that something is
true or has happened in a certain way.
approximate/ You _______________ something
estimate when you try to judge it without
measuring exactly.
proportion/ The _______________ of
proposition something is how big that part is in
relation to the whole thing.
HSY2601 79
3.5 CONCLUSION
This unit indicated that language acquisition is a gradual process
that takes place over time. Different sounds are acquired in
different developmental stages, whilst children are strategic in the
formulation of meaning by employing certain strategies to make up
for sounds that they have not yet acquired.
80
LEARNING UNIT 4
Putting Words Together
Learningunit4
�
14-18 hours
Contents
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The two-word stage
4.3 Measuring MLU (mean length of utterance)
4.4 The multiple-word stage
4.4.1 The development of questions
4.4.2 The development of negatives
4.4.3 Joining sentences together
4.4.4 Developing communicative competence
4.5 Later linguistic developments
4.5.1 Learning to tell stories
4.5.2 Learning to read
4.5.3 Metalinguistic development
4.6 Conclusion
LEARNING OUTCOMES
● describe children’s linguistic developments from age 2-5
● describe children’s linguistic developments during the school years
● calculate the MLU of a speech sample
two-word stage communicative competence

telegraphic speech ‘top-down’ learning
MLU ‘bottom-up’ learning
multiple-word stage metalinguistic development
HSY2601 81
LEARNING UNIT 4 PUTTING WORDS TOGETHER
Preview
In this learning unit, we investigate some of the ways that
children’s speech changes and develops after age 2. Language
development during this period is still fairly uniform among
children from different language environments. Focusing on
what is universal in language acquisition, we look at children’s
growing language competence as reflected in the increasing
length and complexity of their sentences. We will focus on
describing children’s speech at all linguistic levels – phonological,
morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic, and will start
to put our skills and knowledge into practice by analysing some
actual samples of child language. Finally, we focus on language
development in the school years, including the development of
reading and story-telling skills and the ability to think and talk
about language and how it works.
4.1 INTRODUCTION
We mentioned in learning unit 3 that the linguistic phase signals the
emergence of intentional, communicative use of language. Children
start by producing one-word utterances, then two-word utterances.
As they get older, more words are added, and their utterances get
longer and more complex. In this learning unit we look at some of
the major linguistic developments from age 2 to the early school
years.
4.2 THE TWO-WORD STAGE

An important stage of linguistic development is reached when
children start putting two words together to form simple sentences.
This usually occurs between the ages of approximately 15 months
and 2 years and marks the beginning of the two-word stage.
Children now tune into the unique structural properties of the
language to which they are exposed. As we now know, children
don’t simply imitate the language they hear around them but often
come up with creative utterances like allgone biscuit. This kind of
evidence suggests that children are unconsciously constructing
utterances according to some pattern, although this pattern may
differ from the rules and patterns of adult grammar. Even the
simplest two-word utterances show evidence of syntax, i. e., that
children are creating sentences by following rules, rather than just
randomly stringing words together.
Just before children move into the two-word stage, they begin to
use various strategies to extend their one-word utterances. For
example, some children tag on a meaningless ‘filler’ syllable like /a/
82
Putting Words Together Learning unit 4
or /i/ to the beginning or end of their one-word utterances to

produce utterances like a write or i ball (Foster-Cohen 1999:25-26).
Another strategy is simply to repeat a word, producing utterances
like car car (Reich 1986:70). Although these are not genuine two-
word utterances, they provide evidence of a transition period
between the one-word and the two-word stage.
Look at the following two-word utterances, produced by a two-
year-old girl called Kendall (Bowerman 1973). The context and the
possible meaning are given in brackets after each utterance.
Bed pretty (pointing to the bed she slept in)
Want juice (a statement requesting juice)
Pillow here (pointing to the pillow on her bed)
Kendall swim (comment made while she was swimming)
Mummy read (a statement requesting her mother to read to
her)
Kendall book (showing someone her new book)
There cow (pointing to cow in picture book).
Like one-word utterances, two-word utterances consist mainly of
combinations of content words like nouns and verbs. These are the
kinds of words that carry the main semantic load in sentences.
Function words such as the, is, in and that and words that are not
absolutely essential for conveying the semantic message are omitted,
as they would be in a telegram. Children’s speech from the two-
word stage onwards is thus sometimes referred to as telegraphic
speech, as it includes only the words that carry the main message.
Note that we can understand children’s telegraphic speech because
the missing function words are usually predictable from the context.
Some of the few function words that do appear fairly early in
children’s speech are pronouns (e. g., I, me, you, my, mine, yours),
demonstratives (e.g., this, that) and prepositions (e.g., up, off, on).

Assuming that the meanings given in brackets are correct
interpretations of Kendall’s utterances, fill in the function words
and grammatical morphemes missing from each utterance. What
kinds of function words does she leave out? The first one has
been done for you as an example.
Bed pretty (pointing to the bed she slept in) = My bed is pretty
Kendall doesn’t use the possessive pronoun my or the verb is.
HSY2601 83

her)
There cow (pointing to cow in picture book)
Feedback
Kendall’s utterances don’t include function words like pronouns ( I, my, me),
the verb ‘to be’ (is, am), prepositions (to), articles (a) and grammatical
morphemes like -ing. Possible absent function words are suggested below.
Bed pretty (pointing to the bed she slept in) = My bed is pretty
Pillow here (pointing to the pillow on her bed) = My pillow is here
Kendall swim (comment made while she was swimming) = I am

swimming
Mummy read (asking her mother to read to her) = Mummy, read to
me
Kendall book (showing someone her new book) = This is my book
There cow (pointing to cow in picture book) = There is a cow
What is interesting about these early two-unit utterances is that

children all seem to express the same kinds of semantic or meaning
relationships. In order to be able to analyse the meanings and
functions of children’s utterances we need to familiarise ourselves
with some of the functions of the words in an adult sentence. Look
at the following example:
● Ntombi bought her new jacket at the flea market.
The verb here is bought. It is the action word of the sentence. All
the nouns in the sentence also have different functions or roles.
Ntombi is the agent, as she is the person who performs the action,
in this case, buying. The jacket is the object, as it is the thing which
is affected by the action of the agent (the term patient is also
sometimes used for the object of the sentence). The flea market
fulfils the role of location, as it is the place where the action
happens. And we also have a possessor or owner of something, in
this case her (referring back to Ntombi). The word new is an
attribute, as it describes a characteristic of the jacket.
The psycholinguist Roger Brown classified children’s two-word
utterances into the following ten categories, using many of the
functional roles explained above. His classification looks at each of
the roles of the words in a two-word utterance and the semantic
relationship that exists between these two words. The categories
84
can also be applied to one-word utterances if the context is used to

add in the missing element.
● Nomination (naming), e.g., This doll, Here baby
● Recurrence (expressing that something is happening again or
that the child wants it to happen again), e.g., More noise, Another
raisin
● Non-existence, e.g., Allgone egg, Nomore noise
● Agent-action, e.g., Mommy write, Daddy go
● Action-object, e.g., Throw ball, Eat raisin
● Agent-object, e. g., Mommy book (Mommy is putting the book
away)
● Action-location, e.g., Go movie, Put there
● Agent-location, e.g., Mommy kitchen (Mommy is in the kitchen)
● Possessor-possessed, e.g., Mommy dress (Mommy’s dress)
● Object attribute, e.g., Stove hot
Now try the task below.

(a) What is the semantic relationship between the two words in
each of Kendall’s utterances below?
Bed pretty (pointing to the bed she slept in)
her)
There cow (pointing to cow in picture book)
(b) What are the semantic relationships between the two words
in the following Afrikaans utterances (Vorster 1983:234-
37)? Possible meanings are given in brackets after each
utterance. Remember that the word order differs in
Afrikaans so the order of the elements may differ from the
English examples above, although the semantic
relationships will be the same.
HSY2601 85
Utterance Wynand water

Gloss Wynand water
Meaning Wynand is falling in the
water (Wynand val in die
water)
Utterance: bang kat

Gloss: scared cat
Meaning: He is scared of the cat (Hy
is bang vir die kat)
Utterance: groot hond

Gloss: big dog
Meaning: It’s a big dog. (Dis ’n groot
hond)
Feedback
(a) Bed pretty (pointing to the bed she slept in) = object +
attribute
Want juice (asking for juice) = action + object
Pillow here (pointing to the pillow on her bed) =
nomination
Kendall swim (comment made while she was swimming) =
agent + action
Mummy read (asking her mother to read to her) = agent +
action
Kendall book (showing someone her new book) = possessor
+ possessed
There cow (pointing to cow in picture book) = nomination
(b) Wynand water = agent + object
Bang kat = action + object
Groot hond = attribute + object
Just like adult utterances, children’s utterances can be analysed on

various linguistic levels. In addition to a semantic analysis, like
Brown’s above, we need to look at the pragmatic level (the
communicative function of the utterances), the syntax (the word
classes and word order, i. e., the grammar of the utterance), the
morphology (how words are made up), and, if possible, the
phonology (pronunciation) of the child. To take one simple
86
example, the two-word utterance Mommy bwead (produced when

mother was busy baking bread) can be analysed as follows:
Phonologically the child seems to have mastered sounds like /m/,
/b/ and /d/ but has substituted a /w/ sound for the /r/ in bread.
According to the table on p. 73 the /r/ sound is usually mastered at
about age 3, so this kind of phonological substitution would be
expected in the two-word stage.
Morphologically the utterance consists of 2 words, each of a
single morpheme.
Syntactically there are two nouns, i. e., a subject (mommy) and an
object (bread) but no verb so the utterance is syntactically incorrect
but quite usual for the 2-word stage.
Semantically this falls into Brown’s category agent-object as the
mother is the doer of the action and bread is the object that is
affected by the agent’s action.
Pragmatically the utterance functions as a statement describing a
state of affairs. It is a comment on what is going on in the child’s
environment.
Analyse the utterance Toby shoes, said by a small child named Toby
when showing his new shoes to his older sister. The task requires
you to say something about each of the linguistic levels. Use the
following questions to help you:
Phonological level This level can only be addressed if we
are given a transcription that reflects
pronunciation. The kinds of
questions you would ask yourself
here would be those we looked at in
learning unit 3:
How does the child’s pronunciation
differ from that of an adult?
What sounds does the child have
difficulty pronouncing?
What simplification strategies is the
child using, e. g., assimilation,
reduction, substitution?
Morphological level Can the words be broken down into
smaller meaningful elements? For
example, eats consists of the verb eat
+ the singular verb ending -s.
HSY2601 87
Which word endings are missing or

incorrectly used?
Syntactic level What parts of speech are used, e. g.,
nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc?
Which words are missing?
Are the nouns used as agents or
objects of the sentence?
Is the word order the same as or
different from the equivalent
utterance in adult speech?
Semantic level Into which of Brown’s 10 semantic
categories does the utterance fall?
What does the sentence mean in the
given context?
Pragmatic level What is the function of the utterance
in the context in which it is used, e.g.,
is it a statement, question, request,
warning, command, etc?
Feedback
Phonologically the utterance ‘Toby shoes’ seems to be adult-like as no
evidence to the contrary is given in the form of a more detailed transcription.
Morphologically the utterance consists of 3 morphemes (‘Toby shoe-s’)
indicating that the child can form regular plurals. The possessive morpheme
’s is omitted.
Syntactically there are two nouns, i. e., ‘Toby’ and ‘shoes’, but no verb.
The utterance is syntactically incorrect but quite usual for the 2-word stage.
Semantically this falls into Brown’s category possessor-possessed as Toby
owns the shoes.
Pragmatically the utterance functions as a statement describing a state of
affairs.
4.3 MEASURING MLU (MEAN LENGTH OF

UTTERANCE)
How do researchers measure children’s linguistic progress? In some
cases, researchers count the average number of words in a child’s
sentences, but more often they count the average number of
morphemes. (A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of
language, so a word like cats would consist of two morphemes: cat +
88
-s. The ending -s is considered a morpheme since it has the meaning

‘more than one’.)
The figure that researchers come up with is known as the mean
length of utterance or MLU for a particular child and is an
objective way of measuring a child’s linguistic development. MLU is
calculated by counting the total number of words/morphemes and
dividing by the total number of utterances to obtain the mean
(average) number of words/morphemes per utterance. For the
purposes of this course, we will use morphemes as the basis of our
MLU calculations. For example, if the child produces 100
utterances, containing a total of 170 morphemes, the MLU is 170 ¸
100 = 1.7. An MLU of 1.7 means that the average length of the
child’s utterances is between 1 and 2 morphemes. Here is a
summary of Brown’s rules for calculating MLU.
● An utterance is a sentence or a portion of a sentence.
● Only fully transcribed utterances are used. Do not include
sentences with unclear portions. (Unclear portions are often
marked by ( ) or xxx in a transcription.)
● Count each morpheme, including possessive -’s, plural -s, third
person singular -s, past tense -ed, progressive -ing, etc.
● Count repeated words and phrases.
Notice that there are one or two exceptions to the basic principle
of counting each morpheme:
● Don’t count words like um and oh, but do count words like yes,
no and their equivalents - mmhm, uhuh, etc.
● Compound words like birthday, choo-choo which refer to single
concepts count as 1 morpheme, not 2.
● Irregular past tense forms like woke, went, saw count as 1
morpheme, not 2.
● Diminutives like mommy, kitty count as 1 morpheme, not 2.
Let’s work through an example together.
In this example the child, aged 4;8, is talking to her uncle (Foster-
Cohen 1999:63). Calculate the MLU of the child.
Adult: Do you go to school?
Child: Yep, I go to pre-school.
Adult: Oh really? Is that the same school that S goes to?
Child: No, S goes in kindergarten.
Adult: Kindergarten, OK. What d’you do in pre-school?
Child: We-e-e-ell, I made a snowman (laughs) a army snowman today.
Adult: An army snowman! You had snow at your preschool?
Child:No, it didn’t - we - te - made it out of paper. We teared it with
our hands.
Adult: Oooooh, OK
HSY2601 89
Child: Yeah, I made a uuuh (...) my uh snowman’s body (...) shaped like
triangle. Let’s start by counting the number of utterances. The child
has 5 speaking turns, but the fourth turn contains 2 sentences,
making a total of 6 utterances. Now on to the morphemes:
Utterance 1 (Yep, I go to pre-school) contains 5 morphemes (pre-
school is one concept).
Utterance 2 (No, S goes in kindergarten) is 6 morphemes (goes is
2 morphemes: go + third person singular -s).
Utterance 3 (We-e-e-ell, I made a snowman (laughs) a army snowman
today) is 9 morphemes. (made is an irregular past tense so
counts as 1 morpheme).
Utterance 4 (No, it didn’t - we - te - made it out of paper) is 10
morphemes. (Didn’t is 2 morphemes: did + n’t, the te is not
counted as it is just a hesitation and made is 1 morpheme as it
is an irregular past tense).
Utterance 5 (We teared it with our hands) is 8 morphemes (teared
is two morphemes: tear + -ed and hands is 2 morphemes: hand
+ -s)
Utterance 6 is not counted as portions of the utterance were
unclear and could not be transcribed.
We therefore have 5 + 6 + 9 + 10 + 8 = 38 morphemes divided by
5 utterances = an MLU of 7.6. This means that the child uses an
average of 7.6 morphemes per utterance.
There are often debatable or problematic aspects in calculating
MLU, and not everyone will produce exactly the same answer when
asked to calculate the MLU of the same data, so we will mark this
kind of question leniently in exams and assignments. However, you
need to make sure you know the basic calculation method (number
of morphemes divided by number of utterances) and that you can
attempt to count morphemes accurately following the guidelines
above.
Brown calculated the approximate MLUs of children at various
ages and came up with the following figures (Reich 1986:76). While
these figures are a useful guideline, you need to remember that
children are different and there will be a fair amount of flexibility
with regard to the MLU at any particular age.
90
Approximate MLU Typical age

1.75 22 months (1;10)
2.25 28 months (2;4)
2.75 32 months (2;8)
3.5 41 months (3;5)
4 45 months (3;9)
Although MLU is a useful way of classifying the early stages of

language development, it has been used predominantly with
English and may be less successful or yield very different results
when applied to structurally different languages such as African
languages.

Use the following data (based on Foster-Cohen 1999:59) as a
basis for calculating the MLU of Avi, aged 1;9.
1. back-pack 16. here mama get
that
2. lap 17. see you later
alligator
3. right now 18. I pooted
4. Hi 19. (...) a clown
5. peekaboo 20. a hooks
6. .bottle 21. I reach that
7. here mama 22. get that
8. by lap Aja 23. kick it
9. I sit down here 24. powder
10. I read that 25. I try it
11. I get it 26. Oh cinnamon
roll
12. corner 27. peanut butter
13. by corner 28. thank you
14. throw it 29. have a look
15. I throw it 30. here Papa, bite
that
HSY2601 91
Feedback
There are 30 utterances here but utterance 19 should be discarded since it
contains an untranscribable portion. The Oh in utterance 26 is not counted.
Words like back-pack, peekaboo, cinnamon roll, peanut butter and thank
you are compound words referring to a single concept so they each count as 1
morpheme. The words pooted and hooks each have 2 morphemes. This
makes a total of 65 morphemes divided by 29 utterances = an MLU of
2.24. Don’t worry if your answer differs slightly, as long as it is close to 2.
You may also want to exclude utterance 17 since it seems to be a learned
phrase rather than a genuine 4-word-sentence.
4.4 THE MULTIPLE-WORD STAGE

Once children start to put words together, their utterances quickly
begin to include two-word sentences, three-word sentences and
even longer sentences. The length of children’s sentences increases
gradually throughout the preschool and early school years as they
learn the syntactic rules necessary for using function words and
creating more complex sentences. Children from different language
environments all achieve linguistic competence at roughly the same
age (age 6) in spite of structural differences between languages. By
the time children start school, the majority of the rules of the
language have been internalised – an incredible intellectual task to
have accomplished before school-going age.
The order of acquisition of complex constructions seems fairly
consistent across English children although it may differ slightly in
other languages. The typical order of English acquisition is as
follows:
learnt first present progressive -ing, e.g., walking
prepositions in/on
plural, e.g., cats
irregular past tense, e.g., ate, made
possessive ’s, e.g., the cat’s tail
copula (the verb ‘to be’), e.g., The dog is here
articles the, a
regular past tense, e.g., walked, played
third person singular -s, e.g. She walks
auxiliaries, e.g., can, do, might etc.
As we have seen with word meanings, children sometimes get these

syntactic rules wrong in various ways. One common error is
overextension or overgeneralisation, which occurs when
children apply rules too widely. For example, English-speaking
92
children soon learn the most common rule for plural formation:
add -s to a singular noun to form the plural:
learnt last dog + plural � dogs
This rule is then consistently applied, even to exceptions. Thus, the
child produces forms like songs, books, tables as well as *foots/feets,
*oxes, *sheeps, *childs and so on. (An asterisk (*) before a word or
sentence indicates that it is ungrammatical.)
Overgeneralisation is a common strategy used by all children,
irrespective of the language they are acquiring. For example, Zulu
children have a formidable task facing them when acquiring their
language, as Zulu nouns are classified into 15 classes and each
noun must have the appropriate noun class prefix. In addition,
verbs and adjectives must have an agreement marker that shows
agreement with the class of the noun. At an early stage in their
language acquisition Zulu children may not use any agreement
markers at all. Later they will overgeneralise by using the agreement
markers i- and u-, irrespective of the noun class (Suzman 1982).
The table below shows the different agreement markers used in
adult isiZulu as compared to the overgeneralised agreement
markers i- and u- used by young children:
Adult agreement markers

Class 1 (plural) u-
Class 2 (plural) ba-
Class 3 (singular) u-
Class 4 (plural) i-
Class 5 (singular) li-
Class 6 (plural) a-
Class 7 (singular) si-
Class 8 (plural) zi-
Class 9 (singular) i-
Class 11 (singular) lu-
Class 14 bu-
Class 15 ku-
One interesting phenomenon relating to overextension is that

children frequently pass through a stage of using exceptions
HSY2601 93
correctly before they start overgeneralising. For example, a child

may use correct plural forms like feet and sheep and only later start
using overgeneralised plurals like *foots and *sheeps. The explanation
usually given for children’s correct use of exceptions at an early age
is that they have not yet learnt the rule and have merely memorised
unanalysed forms. (So, imitation does play a limited role in
children’s early acquisition!) Once children start analysing these
forms and work out the rule, they frequently overgeneralise the rule
for a period of time. Eventually the child learns the exceptions to
the general rules and starts to use correct plurals again.
4.4.1 The development of questions

Asking and answering questions is obviously a very important
interactional skill that children must learn. They soon learn to
recognise the rising intonation typically associated with questions
and to give a response, although the response is not always
appropriate at first. Before we look at children’s questions, let’s look
at some of the syntactic and semantic features of questions that
need to be mastered.
Semantically, a question can function either as a request for action
(i.e., for someone to do something) or a request for information
(i.e., for someone to tell you something). For example, Can you shut
the door? is a request for action, while What time is the party? is a
request for information. Syntactically, there are three basic types of
questions in English. Tag questions are formed by adding a short
tag onto a statement. For example, We are going to the shop now, aren’t
we? Yes-no questions are questions which require the answer yes
or no. They are formed by taking a statement like I can swim, and
switching the position of the auxiliary verb and the subject, e.g. Can
I swim? The third type of question is known as a wh-question as it
contains a wh-word like who, what, where. Wh-questions require an
answer other than yes or no, and also have an auxiliary before the
subject noun, e.g. Where can I buy some?
At first, children typically form questions by placing a wh-word like
who, what or where at the beginning of the utterance, e.g. What dolly
doing? Where baby Sarah rattle? The other wh-words (when, how and
why) are only used slightly later, e.g. Why he can’t go? One reason for
this is that the concepts of time, manner and causality are more
abstract and require longer and more complex answers than the
concepts expressed by who, what and where, which can be answered
with a single word or phrase (Tager-Flusberg 1989:152-53). At the
same time, children are developing competence in forming yes-no
questions, but tend to place the subject before the auxiliary, e.g. I
can have some? A little later, children learn that questions require a
94
switch in the position of the auxiliary verb and the subject, e.g. Why
can’t he go?, Did you fix it? or Can I have some? The frequency of
children’s questions increases gradually, and reaches a peak at about
age 5, when questions make up nearly 20% of the child’s utterances
(Reich 1986:118).
4.4.2 The development of negatives

Negatives are used for several different purposes, including saying
that something is absent or nonexistent, rejecting a suggestion, and
denying the truth of a statement. An utterance like no cake can have
any one of the three purposes described above, e.g.
absence (‘There is no cake’)

No cake rejection (‘I don’t want any
cake’)
denial (‘That isn’t cake’)
The earliest negative forms are usually produced by simply adding

the word no or not, usually at the beginning of an utterance, e.g. No
Mommy do it (Foster-Cohen 1999:74-76). The next stage in the
development of negative forms is the use of contracted negatives
like aren’t, mustn’t and don’t. Uncontracted negatives like are not and
do not appear slightly later, at about age 3, once the child realises
that the contracted negatives are made up of an auxiliary verb + not.
However, as in adult speech, contracted negatives remain more
common than uncontracted ones.
4.4.3 Joining sentences together

In the early years, children’s utterances contain only one clause (i.e.,
a phrase containing one main verb). In about the third year they
start to join clauses together to produce complex sentences. At first,
the word and is the most common way of joining clauses together,
while children later learn to use more sophisticated connectives like
because, then, but and so (Foster-Cohen 1999:72, 76).
Another way of joining sentences together is to use a relative clause.
Relative clauses are embedded clauses that give further information
about something, using a relative pronoun (that, who, which). For
example, in the sentence Let’s eat the cake that you made., the relative
clause that you made is embedded in another sentence – Let’s eat the
cake. In their early attempts at relative clauses, children frequently
omit the relative pronoun, e.g. Let’s eat the cake you made, or use an
incorrect pronoun, e. g. Let’s eat the cake what you made. Mastery of
this construction usually only occurs at about age 5 or 6.
HSY2601 95
4.4.4 Developing communicative competence

Developing communicative skills is a lifelong process, starting off
with a baby’s initial ability to express pleasure or discomfort and
ending up with adult speakers’ ability to use language and to adapt
their language in subtle ways to make it appropriate to different
situations. For example, adults need to be able to use formal
language in written business letters, and in-group slang when
chatting to their friends. This pragmatic knowledge and ability –
the ability to use language to communicate in ways that are
appropriate to the context – is known as communicative
competence. We focus here on some of the more important skills
that develop in the preschool years. (In learning unit 6, you will see
what happens when children have problems with the pragmatic
aspects of language.)
Conversational skills develop throughout childhood. Even in the
first weeks of life, caretakers interact with babies by responding to
the baby’s coughs, cries and other vocalisations as if they were
conversing with the baby. Through this early interaction, babies
acquire an understanding of some of the rules of conversation,
such as the fact that conversation involves communication between
two or more people and is organised through turn-taking, so that
each participant takes turns to talk and to listen.
At the one-word stage, when their conversation is still obviously
very limited, children start to initiate conversation by using a word
to ask a question, make a statement or comment on objects and
events around them. Children also start to recognise the differences
between questions and statements and learn to respond
appropriately. Another important aspect of conversation which
children need to learn is that utterances should relate to the
preceding utterance and should stick to one main topic or related
topics rather than jumping from one unrelated topic to another.
One important development is the fine-tuning of the turn-taking
skills that emerged earlier. Children learn some of the subtleties
involved in conversing with others, for example, how to leave
appropriate gaps between the end of one person’s speaking turn
and the beginning of the next speaker’s turn. By about age 3;6
children typically leave one- or two-second gaps between turns,
while the adult norm is to leave only about half a second between
turns (Foster 1990:112). They learn to follow the politeness rules
appropriate to their culture, e. g., to say Please and Could I have ...
instead of just Want biscuit or Gimme another one. Children also
develop their ability to make their conversation relevant and
appropriate to what has gone before, for example to respond to a
96
question by providing information of some kind, or to initiate

conversation by commenting on something.
One final important development is learning what to say to whom,
i. e., adjusting one’s speech to the person one is addressing. An
understanding of different social groups based on age, sex, status
and familiarity is a prerequisite for this kind of language adjustment.
By age 4, children have enough background knowledge to adapt
their speech when acting out different roles such as doctor, patient,
teacher and pupil (Foster 1990:127).
Now that we’ve read the theory, let’s look at some actual samples
of children’s developing language. There are samples of 1-year-old,
2-year-old, 3-year-old, 4-year-old and 5-year-old speech. The
transcriptions all come from the CHILDES database and are of
American children.
SAMPLE 1
In this transcription Geraldine’s mother is talking to Geraldine
(aged 1;6). (The database can be found on the internet at www.
childes.psy.cmu.edu/cornell/haas1917).
MOT: What’s this?

CHI: Hat.
MOT: No.
MOT: What’s this?
CHI: Hat.
MOT: Hair.
MOT: What’s this?
CHI: Nose.
MOT: Nose.
MOT: Yeah.
MOT: What’s this?
CHI: Tongue.
MOT: Tongue.
MOT: Gerry, what are these?
CHI: Um.
MOT: What are these?
MOT: What are those?
CHI: Hands.
HSY2601 97
MOT: Hands, yeah.

MOT: You’re a good girl.
CHI: All gone.
MOT: All gone.
SAMPLE 2
The next transcription is of Geraldine (aged 2;5) and her mother
during Gerry’s bathtime (www. childes. psy. cmu. edu/cornell/
haas1929). The line marked %act indicates an action rather than a
verbal utterance.
CHI: I took off my socks.
CHI: Mommy.
CHI: Mommy, see see.
MOT: Good Girl.
MOT: Take off your coat now.
CHI: No, not my coat.
MOT: Well, you can’t go in the tub with your coat on.
MOT: I’ll be right back, hon.
CHI: It’s not a coat.
MOT: Take it off now.
%act: Gerry is crying
MOT: What’s the matter.
CHI: I hit my, my xxx.
MOT: You did all right.
MOT: You did fine.
CHI: I ripped it.
MOT: No, it’s okay.
SAMPLE 3
Mary (aged 3;0) is chatting to her aunt: (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu/
cornell/horn1603)
CHI: Where’s my coffee?

AUN: Where’s your coffee?
CHI: Uhhuh.
CHI: I want to drink it.
98
AUN: Children don’t have coffee.

CHI: My coffee is right here, right here, see?
AUN: Yeah.
CHI: It’s cold.
AUN: You a big girl now, huh?
AUN: You drink coffee.
CHI: Uhhuh.
CHI: I want to drink it.
SAMPLE 4
In the following conversation Matthew (aged 4;0) and his mother
are talking about the weather (www. childes. psy. cmu. edu/cornell/
mom06).
CHI: Cold.
CHI: I think outside it’s a little warmer.
CHI: Put it on my chair too.
MOT: Want me to put it on the chair too?
MOT: It’s not summer any more is it sweetheart?
CHI: No.
MOT: Okay.
CHI: It’s Fall.
MOT: Is it Fall?
CHI: Yes, it’s cold out in the morning.
MOT: Oh, is that what happens when it’s Fall?
CHI: Yeah.
MOT: What else happens when it’s Fall?
CHI: Well, gets colder than the summer.
MOT: Yeah, it does.
MOT: Now, what happens after Fall?
CHI: I don’t know.
CHI: Winter.
MOT: Winter.
HSY2601 99
SAMPLE 5
In the last sample Peter (aged 5;0) is in hospital, about to have an
operation. His father and mother are with him (www. childes. psy.
cmu.edu/cornell/Isno11).
CHI: When are we going to take an operation?

MOT: Right here.
CHI: No, I’m not.
FAT: They’re going to let me do it, Peter.
MOT: They’ve got a special room where they’ll be, the
anesthetist who puts you to sleep, some nurses
maybe and Dr Kelly.
CHI: Dr Kelly makes me go to sleep.
MOT: No, I think, I think the anesthetist gives you the
things to go to sleep.
MOT: Dr Kelly does the operation.
CHI: Dr Kelly?
CHI: I don’t like this Momma.
CHI: Why don’t we got one of these things in ( ...)
MOT: Well yeah, what do you think they’re going to
have you sit up in there while they’re doing it,
huh?
CHI: No, I think the doctor is bringing me.
MOT: Oh, they’ll probably have you walk.
CHI: No.
Read the transcriptions and then try the task that follows.

Read samples 1-5 of children’s language, paying careful attention
to the children’s ages in each sample. Try and describe in broad
terms (1-2 paragraphs) the ways in which children’s language
differs at age 2, 3, 4 and 5, paying particular attention to the
length and complexity of utterances at each age.
100
Feedback
The sentence length and complexity of sentence structure clearly increases as
children mature. As far as sentence length is concerned, one-year old speech
contains single-word utterances. The two-year-old speech seems to contain 1-5
words per utterance, indicating that this child is in the telegraphic stage. The
sample of three-year-old speech contains sentences up to 8 words long. The
four-year-old and five-year-old speech also contains up to 8 words per
utterance. We shouldn’t, however, read too much into these similar results as
we are only given a small amount of data in the task and the contexts of the
conversations may differ. The important point is that from about age 3
children can use fairly long sentences and express complex ideas.
In terms of syntactic complexity, the fact that the data is American makes it
difficult for us to analyse the grammaticality of some of the sentences.
However, in broad terms, two-year-old speech includes simple vocabulary and
also some function words. By age three, the vocabulary and syntax is still
simple, but most sentences are grammatical. By age four and five, more
sophisticated vocabulary and complex constructions like comparatives are
being used. A few ungrammatical utterances, like ‘Why don’t we got ..’ still
remain. Pragmatically, even the child in Sample 1 shows an ability to stick
to the topic and answer questions. In later samples the children show an
increasing ability to answer appropriately and also to initiate conversation by
introducing topics and shifting the conversational topic.
4.5 LATER LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENTS

We do not know as much about language development after about
age 5 as we do about language development up to this time. Here
are some reasons for this state of affairs.
While the research literature in education has always focused
on later language development, it has only been fairly recently
that linguists have turned their attention to language
development after the age of about five or six. There are a
number of reasons for this relative neglect. One is the sense
that the hard part is done by the age of five, and that change
thereafter is slow, and mostly schooled rather than
developing naturally. Another is that older children are
generally shyer and more silent around researchers than
younger children and thus exhibit less ‘data’ for capture
(Stephens 1988). Moreover, since older children are aware
that their language can be deliberately modified for the
audience, their performances are often stilted and less natural
than those of younger children. And finally, older children are
much more mobile. The most interesting language may be
happening at twenty miles an hour on a skateboard. Clearly,
HSY2601 101
these are not ideal recording conditions! (Foster-Cohen

1999:171)
One obvious area of language development is in the number of
vocabulary items a child can produce and comprehend. According
to estimations, a grade 3 pupil (aged 8 or 9) has a vocabulary of 4
000 - 10 000 words while a matric pupil has a vocabulary of about
40 000 words (excluding names, place-names and idioms). This
huge growth in vocabulary from age 8 to age 18 implies that
children learn 3000 words a year or 8 new words a day, not only
from direct teaching at school, but more importantly, from reading
(Foster-Cohen 1999:176).
We know that by the time children start school they have
internalised most of the rules of their language. After this, learners
‘fine-tune’ their existing linguistic competence, learning finer details
such as irregular constructions and exceptions to rules. Although
negation errors like I didn’t did it and overgeneralisation of past
tense forms like runned, drawed, drinked, eated and bited continue well
into the school years, children gradually learn the exceptions to the
past tense and various other rules. At school children start to make
use of a wider range of clause types than before. For example, they
learn to use passive sentences (e. g., The ball was thrown by the boy),
which are pretty rare in English, even in adult speech. At school,
children’s ability to interpret complex sentences improves, and their
descriptions become better as they start to use adjectives and other
modifiers to produce phrases like a big lion, three men. After age 12
they learn to use a descriptive prepositional phrase after the noun, e.
g. The girl with the red shirt.
Some of the major language developments that occur after children
start school include the skills of telling stories, reading and writing
as well as learning to think and talk about language and how it
works. Let’s look at some of these developments in more detail.
4.5.1 Learning to tell stories

During the school years children learn to produce longer stretches
of texts, including stories . Children’s pragmatic development
includes an increasing ability to tell stories that hang together and
that are logical in terms of the order or sequence of events
described and the notion of causality (what causes something to
happen). Children gradually become familiar with the various
elements of a story, namely characters, plot, setting and theme.
Let’s look at some actual examples of children’s stories to find out
how their storytelling skills improve over time. The three samples
were all based on a sequence of pictures that started with the
pictures given below:
102
Task: Invent a story for the pictures
Age 3;9 (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu/frogs/slobin/03f)
And, um, he, this dog is looking into the bowl. And then the frog is still in
there. And now he got away. The dog [ = frog ] got away, and then he tried to
go in but he didn’t, couldn’t go in!
Age 5;11 (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu/frogs/slobin/05k)
When the boy and the dog were asleep the frog jumped out of the jar and then
the boy and the dog woke up, the frog was gone. Then the boy got dressed and
the dog stuck his head in the jar. And then the boy opened up his window and
called out for his frog and the dog still had the jar on his head.
Age 9;6 (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu/frogs/slobin/09c)
Well there was a boy and he had a frog and a dog. He loved his frog very much,
and maybe his dog did too. One night when he was asleep the frog climbed out
of his jar. The boy woke up the next morning, the frog was gone. The dog
looked concerned. The boy quickly got dressed and the dog put his head in a jar.
He got stuck there, but the boy did not pull it off.

Read the three stories above, paying careful attention to the
children’s ages in each sample. Try and describe in broad terms
(1-2 paragraphs) the ways in which children’s storytelling ability
improves in these three samples. Focus specifically on the length
and complexity of the story, the vocabulary and specifically the
connectives used, and the logical sequencing of events.
Feedback
The samples clearly show that children’s stories get longer and more detailed
as they get older. In the first sample (produced by a child aged 3;9) the story
consists of short sentences and relies heavily on the connective ‘and’ to join
sentences together. The child’s vocabulary is rather limited, e.g., he uses the
term ‘bowl’ rather than the more appropriate ‘jar’ or ‘bottle’. Also notice
that the use of the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘his’ is confusing as it isn’t always clear
who the pronoun refers to.
HSY2601 103
In sample 2 (from a child aged 5;11) the story starts rather abruptly without
introducing the characters, the boy, the dog and the frog. The child makes use
of connectives such as ‘and’ and ‘then’ but joins sentences that have no logical
connection, e.g. ‘Then the boy got dressed and the dog stuck his head in the
jar.’
At age 9;6 the child begins the story as an adult would, by introducing the
three main characters. The story describes the events in a logical order, and
tells us when each event occurred, e.g. ‘One night when he was asleep the frog
climbed out of his jar.’ Connectives like ‘and’ and ‘but’ are used
appropriately, as is sophisticated vocabulary like ‘concerned’. He even
describes the characters’ feelings and motivation, telling us that ‘the boy loved
his frog very much, and maybe his dog did too’. Pronouns such as ‘he’ and
‘his’ are used in appropriate ways, showing that the child is able to omit non-
essential information, such as repeated names. When necessary, the child
reintroduces the term ‘the boy’ to prevent ambiguity.
4.5.2 Learning to read

There are several skills that make up our ability to read. These
include phonological awareness (i. e., awareness of the sounds of
language), awareness of the link between letters (spelling) and
sound, the ability to recognise familiar words and the ability to
decode unfamiliar words using both letter-sound relationships and
contextual knowledge. According to Ehri (1991:63):
Understanding the processes involved in learning to read
turns out to be a complex task because reading entails a host
of processes operating together in concert. For example, as
readers’ eyes move across a line of text, they are picking up
visual information about letters, words and sentences at the
same time as they are mentally processing the information by
computing the structure and meaning of the words and
sentences; integrating this with information they have already
read and their world knowledge to understand the text, and
forming expectations about forthcoming text.
Reading requires us to recognise printed words so that we can
access their meaning and pronunciation, both stored in our
memories. There are two ways to recognise printed words: the first
is simply to recognise a word because we have read it so many
times before. This recognition of whole words without breaking
them down into parts is known as top-down word recognition.
The second way is to break a word up and map the letters onto the
sounds they represent. This process of building up words from
smaller units such as letters and syllables is known as bottom-up
word recognition. Why do we need two different ways of
recognising printed words? Typically, common words are
104
recognised as unanalysed wholes, using a top-down strategy. Top-

down word recognition is also essential for reading irregular words
like two and answer as these do not follow the conventional letter-
sound rules. Bottom-up word recognition is necessary because we
need to be able to read and pronounce words that we have never
seen in print before.
Children typically learn to read their first few words as unanalysed
wholes, using a top-down strategy. At some point, however,
(usually age 6-7), children must acquire bottom-up word
recognition skills, learning to divide words into sounds and match
sounds with letters. Research has shown that good readers make
more use of top- down reading than unskilled readers (Taylor &
Taylor 1990:174).
Learning to read occurs in three stages: The prereading stage
begins during the preschool years and children start to participate
in literacy events, such as listening to adults reading stories aloud,
playing with books, learning nursery rhymes, learning the alphabet,
etc. During the prereading stage children also increase their
phonological awareness, i.e., the ability to focus on the sounds of
words rather than their meaning. Examples of this growing
phonological awareness include the ability to recognise rhyme and
the ability to identify words that begin or end with the same sound.
Research has shown that phonological awareness is a key ingredient
in successful reading and that ‘improving children’s ability to
manipulate sound segments of spoken words, and to link sound
segments with letters, caused them to become better readers and
spellers’ (Stuart 1995:33).
The initial reading stage is when children begin to understand
how to map sounds onto letters and understand the principles of
the alphabetic spelling system. The phonics method focuses in
detail on teaching children the sound-letter relationships in
language, e.g., that the letter combinations ee and ea ‘say’ /i/, that
-tion represents the sound ‘shin’, that gh is usually silent in English
and that the ‘silent e’ at the ends of English words changes the
vowel sound, etc. Children learn to recognise common words and
read simple text. They learn to figure out unfamiliar words and
follow story lines in text. Exposure to a wide range of books and
learning to associate reading with a pleasant environment also play
an important part in getting children to make the connection
between meaning and print.
In their second year of reading instruction, children move into the
fluency stage, where they become faster and more skilled at the
activities learnt in the initial reading stage. As their vocabularies
increase they learn to recognise more and more words and to
HSY2601 105
effectively figure out unfamiliar words. Children who read a lot

acquire larger vocabularies and more effective comprehension skills
and begin to outperform those who do less reading.
The final stage of learning to read begins somewhere around the
fourth year of reading instruction and is known as the reading to
learn stage. From this point onwards, children are sufficiently
skilled readers to be able to use reading to find out new
information and comprehend unfamiliar ideas. Even later, children
and teenagers learn to analyse and react to what they read, and to
recognise multiple viewpoints in text.
4.5.3 Metalinguistic development

Metalinguistic development is the development of the ability to
think and talk about language. It involves reflecting on language and
how it works (as we do when we study linguistics!). There are many
different skills that make up a child’s growing metalinguistic
awareness, including the ability to judge the grammaticality of
sentences, to define words and appreciate linguistic humour – jokes,
riddles, tongue twisters, etc. Before age 5, children’s metalinguistic
knowledge of language is largely implicit, but by age 7 they can
consciously access this knowledge and describe it verbally.
One of the first metalinguistic skills to emerge is the ability to
correct one’s own speech errors and slips of the tongue. Children
as young as 18 months can correct their own utterances, e.g., if they
realise they have made a syntactic or pronunciation error. For
example, in the first frog story above, the child corrects his syntax
as follows: ‘… and then he tried to go in but he d’dn’t, cou’dn’t go in!’ This
shows that children are actively monitoring their own speech. By
age 7 children can recognise whether sentences are grammatical or
not and correct most errors.
Some of the metalinguistic abilities that emerge in the primary
school years include the ability to use grammatical terms like noun
and verb, and the ability to give appropriate definitions of words.
Preschoolers’ definitions of words tend to be immature in that they
are concrete and are based on personal experiences, while at school
children gradually learn to define words in more abstract terms, e.g.,
by assigning words to categories and mentioning characteristics and
functions of objects (Taylor & Taylor 1990: 268-9). For example, an
adult definition of a word like knife might be something like the
following: A knife is a tool (category name) with a sharp metal blade
(appearance) that is used to cut (function). A 4-year-old child’s
definition might involve pointing to an actual knife, saying This is a
knife. Between age 5 and 10 they might give definitions like A knife
is for cutting (function), or You cut with a knife, and you cut yourself
106
(personal experience) or A saw is like a knife (giving the name of a

similar object).
Now check your understanding by completing the task below:

Write a paragraph in which you summarise some of the most
important language developments in school-aged children.
Feedback
Syntactic and lexical (vocabulary) development continues during the school
years. According to estimations, from age 8 to age 18 children learn 3 000
words a year. Children’s utterances become gradually more adult-like as they
learn the exceptions to the past tense and various other rules and learn to use
a wider range of sentence structures than before. These include the passive,
adjectives and other modifiers and descriptive prepositional phrases. During
the school years children learn to produce longer stretches of texts, including
stories that hang together in a logical manner. At first the main connective
they use is ‘and’. Later they use more varied connectives as well as more
sophisticated vocabulary, sentence construction, etc. A major milestone is
reached in the early school years when children learn to read by matching
sounds with letters (usually age 6-7). Reading assists language development
by familiarising children with new words and sentence structures and is an
important source of new information. Finally, the school years are an
important time for metalinguistic development – the development of the
ability to reflect on language and talk about how it works. There are many
different skills that make up a child’s growing metalinguistic awareness,
including the ability to correct errors in speech, judge the grammaticality of
sentences, define words and appreciate linguistic humour. Before age 5,
children’s metalinguistic knowledge of language is largely implicit, but by age
seven they can consciously access this knowledge and describe it verbally.

Many of the verbs used in this learning unit can be turned into nouns. The
verb describes an action, and the noun usually describes the result of this
action. Look at the verb used in each of the following sentences and fill in
the corresponding noun in the space provided. The first two have been
done for you as an example. Hint: many of these nouns end in -tion.
If you define a word you produce a definition
If you calculate MLU you do a calculation
If you investigate a topic you do an
If you classify something you come up with a
If you overgeneralise a rule you make an
HSY2601 107
The process of acquiring a language is known as
If you converse with someone you engage in a
If you distinguish between two things you make a
If you utter words you produce an
If you communicate with someone you engage in
If you simplify something, the result is a
4.6 CONCLUSION
This unit further explored the different language developmental
stages of children, specifically focusing on the developmental
stages of children which occur after the one-word stage. The two-
word stage, calculation of the MLU as well as the multiple word
stage is discussed in depth. Later developmental stages, which
include the telling of stories, learning to read as well as
metalinguistic development are also discussed.
108
LEARNING UNIT 5
Language Input and Individual Differences
Learningunit5
�
14-18 hours
Contents
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The critical period
5.2.1 Children who lack input
5.2.2 Dissociation syndromes
5.3 Caretaker speech
5.4 Enriching a child’s linguistic environment
5.5 Individual Differences
5.5.1 Differences in the route of language development
5.5.2 Differences in rate of acquisition
5.6 Conclusion
LEARNING OUTCOMES
● identify the problems that children who have been reared in isolation experience when they attempt
to acquire language
● explain the critical period hypothesis and cite research findings that support this hypothesis
● identify characteristics of baby talk and discuss its role in language acquisition
● identify and account for individual differences that may occur in the endpoint, strategy and rate of
early language acquisition
input baby-talk words

output expansion
critical period wild/feral children
critical period hypothesis dissociation syndromes
caretaker analytic vs gestalt learning
caretaker speech referential vs expressive learning
HSY2601 109
LEARNING UNIT 5 LANGUAGE INPUT AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Preview
In this learning unit we look at some situations where children do
not grow up in a speech-filled environment and acquire little or
no language. We discuss the idea that children’s ability to acquire
their first language is dramatically reduced after puberty, although
a second or additional language may be learnt after this period.
We also focus on the language directed at young children and
investigate the problem of how children use the language they
hear around them as a basis for working out the rules of the
language in a way that will enable them to use language creatively.
To balance our earlier focus on universal aspects of language
acquisition, this learning unit also focuses on aspects of language
acquisition that differ from child to child, such as the rate and
style of acquisition.
5.1 INTRODUCTION
Imagine a situation in which a child grows up hearing no spoken
language – a baby abandoned in a forest, for example, and brought
up by wolves. What language or communication system would you
expect the child to use? Write your answer in the space provided
before you continue reading.
........................................................
........................................................
Children who have been isolated from human contact do not
acquire language, although they may use grunts and gestures of
various kinds as a primitive form of communication. A real-life
example of this situation occurred in France in 1799, when an 11-
year-old boy was found in the countryside around Aveyron. He had
grown up without human contact, feeding off forest plants and
fruits, and he spoke no language. He was nicknamed Victor, the
wild boy of Aveyron, and was later extensively trained to try and
get him to use spoken language:
A young French doctor named Itard took over the task of
attempting to train Victor for normal life, and subjected him
to a strict training regimen. It is particularly noteworthy,
therefore, that despite this regimen, Victor did not progress
very far linguistically. With great effort, he apparently
mastered the concept of word reference, initially treating the
words he learned as names which could only be applied to
the objects on which he had been trained, and then gradually
coming to extend them to any of a class of similar objects.
110
Language Input and Individual Differences Learning unit 5
He even over-generalised creatively in the way normal

children are known to do.
Having mastered some nouns, Victor was then taught a few
adjectives (e.g. ‘petit’ (‘small’), ‘grand’ (‘big’)) and some action
verbs (e. g. ‘jeter’ (‘throw’), ‘toucher’ (‘touch’)). This highly
skeletal communication system appeared to have been the
height of Victor’s linguistic achievement. He did manage to
write the words in his system, but the system itself does not
appear to have become any more complicated: no pronouns,
no auxiliaries, no embedded clauses. (Foster-Cohen 1999:123-
4)
A similar case is that of Robin, a hearing child of deaf parents, who
was exposed to so little spoken language that he learnt only a few
words of English. At age 6, teachers assumed that he was deaf.
Once it was discovered that his minimal spoken language was a
result of lack of exposure and not of deafness, he was transferred
to a hearing school where he quickly learned to speak (Reich
1986:248). Cases like these show that although all children are
genetically capable of acquiring language, exposure to language is a
necessary prerequisite for language acquisition. Up to now we have
focused primarily on the output of children of various ages, but in
this learning unit we will focus on the input children hear, and the
role it plays in language acquisition.
5.2 THE CRITICAL PERIOD

If a person does not acquire any language during childhood, is it
possible to acquire a language later in life, say after the age of 12 or
so? In other words, is there a set deadline for language acquisition,
a critical period during which language must be acquired? This idea
gained prominence after the publication of Eric Lenneberg’s book,
Biological Foundations of Language, in 1967, and came to be known as
the critical period hypothesis. The hypothesis relates closely to
the nature-nurture issue, suggesting that children’s ability to learn
their first language effectively ends at the onset of adolescence
because of physiological changes in the brain at this time. Note that
the focus here is on the acquisition of a first language after puberty,
and not on the acquisition of a second or additional language, since
there are millions of people all over the world who learn a second
or third language during adolescence or adulthood with greater or
lesser degrees of success.
If there is a critical period for learning a first language, the next
important questions to examine are:
How long does the critical period last?
What factors create the critical period?
HSY2601 111
For example, is language acquired because of an inner biological

timetable (nature) or because environmental circumstances are
most favourable at that time (nurture)? Do our mental processes
and the physiological structure of our brains change with the onset
of puberty (i.e., around the age of 12-13)? Does this change affect
our natural language learning ability? Does the social and
communicative environment in which we acquire language change
as we grow older?
5.2.1 Children who lack input

The question of whether there is a critical period for language
acquisition is not easily answered with a straightforward yes or no.
One reason for this is that psycholinguists cannot experiment on
people! It would be unethical to bring up a child in isolation to find
out whether he or she could learn language after being
reintroduced to society. However, some of these questions have
been partially answered by studying the language development of
wild or feral children. These are children like Victor who have
grown up in the wild, away from human society or who have been
shut up in isolation by abusive parents. More than 60 cases of these
children have been documented over the years, including a South
African wild child, allegedly brought up by baboons and nicknamed
Lucas, the baboon-child. Most of these children experienced severe
problems in acquiring language after they were found. However,
five of them learnt sign language and nine succeeded in learning
some spoken language, although they never attained adult
standards (Reich 1986:298).
More evidence regarding the critical period comes from studying
the language acquisition of deaf children. Because 90% of deaf
children grow up in families with hearing parents, they often do not
acquire sign language as a mother tongue because they lack a
signing environment at home. Instead, they learn sign language
after age 7, when they encounter it for the first time from their
peers in schools for the deaf. Research has shown that these
children never become fluent signers, regardless of how long they
are exposed to sign language (Newport 1991). This evidence
suggests that the critical period may be even shorter, ending at
about age five or six rather than at puberty.
We have already referred to the wild child Victor, who grew up
outside human society, with no linguistic input of any kind before
age 11. But the most famous case is that of a 13-year-old girl
known as Genie, who was found by social workers in Los Angeles
in 1970, just 3 years after the publication of Lenneberg’s book. She
had been kept tied to a potty-chair in a room for 11½ years and
112
had heard almost no language, either from her parents or from

radio or television. At the time she was found her vocabulary
consisted of fewer than twenty words. She understood ‘red’, ‘blue’,
‘green’ and ‘brown’; ‘Mother’ and some other names; the verbs
‘walk’ and ‘go’; and assorted nouns, among them ‘door’, ‘jewellery
box’ and ‘bunny’. Her productive vocabulary – those words she
could utter – was even more limited. She seemed able to say only
‘Stopit’ and ‘Nomore’, and a couple of shorter negatives (The New
Yorker April 13 1992).
Linguists were intrigued by the possibility of observing the
language development of a child who was over the age of puberty
and of verifying for themselves whether or not the critical period
hypothesis was true. A young postgraduate student, Susan Curtiss,
was assigned the project of tracing Genie’s language development.
Genie was moved from hospital to a series of foster homes and
given extensive psychological treatment and language training.
After a year her grammar resembled that of an 18-month-old child
in the two-word stage. It seemed that she was progressing, and that
the critical period hypothesis was false. But the acceleration in
language development that occurs in normal children did not
happen in Genie’s case. The short simple utterances persisted for
more than three years. When she did produce longer utterances,
they consisted of a string of words without any grammatical
structure, e.g., Bad orange fish no eat bad fish or Mr W say put face in big
swimming pool. It seemed that although words could be learned,
grammar was more of a problem:
Frustratingly, a number of grammatical morphemes did make
brief appearances in Genie’s utterances. But they did not stay.
It was as if, having produced them from memorisation at first
(as normal children so), they then made no sense to her, and
were dropped. So, for example, ‘-ing’, plural markers, ‘-ed’
and possessive ‘-’s’ made very brief appearances before
disappearing... The only subject pronouns to appear were ‘I’
and ‘you’ and the latter only appeared twice in the data. She
never produced either relative pronouns or wh-words
spontaneously, although she did manage the latter in training
sessions (Foster-Cohen 1999:125).
As the critical period hypothesis predicted, some aspects of
language such as grammatical structure seem not to be successfully
learned after puberty. This suggests that even if children are born
with Universal Grammar, Universal Grammar cannot operate as a
language acquisition device after puberty. Of course, Genie’s lack of
progress may have been due to mental retardation, the trauma of
her childhood or any number of other factors and scientists still
HSY2601 113
cannot say conclusively whether the critical period hypothesis is

valid, and how much of our language ability is innate.
5.2.2 Dissociation syndromes

An interesting facet of Genie’s case was that her cognitive
development continued steadily even after her language had ceased
to improve – her mental age increased by 1 year for every year after
she was found. This relates to the question we raised in learning
unit 2, namely whether language and cognition are separate
faculties or dependent on each other in some way. Genie’s case
suggests that the two are independent (‘dissociated’) facets of the
human mind. Other research on children with various disabilities
has also shed light on this question, supporting Chomsky’s view
that language development and cognitive development are indeed
independent. In certain of these children, severe cognitive
deficiencies (as indicated by a very low IQ) go hand in hand with
quite sophisticated language competence. The opposite is also true,
as children with SLI (Specific Language Impairment), for example,
have impaired language without any associated cognitive
deficiencies. We will look at some aspects of this fascinating area of
language acquisition research in learning unit 6. Now let’s turn our
attention to the kind of input that most children hear around them
in their early years.
5.3 CARETAKER SPEECH

Children’s exposure to language consists mainly of the language
addressed to them by caretakers. In this context the term caretaker
refers to any person involved in the bringing up of children, e. g.,
mothers, fathers, older siblings, grandparents, domestic helpers,
preprimary schoolteachers, etc. According to the social
interactionists, if we want to understand how children acquire a
complex system like language, then we need to examine more
closely the nature of this communication as well as the
environment in which the child grows up. By environment we refer
to both the social (i.e., the culture, class and ethnic group in which
the child grows up) and the linguistic environment (i.e., the kinds
of language that the child is exposed to). This problem can be
broken down into the following kinds of questions:
(a) Do adults speak in a different way to young children than they
do to older children and adults?
(b) If adult speech to young children is different from ordinary
speech, how does it differ, i.e., what are its characteristics?
(c) Do all members of a speech community and do all cultures
speak to children in the same way? In other words, are the
characteristics of caretaker speech universal? (Here we are
114
interested in the way in which different societies as well as

different communities within the same society speak to
children.)
(d) Is caretaker speech necessary, or is it simply a useful facilitator
in the acquisition process?
Research has shown that adults do indeed speak differently when
addressing young children than when addressing older children and
adults. Psycholinguists use the terms caretaker speech,
motherese or baby talk to refer to speech directed at young
children. You should be aware that the social organisation and the
status and role of children in a particular society affect the way that
adults interact with them, and the amount and kind of speech
addressed to them. In some cultures, adults interact very little with
children, believing they should be seen and not heard. For example,
the Kaluli people in Papua New Guinea do not engage in much
sustained interaction with their children until they are at least 18
months old. Other societies believe that it is important to interact
with their children from an early age and encourage children to
express themselves and contribute to the conversation.
Let’s look at an example to get an idea of some of the
characteristics of caretaker speech. In the following conversation a
grandmother is interacting with her granddaughters of 2;6 and 3;10
in Sesotho (Demuth no date: 34-35).
Grandmother: ’Neuoe uena le etsa joang?

What are you doing?
Neuoe (2;6) Re isa (Adult form = rea
itlhatsoa)
We’re washing.
Grandmother: E?
What?
Neuoe: Rea isatsoa (Adult form = rea
itlhatsoa)
We’re washing ourselves.
Grandmother: Lea itlhatsoa?
Are you washing yourselves?
Neuoe: E.
Yes.
Grandmother: Le itlhatsoa hokae?
Where are you washing?
Mother: Ere nokaneng.
HSY2601 115
Say ‘at the creek’.

Grandmother: Le itlhatsoa hokae?
Where are you washing?
Neuoe: Linokanengeng (Adult form =
linokaneng)
At – at the creeks.
Diminutives are words

indicating a small or young Research has identified the following characteristics of caretaker
version of something, e.g., speech (adult-to-child language) as compared to ordinary adult-to-
in English, dog becomes
doggy, in Northern Sotho adult language:
mpša becomes mpšana, ● Sing-song, high-pitched intonation.
etc.
● Use of special vocabulary. The simplified words and diminutives
like bunny (‘rabbit’), dindins (‘dinner’) and doggy (‘dog’) used by
adults when speaking to very young children are known as
baby-talk words. This phenomenon is found in many different
languages, for example in Northern Sotho, where the adult
word dijo (‘food’) becomes jaja and the adult word ngwana
(‘baby’) becomes nana.
● Shorter utterance length.
● It is generally grammatical.
● It focuses on the ‘here and now’, i. e., on things that are
observable in the child’s immediate environment at that
particular time. In the example above, the grandmother is
asking questions about the game the girls are currently engaged
in and the actions they are miming.
● Slower speech rate than in adult-to-adult language, with
frequent pauses between utterances.
● Clear enunciation.
● Frequent questions and commands. For example, notice the
frequent use of questions to encourage the child to speak in the
Sesotho example above.
● Frequent repetition and expansion. Expansion is the term used
when a caretaker repeats a child’s utterance in a grammatically
correct form, often adding elements omitted by the child. For
example, when a child says bean, the mother might respond Yes,
eat your beans. Expansions are very common in caretaker speech,
making up about 20% of all utterances addressed to children
(Strapp 1999:386).
● Caretakers often fine-tune their speech so that it is slightly
above the current level of their children’s language output. See
figure 5.1 below.
116
Figure 5.1: Mother’s MLU adjustment in response to the child’s increasing

MLU (Moerk 1974:106 in Reich 1986:89-90)
The graph in figure 5.1 compares the MLU of mothers’ speech to

children in comparison to the MLU of their children’s utterances.
The graph can be read by starting at any point along the horizontal
axis, e. g., at the point where the child’s MLU = 2. Now move
upwards in a straight line until you touch the dotted line, and then
move left from the point at which you crossed the line to find out
the MLU of the mother when the child’s MLU is 2. You will see
that the mother’s MLU is approximately 4, and it continues to stay
slightly ahead of the child’s, e.g., the mother’s MLU is 5 when the
child’s is 3, etc.
‘Baby-talk words’ are the simplified words and diminutives used
by adults when speaking to very young children. List five baby-
talk words in a language other than English, giving the normal
adult equivalent term as well as an English translation. You can
do this task on your own if you are sufficiently familiar with
another language, or you may have to ask a mother-tongue
speaker to help you.
The language I investigated was _________
Baby-talk word Adult term Translation
Attitudes to the use of baby-talk words and to caretaker speech
in general differ from culture to culture. Try and find out about
the attitudes to caretaker speech in the language you investigated,
by asking your informant whether he or she agrees or disagrees
with the following statements: (Remember to explain the term
caretaker speech to the person before you begin!). Circle the
answer that your informant gives in each case.
HSY2601 117
I would use caretaker speech when talking to Agree Disagree

a baby.
Using caretaker speech when addressing a Agree Disagree
child is a bad idea.
It is appropriate for a mother to use Agree Disagree
caretaker speech to her child.
It is appropriate for a father to use caretaker Agree Disagree
speech to his child.
It is embarrassing when another adult Agree Disagree
overhears you using caretaker speech.
Feedback
Test your answers by reading them out to a friend who is familiar with the
language. Ask him/her to give the normal adult equivalents of each baby-
talk word and check that they are the same as yours. Check your
translations in a dictionary if necessary. The attitude statements only
represent one person’s opinion so there are no right or wrong answers, but the
more people you ask, the more valid your conclusions would be!
5.4 ENRICHING A CHILD’S LINGUISTIC

ENVIRONMENT
The general consensus seems to be that children who are brought
up in a rich verbal environment (i. e., one that provides plenty of
opportunities for interaction, practice and vocabulary growth) tend
to fare better linguistically than those whose environment is not
verbally enriching. In other words, although all children will acquire
basic linguistic and communicative competence, children from a
verbally rich and stimulating environment are likely to have a wider
vocabulary and greater language awareness and communicative
skills.
Connelly (1987) did an interesting study on the speed at which
Basotho children learn to speak. She found that Basotho children’s
linguistic development takes place at a significantly earlier age
(Connelly 1987:232) than that of American children. Studies of
American children show that they only seem to catch up with the
Basotho children when they are four to five years old. What is the
crucial factor that enables Basotho children to outperform
American children during the early stages of language acquisition?
Connelly suggests that it is not because of the structure of the
Sesotho language, but because of the way the young child is treated
in Sotho culture. ‘The child is carried into every social situation that
the mother enters, and it is also frequently the focus of social and
118
verbal interaction’ (Connelly 1987:238). Sesotho children therefore

hear more spoken language than American children and are spoken
to more often. The message is clear: children will begin to talk at an
early age if their parents or caregivers talk to them a lot and
encourage them to talk by reacting to what they say.
According to Fowler (1990:10), enriching a child’s linguistic
environment at an early age has significant positive effects on the
child’s mental and social development. Children from an enriched
environment acquire language at a faster rate than children from an
average environment, for example using two-word sentences at 12-
13 months instead of 20-22 months. The child’s problem-solving
abilities, school performance, independence and motivation all
benefit from an enriched environment during infancy and improve
even more when enrichment is continued throughout the child’s
first years.
Research by Tamis-Lemonda et al. (1998) indicates that children
with responsive caretakers reach the important milestone of 50
words earlier than other children. Responsive caretakers in this
study were defined as those who are sensitive to their children’s
interests, talk about what the child is doing and pay attention and
react to children’s own utterances. In a similar study, Kloth et al.
(1998) found that mothers’ interactional styles fell into one of three
categories (the study focused on mothers, but it applies equally to
all caretakers):
● ‘non-intervening’ mothers don’t ask their children a lot of
questions and don’t pressurise the child to respond.
● ‘explaining’ mothers are talkative and dominate the conversation,
providing information, labelling objects and interrupting the
child.
● ‘directing’ mothers try and control the child’s behaviour by
issuing commands, warnings, criticising, saying ‘no’, etc.
One of their findings was that children with explaining mothers
tend to have a higher level of understanding than children with the
other maternal interaction styles. A possible reason for this is that
these children simply hear more input. Wells (1992:136) indicates
that children who receive a lot of feedback that relates back to their
own utterances, in the form of imitation, expansion, etc. tend to
make more rapid progress. Rapid progress is also associated with
children whose mothers initiate and facilitate conversation rather
than using language mainly to control the child’s behaviour
(McDonald & Pien 1982).
Now that we have looked at some of the academic findings about
caretaker speech, let’s try and use those findings to formulate some
HSY2601 119
practical advice about the best way to interact with small children.
If you are a parent or caregiver, you probably want to know how to
go about enriching a child’s language environment, and the good
news is that it doesn’t require a huge investment in effort, money
or time. One can start stimulating children with enriching activities
at any age, but the important thing to realise is that children can
benefit from hearing language and face-to-face conversation from
the time they are born. From birth, caretakers need to talk with the
baby face to face, imitate the baby’s vocalisations and make new
sounds for him or her to imitate. From about three months
caretakers should join in as the baby plays, name the things the
infant looks at or touches, draw the infant’s attention to things and
name them, and begin to use picture books. From about nine
months caretakers should expand on the child’s utterances and
introduce the child to rhymes, songs and story books. From 14
months adults should read stories and information books, involve
the child in conversations and encourage the child to talk about his
or her experiences. Children should also be encouraged to role-play
with their peers.
Here are some ideas for improving your own interactions with
young children (Fowler 1990):
● It’s OK to use caretaker speech.
● Speak clearly and not too fast.
● Avoid correcting children’s errors.
● Don’t use incorrect grammar like ‘Baby wan’ go home?
● When children know words well, use nonsense words in their
place and allow children to correct you, e.g.
Adult: Is it a rocodile?
Child: No, it’s crocodile.
Adult: Did you say cocodile?
Child: No, crocodile.
● Don’t bombard the child with complex language too early. Start
with simple sounds and words and increase the degree of
difficulty gradually.
● Use appropriate movements and actions during songs and
rhymes.
Here are some other tips which, although they are not directly
related to language, may help the child’s linguistic development and
expand their vocabulary.
● Engage the child’s attention and be sensitive to when the child
is interested or is losing interest.
● Avoid excessive use of dummies/pacifiers, as these limit babies’
opportunities for vocalising and responding.
120
● Bring out only a few of the child’s toys at a time and keep others
for another day. This helps to maintain the child’s interest and
focus.
● Take the child to different areas of the house/neighbourhood
and talk about the various places you go to and activities you do.
Talk about these places and activities afterwards as well to
encourage reflection.
● Read books and look at pictures together as often as possible,
preferably every day. Start with simple picture books with one
picture per page, then gradually work up to more complex
scenes. You can make your own picture books by cutting
pictures out of magazines and sticking them onto blank paper
or use the ones in the readRIGHT supplement in Sunday
newspapers.
● Try and interest the child in books before or at the same time as
exposing the child to TV. If children get used to TV first, they
may be unwilling to put in the extra mental effort that reading
requires. Continue the book-reading sessions until the child can
read alone.
● Think of new ideas to make children’s play more interesting, e.g.,
moving objects around, putting them into containers, acting out
scenes using toys, etc.
5.5 INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

For many years, as a result of the dominance of Chomsky’s theory
of Universal Grammar, there was a lack of interest in individual
differences, but this changed in the 1980s. Although universal
patterns are very striking, individual differences also characterise
the language acquisition process. Not all children fit into the typical
pattern we have learned about so far, and in this section, we show
you that the language acquisition process can differ in both rate
(speed of development) and route (pattern or sequence of
development). Like adult speakers, children use language differently
depending on their gender, social class and culture. Individual
personality traits can also have an effect on the rate of development
and the acquisition strategies children prefer.
Wells (1992:112) identifies four groups of factors which can
influence children’s language acquisition and cause it to vary in rate
or route. Variation is a result of an interaction between all these
factors:
● Inherited factors like sex, intelligence and personality.
● The social and cultural background of the child and the family
structure.
● The style of interaction, e. g., interpersonal relations and child-
rearing methods.
HSY2601 121
● Situational factors like the setting, activity and the status of the
participants.
5.5.1 Differences in the route of language development

The term gestalt is a
German word meaning Acquisition styles and strategies may also differ from child to child.
‘whole’.
For example, a distinction has been made between analytic and
gestalt learning strategies. Children who follow an analytic style
tend to analyse the input into its constituent parts and then
gradually build up utterances in the usual way, starting with one-
word utterances and moving gradually to two- and three-word
sentences. Children who prefer a gestalt style focus on whole
utterances, and often produce larger chunks of speech at an early
age, even if the meaning of each of the parts is not known. For
example, phrases like What’s it doing? or I don’t want it might be used
at a stage where analytic children are using only one-word
utterances (Foster-Cohen 1999:130-31). Most children fall
somewhere between these two extremes and use a combination of
both strategies in their early utterances.
One of the earliest studies to highlight differences between children
was Nelson’s (1973) study of the early words used by children of
about a year old. The children in the study all had words for the
people and objects in their everyday environments, but the children
seemed to fall into two groups depending on how many nouns
were present in their first 50 words. The referential children had a
high proportion of nouns in their vocabularies (more than 50% of
their vocabularies consisted of nouns). They tended to use an
analytic strategy (acquiring single words rather than phrases) and
acquired words faster than the other group – the expressive
children. The expressive children had fewer words for objects in
their vocabularies (i.e., nouns made up less than 50% of the total
vocabulary) but they used more pronouns and multiword gestalt
personal-social expressions like Go away, Oh dear, Thank you and I
want it. These children acquire words at a slower rate than the
referential children. Because of the number of multiword gestalt
expressions used during the one-word stage, the transition between
the one-word stage and the two-word stage was less clear in the
expressive children.
Nelson concluded that referential and expressive children use
language to fulfil different functions. Referential children were
learning language to categorise the objects around them, while
expressive children were more socially orientated, using language to
talk about themselves and others, to express feelings, needs and
social forms. You should also note that Nelson’s research used only
20 children, so it shouldn’t be accepted without reservation.
122
Additional research has suggested that most children fall

somewhere between these two extremes.
(a) Look at the following data from Nelson (1973:22) and
classify each child as either referential or expressive.
Remember to justify your answer.
Elizabeth’s first 50 words
object names 24
action words 6
modifiers 6
personal-social words 12
function words 2
Rachel’s first 50 words
object names 41
action words 4
modifiers 2
personal-social words 1
function words 1
(b) Look back at task 3.6 and decide whether Jennika is a
referential or an expressive child.
Feedback
(a) Elizabeth is an expressive child as less than half of her vocabulary
(24 out of 50 words) consists of object names. Twelve of her first words
are personal-social words, compared to Rachel who uses only one
personal-social word. Rachel is a referential child as 41 of her first 50
words (82%) are object names.
(b) The child whose vocabulary we looked at earlier, Jennika, is an
expressive child. Of her first 22 words, 8 (less than half) refer to
objects. However, Jennika has a lot of personal-social words in her
vocabulary (8 out of 22), and therefore seems to prefer an expressive
learning strategy.
The nature-nurture controversy raises its head again as researchers

have attempted to account for the referential-expressive distinction.
Are these different styles a result of innate cognitive differences
between children (nature), or do they result from different ways in
which caretakers interact with their children (nurture)? Again, the
answer seems to be both. Referential children spend much time
playing with toys and objects, while expressive children tend to
spend less time playing and more time interacting with adults.
Mothers’ interaction with their children also has an influence.
HSY2601 123
Mothers of referential children tend to spend much time reading

books to their children or playing with toys together. These
activities provide opportunities for naming objects and learning
new nouns. Mothers of expressive children may prefer to engage in
conversational routines with their children and other forms of play
that do not involve toys. The kinds of expressions learnt from this
kind of mother-child interaction tend to be social words like Thank
you and Hi and phrases like Let me see. Additional evidence that it is
the caretaker’s input that determines the child’s early acquisition
style comes from Bates, Bretherton and Snyder (1988) who show
that a bilingual child was highly referential in her one-word
vocabulary in English, but expressive in her later learning of Italian,
for which she had a different caretaker.
5.5.2 Differences in rate of acquisition

As mentioned above, children also differ in their rate of acquisition.
Some children start developing later than others and some move
through the developmental stages faster than others. Normal
children can differ by up to 3 years in their rate of language
development, though the stages they pass through are generally the
same regardless of how stretched out or compressed they are. The
amount of talk the child hears and participates in is one variable
that affects the rate of acquisition. For this reason, firstborn
children are often faster developers because they receive more of
their parents’ undivided attention and engage in shared activities
more often than younger siblings. Blind children seem to be slightly
slower to talk, although they usually catch up to sighted children by
age 3 (Foster-Cohen 1999:135).
It is often claimed that boys are later language learners than girls,
but the evidence for this is not clear or conclusive either way
(Foster-Cohen 1999:138). Studies of parent-child interaction do
show however that boys and girls are treated differently almost
from birth. Parents touch their sons less often and more roughly
than they do their daughters (Wood 1994:162). Boys are
encouraged to be aggressive and boisterous, while girls are
encouraged to be more emotional but less physical. According to
Wells (1992:123) “adults emphasize more useful, ‘domestic’,
activities in their interactions with girls, whilst the emphasis with
boys is towards a more free-ranging, exploratory manipulation of
the physical environment. What is not clear, however, is who
establishes this differential preference – the children or their
parents.” The best advice for caretakers is to try and avoid sexual
stereotypes and provide a positive, enriching environment
irrespective of the sex of the child (or the caretaker!).
124
Research suggests that learners whose language develops faster

than average use more nouns and complex noun phrases and make
more grammatical errors. They appear to focus on the task of
communicating, rather than on the fine details of grammar. This
kind of ‘risk-taking’ approach results in rapid progress. Slower
learners, in contrast, use fewer noun phrases but more verb phrases,
and perform better than fast learners in comprehension tests. Their
approach to language is more cautious and conservative, and
focuses on the details of language structure, resulting in a slower
rate of acquisition (Foster-Cohen 1999:139). Here is Reich’s
account of the differences between his own children. (Also, see if
you can identify the phonological simplification strategy used by
Quentin in the given example. Is it reduction, substitution or
assimilation?):
The fact that some children are more reticent than others in
using words that they know they can’t pronounce correctly
may be one cause of variation in the time a child first starts to
speak. It may also explain why sometimes previously acquired
words drop out of the vocabulary of a child for a period.
Quentin was more conservative than Athena. He was slow at
beginning to speak, but when he did start, his speech was
easy to understand. This desire to be correct was evident
even after he began to speak. Once Quentin, a Star Trek fan,
tried to say Mr. Spok. All he could produce was Mr. Spop. He
broke into tears when he found he couldn’t say it properly.
On the other hand, Athena was more concerned with doing
things that she saw others doing than she was in doing them
right. She began to speak early, but her phonology was much
worse than that of her brother (Reich 1986:58-59).
In this learning unit we have considered the effect of external
forces such as the input children hear, and the effect of internal
traits such as personality and how these affect language acquisition.
In the following learning unit we will continue our focus on
differences in the usual pattern of language acquisition by looking
at language development in children with various disabilities.

Test your understanding of the learning unit by choosing the
option that fits best with the given statement in the following
multiple-choice questions. Circle the correct answer ([1], [2], [3]
or [4]).
1. The critical period hypothesis states that:
HSY2601 125
[1] a child’s first language is acquired easily after

puberty
[2] there is a period between birth and puberty
when a first language is usually acquired
[3] children need special instruction in their first
language during a specific ‘critical’ period
[4] there is a specific period for first language
acquisition, after this period it is difficult and
maybe even impossible to acquire language
2. The case of Genie:

[1] proves that the critical period hypothesis is
false
[2] shows that the syntax of a first language can be
acquired easily after puberty
[3] shows that it may be difficult to acquire the
syntax of a first language after puberty
[4] shows that vocabulary is the main obstacle in
language learning
3. Caretaker speech differs from adult-to-adult language in the

following way:
[1] Caretaker speech is faster than adult-to-adult
language in words per minute.
[2] Caretaker speech contains many vocabulary
items not found in adult-to-adult language.
[3] Caretaker speech contains fewer questions and
commands than adult-to-adult language.
[4] Caretaker speech contains less repetition than
adult-to-adult language.
4. Which of the following statements is true?

[1] Caregivers often underextend words when
using baby talk.
[2] Caretaker speech utterances are usually slightly
shorter than the child’s utterances at that stage.
[3] Caretaker speech is characterised by
disfluencies and grammatical errors.
[4] Caretaker speech is characterised by pauses
between utterances.
126
5. Which of the following are not baby-talk words in English?

[1] blanket, bottle
[2] kitty, doggy
[3] tummy, bunny
[4] mommy, daddy
6. Which of the following statements describes referential

children?
[1] They use many multiword personal-social
expressions like Go away and Thank you.
[2] Less than 50% of their vocabularies consist of
nouns.
[3] They use language mainly to express feelings
and needs.
[4] They acquire words at a faster rate than
expressive children.
Feedback
1. [4] 2. [3] 3. [2] 4. [4] 5. [1] 6. [4]
5.6 CONCLUSION
Hopefully after carefully going through this chapter you have a
better understanding of the critical period hypothesis and how
much the environment contributes to language development. This
chapter deals with the critical period in which a first language
should ideally be acquired and what happens when children do not
receive the necessary input. It also addressed caretaker speech and
individual differences in language acquisition, particularly focusing
on differences in the route of language development as well as
differences in the rate of language development.
HSY2601 127
LEARNING UNIT 6
Language Disability
Learningunit6
�
20-30 hours
Contents
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Cognitive disability and language development
6.2.1 Down Syndrome
6.2.2 Williams Syndrome
6.2.3 Autism
6.2.4 Dyslexia
6.3 Conclusion
LEARNING OUTCOMES
● explain what Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, autism and dyslexia are
● identify the causes or possible causes of these disabilities and the parts of the brain that are
affected in each case
● describe the general characteristics of these disabilities in order to provide a context for the
development of language in children with these disabilities
● describe how language development is affected as a result of the specific disabilities
● explain why the study of language development in children with disabilities is important for
psycholinguistics
● outline what recent research on children with disabilities has revealed about the relationship
between language and the brain, and language and cognition
128
Language Disability Learning unit 6
mental retardation cognitive impairment association/

pervasive vs specific developmental dissociation between language
disorder and cognition
syndrome Asperger’s syndrome
Down syndrome mutism
apraxia echolalia
Williams syndrome developmental dyslexia
autism acquired dyslexia
delayed vs deviant language
development
Preview
In this learning unit you will be able to make use of the knowledge that you have built up so
far (in learning units 1-5) to examine an important topic, that of atypical language
development. So far in this module we have described where the language functions of the
brain reside, and we have discussed language development in normal populations of
children. But what happens when children are born with, or acquire at an early age, some or
other disability that impairs their ability to receive, process or produce linguistic data? This
is the interesting question that we shall explore in this unit. We shall look at language
development in children with cognitive and neurological impairments. In each case we shall
see how the specific impairment affects language development and what steps are typically
taken to aid the child in developing effective linguistic and communicative strategies.
6.1 INTRODUCTION
In the previous learning units, you learned something about where
specific language functions are situated in the brain and you
became acquainted with the different stages of language
development that ordinary children go through. You also made
acquaintance with some of the main controversies in
developmental psycholinguistics, namely the nature/nurture debate
and the question of whether language and cognition are separate
entities or whether language is dependent on cognition. The kind
of knowledge you have acquired so far will stand you in good stead
for this unit, which deals with language development in children
with specific cognitive disabilities.
An impairment is a The domain of children with language problems is a vast and
disability which adversely interesting one and covers language development in children who
affects normal functioning.
have sensory impairments (e. g., deaf or blind children), physical
A syndrome is a collection impairments (e.g., cerebral palsy), cognitive impairments (e.g., Down
of clinical signs and syndrome), neurological impairments (e.g., autism and stuttering) and
symptoms.
children with delayed language development in the absence of any
apparent cognitive or neurological disability. This domain is too
vast to be dealt with in a single unit and we have thus necessarily
had to narrow our focus. We shall look specifically at four kinds of
impairment and their effect on language development. We shall
examine the various ways in which language is affected in children
HSY2601 129
LEARNING UNIT 6 LANGUAGE DISABILITY
who have some kind of cognitive impairment as a result of

chromosomal abnormality, such as children with Down syndrome
or Williams syndrome, or as a result of impaired brain development,
such as individuals with autism and dyslexia. In each case we shall
briefly discuss the possible causes of the impairment, identify the
symptoms that characterise the disorder, describe ways in which the
impairment affects language and the nature of the communicative
difficulty. We will also briefly consider possible remedial therapy or
intervention programmes that can help to minimise individuals’
linguistic problems and aid them to develop more effective
communicative skills.
Why, you may wonder, is it important to study the language of
children with disorders? We believe it is important for three reasons.
First of all, our knowledge about how language develops in
ordinary children can help us understand how the process of
language development in children with disorders is similar to or
different from normal language development. Secondly, data about
the language of children with disorders can provide us with
valuable insight into the relationship between language and other
factors such as biological, physical, cognitive and neurological
factors. Thirdly, by examining the relationship between specific
disorders and language development, we hope to understand these
disorders better and find ways to treat them more effectively and
maybe even prevent them in the future. As Ratner (1989:370)
points out, it has been estimated that “8 to 10 per cent of school-
aged children demonstrate patterns of communicative development
that may be termed ‘delayed’ or ‘disordered’”. This is a relatively
large proportion of children that is affected, and it is therefore
crucial that we advance our understanding of their problems and
thereby find ways to aid such children in improving their linguistic
skills. After all, it is through language that we express ourselves and
interact with other people and our world in meaningful ways.
6.2 COGNITIVE DISABILITY AND LANGUAGE

DEVELOPMENT
There are three major types of diagnostic categories into which
people with disabilities are grouped, namely mental retardation,
pervasive developmental disorders, and specific developmental
disorders (Diagnostic Statistic Manual 1994). Let us briefly look at
these three categories.
In mental retardation, development is slowed down, and the
individual’s mental age is always lower than their chronological age
(e.g., a mentally retarded child of 15 years may have the mental age
of a 5-year-old). There are many different causes of mental
130
retardation and different causes can lead to different cognitive and

linguistic patterns of ability and behaviour, with different
therapeutic implications. One type of mental retardation is Down
syndrome. There has not been a great deal of research on language
development in the mentally retarded and most of the research that
has been done, has focused mainly on children with Down
syndrome. In this unit we shall be looking at language development
in children with Down syndrome.
The second diagnostic category, namely pervasive developmental
disorder, involves several areas of qualitative impairment in areas
involving cognitive, linguistic, social and motor skills. The term
‘pervasive’ means the individual is affected ‘deep inside, throughout
their entire being’ (Peeters 1997:3), ‘developmental’ refers to the
fact that various aspects of a child’s development are affected, and
‘disorder’ means that the condition is permanent. In this unit we
shall be looking at language development in two kinds of pervasive
developmental disorders, namely Williams syndrome and autism.
The third diagnostic category, namely specific developmental
disorder, involves slow or faulty development in one particular
skill area. For example, a person with dyslexia has tremendous
problems learning to read. Although a dyslexic person has normal
intelligence, the problem stems specifically from a particular
phonological decoding impairment, while other aspects of
development and learning are unaffected (Peeters 1997).
Let us now look at the broader picture of cognitive disability.
Ratner (1989:378) estimates that about 2% of school-aged children
have some form of cognitive disability. This brings us to the
controversial question concerning the measurement of cognitive
ability. Although not everyone is agreed on the best way to assess
cognitive functioning and ability, intelligent quotient (IQ) tests
continue to be used as a standard measure of cognitive ability. An
IQ score of 100 is regarded as average. The following four
categories of cognitive disability or mental retardation are
commonly distinguished, based on performance on IQ tests:
Mild retardation IQ of 53-70 Educable (can be educated)

Moderate retardation IQ of 36-52 Trainable (can be taught basic self-care routines,
e.g., toilet training, dressing themselves, etc.)
Severe retardation IQ of 20-35 Trainable
Profound retardation IQ below 20 Custodial (requires constant care in a protected
environment, e.g., a home for the mentally
retarded)
HSY2601 131
It is estimated (Ratner 1989:379) that children with IQ scores

below 50 experience severe language disabilities, while children
with mild retardation still experience some or other language
disabilities. Children with Down syndrome or Williams syndrome
usually have mild to moderate retardation and associated language
disabilities.
It is difficult to separate/distinguish brain processes that control
language from those that control general cognitive functioning,
because in the general population, ability in both go hand in hand.
By studying children with disorders researchers can tease apart
these processes. As we saw earlier in the introduction to this unit,
the relationship between cognition and language is still imperfectly
understood, and different opinions are expressed on this matter by
researchers and practitioners alike. Some (like Piaget) hold that
some aspects of cognitive development are necessary precursors to
linguistic development and provide a scaffold within which
language development occurs, while others (like Chomsky) believe
that cognition and language are two separate systems that develop
in parallel ways. The study of language development in children
with cognitive impairment provides a unique window onto this
relationship and allows us to examine it in ways that are not
possible in normal language development.
6.2.1 Down syndrome

Down syndrome is a genetic condition in which a person is born
with an abnormal number of chromosomes. It is named after an
English doctor, Dr Langdon Down, who first described the
symptoms of this condition in 1866. The condition was first
referred to as ‘Down’s syndrome’ but the preferred term for this
condition since the 1990s is ‘Down syndrome’ or idawuni sinidromu
in isiZulu, sindromo ya Down in Setswana and Sepedi, vhulwadze ha u
sa fhelela vhuluvhini in Tshivenda, and dhawuni sindiromu in ChiShona.
It is estimated that about 1 in every 600-700 babies is born with
Down syndrome.
6.2.1.1 What causes Down syndrome?

Down syndrome is often defined as a ‘chromosomal abnormality’.
In order to better understand what this means, some details about
the cause of the condition are provided below.
132
Figure 6.1: Extra chromosome
Chromosomes are small structures that occur in pairs in all cells,

and they carry the genes. Most people have 2 pairs of 23
chromosomes per cell (i. e., 46 chromosomes per cell), which
originate from 23 chromosomes in the mother’s egg, and 23 in the
father’s sperm. People with Down syndrome have an extra
chromosome per cell, i.e., they have 47 chromosomes per cell. The
extra chromosome comes specifically from chromosome #21 (#
stands for ‘number’). See figure 6.1 opposite.
Babies with Down syndrome can be born to parents of every age,
social class and ethnic group and it is important to realise that
parents are not responsible for having ‘caused’ their child to be
born with Down syndrome. However, the risk of having a child
with Down syndrome increases as the mother’s age increases.
Despite advances in recent years in genetic research, the factors
that trigger the chromosomal abnormality in the foetus are not yet
fully understood. Although the condition has been well
documented and researched in first world countries, there is less
information about it in third world countries. Initially it was
believed to be rare in the African population, but more recent
research in Nigeria, Tanzania and South Africa has shown that it
occurs with equal regularity in African communities (about six
children with Down syndrome are born every week in Baragwanath
hospital in Johannesburg). In fact, data collated in South Africa by
Christianson (1997) suggests that the incidence of Down syndrome
may even be slightly higher in black communities, due mainly to the
fact that many black women continue to have children when they
are older.
Down syndrome is an irreversible condition, i.e., it cannot be cured.
However, children can be stimulated and developed to their full
potential, and many children with Down syndrome can reach quite
high levels of functioning. As you will remember from learning unit
5, a stimulating environment can make a big difference to a child’s
cognitive and language development, irrespective of whether the
child has a disability or not.
HSY2601 133
6.2.1.2 Symptoms and characteristic features

There are two areas of the brain that are affected by the extra
chromosome in #21, namely Broca’s area and the cerebellum.
Refresh your memory by referring back to learning unit 1 to locate
these areas in the brain and then do task.6.1.
Task 6.1
Use the knowledge that you acquired in learning unit 1 to make
predictions about how language may possibly be affected in
children with Down syndrome:
1. If the cerebellum is affected in Down syndrome, what
effects can we predict that this will have on a child’s
language?
2. If Broca’s area of the brain is affected in Down syndrome,
what effects can we predict that this will have on a child’s
language?
3. Do you think there could possibly be a link between these
affected areas?
Feedback
1. The cerebellum controls motor coordination. If this area is affected,
then the motor coordination of the articulatory organs will probably be
affected.
2. Dichotic listening tests show that children with Down syndrome show
impairment in the left-hemisphere areas of the brain associated with
speech production. Broca’s area controls speech production. If Broca’s
area is affected, then children with Down syndrome will probably have
problems with speech production.
3. Yes, there is a link. Speech production involves motor coordination.
The cerebellum and Broca’s area are both areas of the brain that
control motor coordination. If these areas are impaired, then speech
production is likely to be affected.
Here are some of the typical features that occur in children with
Down syndrome (visuals from Down Syndrome South Africa
1998). Not all these features will be present in each child:
134
A rounded face, with slanted eyes (the shape of the eyes led to the
earlier use of the term ‘mongolism’, a term which has since fallen
into disuse).
● Slightly open mouth with protruding tongue. The tongue is
large in relation to the size of the oral cavity.
● Low muscle tone and looseness of joints.
● Eye defects in about 60% of cases.
● Hearing defects and problems with short-term memory can also
occur.
As you can predict, three of the characteristics of Down syndrome
will have a direct effect on language acquisition and development:
● The large tongue (which also occurs in newborns, as you will
recall from learning unit 3) restricts movement in the mouth
and inhibits the clear articulation of sounds.
● Low muscle tone affects speech production and can lead to
apraxia, a motor-speech disorder which causes difficulty in
coordinating articulatory movements to combine sounds in the
production of syllables, words, phrases and sentences.
● Hearing defects can adversely affect language development
because the child does not hear linguistic input clearly. Children
with Down syndrome also have problems with auditory short-
term memory. In other words, they have a poor ‘listening’
memory span for language learning. This has important
implications for language acquisition because for ordinary
children, most of early language is acquired through listening to
speech. In order to process sentences for meaning, syntactic
forms and functions, children need to be able to hold a number
of sentences in short-term memory.
A ceiling effect is a Having identified some of the features of Down syndrome and the
limitation that occurs that
way in which they can affect language, let us now build up a
hampers further
development. broader picture of language development in children with Down
syndrome.
6.2.1.3 Language development

The path of language development in children with Down
syndrome is similar to that of normal children except that it occurs
slower and there appears to be a ceiling effect that is probably
imposed by the genetic condition but could also be caused by other
factors. In other words, language development is delayed rather
than deviant (i.e., different). It must be stressed however that, like
ordinary children, children with Down syndrome also display
variation in their rate of language development. Some acquire a
fairly high degree of linguistic proficiency while others may reach
their ceiling quite early.
HSY2601 135
Babies with Down syndrome go through the usual babbling stages

that normal babies do, and they also engage in social interaction
with their parents or caregivers during the first year, such as
listening, establishing eye contact and joint attention, and taking
turns in early ‘conversations’ via babbling. However, their
development in these early communicative acts is slower and less
well developed than in normal children.
Studies seem to indicate that vocabulary acquisition occurs slower
among children with Down syndrome than among normal children.
As with ordinary children, the same kinds of words are acquired
first, namely concrete nouns referring to objects that occur in the
child’s immediate context. As you learned in learning unit 3, in
ordinary children a vocabulary spurt seems to occur around 1;6
years when children start acquiring the names of many new objects.
A similar spurt occurs in children with Down syndrome, only it
occurs later, at about the mental age of 2;6 years.
Later these children use the same range of two-word constructions,
but they show greater difficulty in picking up grammatical and
morphological markers and underlying syntactic rules. Their speech,
even when they’re older, often tends to be telegraphic (e.g., No want
to swim instead of I don’t want to go swimming). Some studies have
shown that older children with Down syndrome show continuing
syntactic development up to 20 years of age, but they tend to omit
more words than ordinary teenagers, and all these omitted words
are function words (e. g., articles, prepositions and auxiliaries in
English) (Buckley 1993:6).
One must also not overlook the relationship between language
development and linguistic input that the children receive from the
environment. Studies show that adults who interact with teenagers
with Down syndrome tend to ask more closed questions than
open-ended questions (e. g., Did you have a nice day at school? as
opposed to What did you do at school today?); they use many
repetitions and clarifications, and tend to complete children’s
sentences for them. Buckley (1993:64) suggests that though such
conversational strategies may be helpful in the short term, in the
long term they may curb the development of longer sentences in
the child.
Due to the impairments in the cerebellum and Broca’s areas,
children with Down syndrome have problems with speech
production and this affects their intelligibility. Because their
tongues are large, they often have difficulty with the production of
consonants and consonant clusters. Research indicates that
pronunciation is often better when short utterances are used, and
this increases intelligibility. Buckley (1993:6) suggests that since the
136
main aim of communication is to be understood, it could be that

children with Down syndrome use shorter utterances because
shorter MLU improves the intelligibility of their utterances, even
though they may be capable of generating more complex sentences.
The poor intelligibility of many children with Down syndrome
continues into adulthood. In her study of 87 teenagers with Down
syndrome, Buckley (1993) found that while more than 70% of the
children were regularly producing utterances of 5 words or more,
about 20% of them used language with an MLU of 3 words or less.
Furthermore, although these utterances were intelligible to those
who knew the children, intelligibility decreased when the teenagers
attempted to communicate with strangers.
6.2.1.4 Therapy and intervention

Having a better understanding of where the problems lie and how
physical problems affect social interaction and language
development, researchers, practitioners and caregivers can use
communication and language techniques that aid in improving
problem areas. Some of the specific language problems that
children with Down syndrome have are remediable to some degree.
Intelligibility can be improved to some extent with speech therapy.
The apraxia features are treatable, not with traditional speech
therapy techniques, but with motor-speech programming
techniques.
Our assumptions about what people with cognitive impairments
can or cannot do affect our beliefs about what treatment will be
effective and appropriate for them. In the past many children with
Down syndrome were not taught to read because it was thought
that they were not up to it. However, research into language
disorders has shown that children can learn language through
different channels or mediums. For normal children, language
acquisition typically occurs via the auditory channel (i. e., through
hearing spoken language). For children with disabilities relating to
the auditory channel, the visual channel provides a stronger
medium for language acquisition. This has led researchers and
practitioners to use intervention methods that rely on visual
processing to help support language development in children with
Down syndrome. These methods include signing and reading.
Research during the past two decades has shown that children with
Down syndrome can be successfully taught to read (even from as
early as 3 years) and that reading actually helps them develop their
language skills and their speech production to a higher degree than
is usually achieved via the auditory medium by a person with Down
syndrome. Most children with Down syndrome find reading useful,
HSY2601 137
enjoyable and stimulating. Reading seems to improve their auditory

memory span, language development, general memory
development and spoken language. Because the printed word
provides a permanent visual record of linguistic input and helps to
reinforce the memory, reading serves as a powerful tool to help
children with Down syndrome to understand and practise
grammatically correct sentences via the visual medium rather than
the auditory medium. In comparing a group of Down readers with
non-readers, Laws et al. (1995) found that the readers had
significantly higher scores on the reading and memory tests than
the non-readers, even though four years previously both groups
had started out with similar scores. Furthermore, children with
Down syndrome who read have been shown to improve their
scores on standardised tests, which result in them being classified
as ‘brighter’.
SUMMARY
Research into the language development of children with Down
syndrome shows an association between language and cognition.
Mental retardation is usually characterised by a slower but not
deviant rate of language development, and the linguistic
competence that is eventually acquired is not as proficient as in the
normal population.
6.2.2 Williams syndrome
Internet visual from www. Williams syndrome is a rare and, until recently, a relatively
williams-syndrome.org
unknown genetic disorder that was first recognised as a distinct
syndrome in 1961 by a New Zealand heart specialist, Dr Williams.
The reason why we have included it for discussion here is that
recent developments in genetic research during the 1980s and
1990s have led to some important discoveries about this condition
that throw more light on the complex relationship between the
mind and language. There are also some interesting differences in
the language of children with Down syndrome and children with
138
Williams syndrome. By comparing differences in the language

development of such children we can try to identify the cognitive
and linguistic features that characterise a specific disorder and so
gain greater insight into the way in which the brain is organised.
And greater insight into a disorder naturally enables us to make
better informed decisions about treatment and remediation
programmes for the individuals concerned.
6.2.2.1 What causes Williams syndrome?

Findings from genetic research have revealed that children with
Williams syndrome have a chromosomal abnormality – a small part
of chromosome #7 is missing. This missing part of the
chromosome affects several genes, including one that makes the
protein elastin and three genes that are active in the brain and
consequently affect brain functions and development, including
visual-spatial abilities.
Williams syndrome is quite rare and is estimated to occur in about
1 in every 20 000 births. Like Down syndrome, it is a congenital
condition and neither of the parents can be ‘blamed’ for its
occurrence.
6.2.2.2 Symptoms and characteristic features
Children with Williams syndrome have characteristic facial and

physical features and they often look more like other children with
Williams syndrome than like their relatives. Here are some of the
features associated with the syndrome:
(Lenhoff et al. 1997:47)
● The individuals tend to have a small, upturned nose, a long
upper lip and wide mouth, puffiness around the eyes, and a
small chin. They often have a pixie-like appearance and tend to
be quite short.
● They often have more sensitive hearing than other children.
HSY2601 139
● They tend to be very friendly, sociable and empathetic people;

the children enjoy social contact with adults.
Individuals with Williams syndrome have some degree of
intellectual handicap and they perform poorly on tests of general
cognitive ability. They are often diagnosed as mildly to moderately
retarded and score below average on IQ tests (they typically score
between 50 and 60 on IQ tests). They usually experience
developmental delays in walking and talking, and in general show
slow growth and development.
Compared to Down syndrome, the volume of the cerebellum in
children with Williams syndrome is normal. An interesting aspect
of Williams syndrome is that it is associated with a mixture of
abilities and disabilities. The chromosomal abnormality of Williams
syndrome results in a fairly severe impairment of visual-spatial
cognition, yet as they get older these individuals generally tend to
have good oral language skills and some of them display amazing
musical talent with near perfect pitch. Let us look at these features
more closely and see what insights they reveal about the
relationship between language and cognition.
6.2.2.3 Visual-spatial abilities

As you will remember from learning unit 1, visual-spatial tasks are
processed in the right hemisphere. Individuals with Williams
syndrome perform poorly on tasks involving visual-spatial
processing, such as drawing and copying drawn objects, or sorting
out a series of objects from shortest to longest. Look at the
pictures of a bicycle below that were drawn by two children with
Williams syndrome (the labels for the different parts of the bicycle
are given on the right). Without the labels, it would be difficult to
know what the pictures depicted.
Figure 6.2: Drawings of a bicycle by two children with Williams syndrome

(Bellugi et al. 1988:181)
140
Because of visual-spatial impairments, children with Williams

syndrome have problems learning to read and write. Yet
surprisingly, despite their problems with visual-spatial tasks in
general, people with Williams syndrome can recognise and
discriminate unfamiliar faces very well –– a visual-spatial task that
requires processing in the right brain.
Research has shown that we have different learning styles for
different cognitive tasks, and that some individuals may show a
preference for a particular learning style. Refer to the discussion of
analytic and gestalt approaches to syntax on p.116, and then do task
6.2, dealing with differences in gestalt perception between children
with Down and Williams syndromes.
Task 6.2
Individuals with Williams syndrome have problems with gestalt
perception (i.e., integrating details to form a holistic view). They
can see component parts better than they can perceive the whole
– in this they are similar to patients who have suffered a stroke to
the right hemisphere of the brain. Down subjects on the other
hand can see the whole but have difficulty perceiving component
parts – in this they are similar to patients who have suffered a
stroke to the left hemisphere. One way to test a person’s ability to
integrate details into the whole (the gestalt) is to ask them to
copy a letter which is made up of smaller letters. For example, the
D below is made up of small Ys. Look at the two responses to
this task in A and B. One of them was done by a child with
Down Syndrome and one by a child with Williams syndrome.
Can you identify which response was done by which child?
Task:
Reproduce Image
Response A
Response B
Feedback
Response A was done by a child with Williams syndrome. The child has
reproduced the Ys (the component parts) but was unable to put them in the
bigger picture (the D). Response B was done by a child with Down syndrome.
Here the child was able to produce the big picture (the D) but was unable to
perceive that it consisted of small Ys.
HSY2601 141
6.2.2.4 Language abilities

Although there is a delay in the onset of language development
amongst children with Williams syndrome, many of them go on to
develop quite impressive language skills. They are socially
interactive children who readily participate in conversations and as
they become older, they can develop quite vivid descriptive skills.
Because they are so ‘chatty’ and have good language skills, their
cognitive handicap is often masked or overlooked.
Unlike children with Down Syndrome, children with Williams
syndrome seem to have a well-preserved phonological short-term
memory, which probably accounts for their good pronunciation
and their expressive and fluent spoken language skills. They use
varying intonation, pitch, volume and dramatic flair while they talk,
and are considered by many to have the ‘gift of the gab’.
Lexical development starts later than in normal children. For
example, Capirci et al. (1996) report that Elissa, an Italian girl with
Williams syndrome, only produced 10 words at age 2;3 (in normal
Italian children, 10 words are produced at around 1;6 years, while
an average of 334 words are produced at age 2;3). At age 4;10
Elissa still had problems naming colours and would use a strategy
of associating colours with the names of things that bore these
colours. For example, if something was brown she said it was like
chocolate, and the colour green she called grass.
A remarkable characteristic of many older children with Williams
syndrome is their relatively rich and wide vocabulary knowledge,
especially of low frequency words. They have larger vocabularies
than would be expected for their mental age and can usually use
the words correctly in context. For example, Van, 11 years old and
with an IQ of 50, could use the words peninsula, slumbering, husk,
solemn, dissecting and hoisting appropriately in his conversations. They
can also generally give accurate explanations of a word’s meaning.
For example, when asked to explain what the word poor meant,
Crystal, 15 years old and with an IQ of 49, replied: ‘Means they are
hungry, they don’t have any money, they are dying from exposure’.
The question of morphosyntactic ability in Williams children is not
yet clear. On the one hand, studies of young French and Italian
children with Williams syndrome describe these children as having
problems mastering the more subtle aspects of morphology and
syntax. Problem areas that have been reported include grammatical
gender (i. e., the masculine/feminine/neuter status of nouns and
adjectives in some languages), agreement between nouns and
adjectives, tense and verb conjugations, the use of articles before
nouns, use of prepositions and auxiliaries (Karmiloff-Smith &
142
Grant 1992, in Capirci et al. 1996:1035). The children were

observed to follow the same sequence of development as normal
children, but they also made more morphosyntactic errors than
normal children, and they also made errors that normal children
seldom make. On the other hand, studies of adolescent English-
speaking children with Williams syndrome describe these children
as having strong linguistic abilities. At the end of this section, we
shall return to the differences in findings between the French/
Italian studies on Williams syndrome and the English studies. In
the meantime, let us look at some examples of the linguistic
abilities of older, English-speaking children with Williams
syndrome. In the previous section we saw that children with Down
syndrome generally had low MLUs. In contrast, children with
Williams syndrome display fairly strong grammatical competence.
For example, the three adolescent children that Bellugi et al. (1988)
tested used well-formed grammatical sentences in their spoken
English and had an average MLU of 10.2. Older English children
with Williams syndrome have been shown to handle quite complex
syntactic constructions such as passives, embedded relative clauses
and tag questions. Although they occasionally make morphological
or pronoun errors, the expressive language use of English children
with Williams syndrome shows grammatical complexity and well-
formedness. Here is a sample of speech produced by Ben, a
teenager with an IQ of 54, describing what happened when he hurt
his foot.
After it stopped hurting I was told I could go to school again and
do whatever I feel like doing. If it got really infected they would
have taken my toe off. They had to give me ether so I wouldn’t feel
the pain.
(from Bellugi et al. 1988)
One way of formally testing syntactic competence or grammatical
comprehension is to give children a set of pictures and ask them to
identify the picture that corresponds to a sentence spoken by the
examiner. For example, to test the comprehension of passive
constructions, on hearing the sentence The horse is chased by the man,
the subject should be able to identify picture 3 as corresponding to
the cue sentence, as shown in figure 6.3 below (as opposed to The
horse is chasing the man in picture 1). The three teenage children with
Williams syndrome that Bellugi et al. (1988) tested scored well on
numerous tests such as these, suggesting that they have fairly high
levels of grammatical competence.
HSY2601 143
Figure 6.3: Task for testing syntactic competence (Bellugi et al. 1988)
The ability to use language appropriately and meaningfully in

different contexts is part of a person’s pragmatic ability. As referred
to earlier, children with Williams syndrome are often quite chatty
and have good conversational skills. Some individuals also have
vivid descriptive and narrative skills. Compare, for example, the
drawing of an elephant by a teenager with Williams syndrome with
his description of an elephant.
What an elephant is, it is one of the animals. And what an elephant

does, it lives in the jungle. It can also live in the zoo. And what it
has, it has long, grey ears, fan ears, ears that can blow in the wind.
It has a long trunk that can pick up grass or pick up hay. If they’re
in a bad mood, it can be terrible. If the elephant gets mad, it could
stomp, it could charge. Sometimes elephants can charge. They have
big long tusks. They can damage a car. It could be dangerous.
When they’re in a pinch, when they’re in a bad mood, it can be
144
terrible. You don’t want an elephant as a pet. You want a cat or a

dog or a bird. (from Lenhoff et al. 1997)
Some researchers have also tested the metalinguistic ability of
children with Williams syndrome. Metalinguistic ability (i. e., the
ability to reflect on language use and to detect and correct incorrect
sentences) requires greater cognitive-linguistic resources because it
requires an awareness of grammatical and semantic rules. The
teenagers that Bellugi et al. (1988) tested on metalinguistic
awareness showed an ability to handle metalinguistic tasks. For
example:
Examiner: The log swam lazily away.

Crystal: Logs cannot do that. Logs float lazily in water.
(Bellugi et al. 1988:189)

Bellugi et al. (1988:189) conclude that the results on the
metalinguistic tasks indicate that children with Williams syndrome
have linguistic abilities that ‘involve awareness and manipulation of
grammatical structure’.
6.2.2.5 Significance of research on Williams syndrome

As you will recall from the introduction to this learning unit,
research into the language development of children who are
cognitively impaired can help us gain a better understanding of the
relationship between language and the mind (cognition). The main
question that has interested scholars here is: Is there a dissociation
between language and cognition?. That is, are language and
cognition separate faculties in the mind? If there is a dissociation,
then we should be able to find evidence of children who are
cognitively impaired, yet whose formal linguistic ability is
unimpaired.
The reason why the recent research into the linguistic development
of Williams syndrome is so important to us is that it reveals some
significant relationships that previously were difficult to untangle.
Usually, mental retardation results in a depression of functions (i.e.,
reduced functioning) across different domains. Thus, for example,
low IQs are usually accompanied by poor linguistic development,
poor performance on visual-spatial tasks, poor levels of numeracy,
nonverbal reasoning, etc.
From the discussion above, we saw that English-speaking children
with Williams syndrome show fairly good mastery of grammatical
structures. The fact that the formal grammatical abilities have been
relatively well preserved in these children despite their low IQs led
HSY2601 145
several researchers to conclude that the linguistic domain is

separate from the general cognitive domain.
However, from the above discussion we also saw that French- and
Italian-speaking children with Williams syndrome are reported to
have problems mastering some aspects of the grammatical
structure of their languages. These latter findings led the French
and Italian researchers to conclude that there was not clear evidence
of a dissociation between language and cognition! What are we to
make of these differences?
The differences in findings between these studies is a clear example
of the way in which different kinds of research can lead to different
findings, and hence different conclusions. One possible reason for
the differences in formal linguistic ability reflected in these studies
lies in the nature of the language acquired by the child. French and
Italian are, morphologically, much richer languages than English,
and it is therefore not surprising that children with impairments
will have greater difficulty with the morphology of such languages.
We cannot come to conclusions about the relationship between
language and cognition unless we have findings from different
types of languages.
Another reason for these differences in interpretation lies in the
nature of the research studies. The French and Italian studies were
both longitudinal, and they studied younger children who were in the
early stages of language acquisition. The English studies, on the
other hand, were cross-sectional, and they studied older children in
more advanced stages of language acquisition (refer to learning unit
2 for the differences between longitudinal and cross-sectional
research). From this it is clear that we need data from both
longitudinal and cross-sectional research before we can confidently
come to conclusions about the process of language development in
children with cognitive impairments. It is also possible that for
children with cognitive impairments, initial delays and problems
occur in the early stages of language acquisition, and that their
language development levels off as they grow older.
The research into the cognitive and linguistic abilities of children
with Williams syndrome shows a complex yet interesting profile of
development in both language and cognition – one of selective
impairment in development. These individuals show peaks of
ability in some aspects of language and cognition, and disabilities in
other aspects.
146
6.2.3 Autism
We come now to the third syndrome to be examined in this unit,
namely autism. Unlike Down and Williams syndromes, which have
a genetic basis and represent fairly homogeneous groups of
individuals, autism is a more complex syndrome and one that is not
yet fully understood. Autism is a lifelong developmental disorder
that generally (but not always) emerges within the first three years
of life. The syndrome was first diagnosed and described by the
child psychiatrist, Leo Kanner, in 1943. He identified the
characteristics of a group of children who showed profound
withdrawal from social contact, were more attached to objects than
humans, engaged in repetitive behaviour, and were either mute (i.e.,
they failed to acquire language) or if they did acquire language, they
used it in inappropriate ways. Children with symptoms such as
these would traditionally have been classified as either mentally
retarded or schizophrenic (i.e., emotionally disturbed), but Kanner
argued that these individuals showed unusual symptoms not
typically associated with either mental retardation or schizophrenia.
The name he gave to this syndrome was ‘infantile autism’. Over the
years, however, the word ‘infantile’ has been dropped because the
syndrome does not only occur during infancy. The term ‘Kanner’s
autism’ is often used.
Estimations of the occurrence of autism vary between 10 and 15 in
every 10 000 people. No reliable figures are available for SA. In
1988 only 283 cases had been positively identified, although these
low figures may be due to lack of awareness and lack of trained
professionals. Autism occurs in all race, ethnic and class groups,
and its incidence is higher amongst boys than girls – about 80% of
autistic people are males (Hart 1987). Autistic individuals vary
greatly with regard to the severity of the disorder, with some
individuals acquiring high levels of independent functioning, while
others never acquire language (they are called nonverbal autistics)
and require constant care and supervision. Rutter (1979) suggests
that almost three-quarters of autistic children may be classified as
mentally retarded.
Before looking at language development in autism, let us first look
more closely at the causes of autism and the behavioural symptoms
of autistic individuals. This will provide a broader context within
which to examine the linguistic features of autism.
6.2.3.1 Causes of autism

The question as to what causes autism is a very controversial one
that can stir up much heated debate. Unlike disorders such as
Down syndrome and Williams syndrome which are caused by
HSY2601 147
specific chromosomal abnormalities, the causes of autism are far

more complex and not yet properly understood.
It was initially believed that autism had a psychological cause, but it
is now generally accepted that the cause is biological and not
psychological. Some possible causes are ascribed to food allergies,
viruses, adverse reactions to vaccinations, and brain injury.
Whatever the causes that trigger this disorder, the result is an
interference in normal brain development. The main problem
seems to stem from a dysfunctional brain stem, corpus callosum
and central nervous system. In fact, the central nervous system in
autistic individuals seems to scramble sensory input (e. g., input
relating to sight, sounds, touch, taste). Consequently, these
individuals have severe problems interpreting and understanding
stimuli – in effect, they have difficulty making sense of the world
into which they are born and the people who inhabit it.
6.2.3.2 Characteristics of autism

In order to understand the characteristics of autistic language, one
must first understand the characteristics of autistic behaviour in
general. The problems with describing the autistic syndrome are
that there seem to be various subtypes of autism (i. e., not all
autistic people show the same symptoms) and there are varying
degrees of severity in the symptoms. For example, some autistic
people are mentally retarded while some are not; some autistic
people may eventually acquire high levels of linguistic competence
while others remain mute all their lives; some autistic people may
reach high levels of functioning and independence in adult life,
while others require constant care.
There seem to be three main subtypes of autism, the Aloof group,
the Passive group and the Active-but-odd group (Wing & Attwood
1987). Let us take a brief look at some of the features that
distinguish these three groups from one another, and afterwards we
shall identify the features that are common to all three groups.
While you are reading about the various symptoms of autism, think
about the possible effects these symptoms could have on language
development.
Autistic children who are diagnosed as being in the Aloof group
are said to have the more ‘classic’ symptoms of autism and are also
sometimes diagnosed as having Kanner’s autism. The Aloof group
or classic autism occurs in 2 to 4 per 10 000 births worldwide.
What is striking about their behaviour is the fact that they avoid
social and physical contact. In fact, they have an intense dislike of
being touched, they avoid making eye contact, they do not express
overt affection and they do not play with other children. As young
148
children, they do not engage in symbolic pretend play. In other

words, they do not pretend that toys represent real things and will
not, for example, pretend to be driving a toy car around. Instead,
they engage with toys as objects in repetitive activities. For example,
they will hold a toy car up and spin its wheels for hours on end.
They also engage in other forms of repetitive behaviour, such as
flicking their fingers or flicking a light switch on and off, flapping
their arms, banging their heads or rocking themselves for hours on
end. They do not share these activities with anyone and seem to be
lost in their own world, oblivious to the presence of others.
They prefer to do the same things at the same time and in the same
order every day and they get very upset if their routines are
disturbed or interrupted and may scream and throw tantrums. As
they grow older their repetitive behaviours may be replaced by
more complex repetitive behaviours, for example, they may insist
on going to the shops by the exact same route every time.
Autistic children in this group do not seem to ‘tune into’ human
speech and in fact their lack of response to speech often leads their
parents or caregivers to suspect that they are deaf. Usually, they are
not deaf and in fact they often have an oversensitive sense of
hearing. For example, in her book, Donna Williams describes how
stroking the bristles of a brush and listening to their swishing
sound – a sound that children would not normally hear or listen to
– soothed her fear and anxiety. Many children in this group are
mute and, as we shall see later in section 4.3, those who are verbal
show delayed language acquisition. For children in this group,
speech is not a means of social interaction (e. g., for talking to
people, finding out about the world and how it works). These
children also have problems copying other people’s gestures (e. g.,
smiles, frowns, hand movements, etc.) and behaviour.
They have unusual reactions to sensory stimuli – sound, light,
vibrations, touch. They may either ignore a particular stimulus (e.g.,
human speech), be attracted to a stimulus (e.g., be fascinated with
spinning objects or with colours) or dislike a stimulus intensely (e.g.,
having their hair brushed). They have no fear of real dangers (for
example they may have no fear of heights, or they will walk into
moving traffic) but paradoxically they may be frightened by
everyday things that seem perfectly harmless to us (e. g., a certain
colour, a row of trees in a street, etc).
The children in the Passive group show milder symptoms of
autism. For example, they do not spontaneously engage in social
interaction, but they do not reject others’ approaches as much as
the Aloof group. Their play lacks the spontaneity and inventiveness
typical of normal children. They are able to copy other people’s
HSY2601 149
actions, but without full understanding of why or what they are

doing. The children in this group tend to have better language skills
than those in the aloof group, but they still have severe problems
with interpersonal communication. Like the aloof group, they
engage in repetitive routines, but show less intense resistance to
changes in that routine.
Like the Passive group, the Active-but-odd group have milder
forms of autism in some respects. This type of autism is also called
Asperger’s syndrome (named after the Swedish doctor who
identified the symptoms in the early 1940s). Individuals with this
autistic syndrome typically develop good language competencies
but, like all autistic people, they engage in repetitive behaviour,
show little flexibility in thought patterns and they have problems
with socialisation and communication. Their speech patterns may
have strange inflections, and they tend to have poor volume
control – for instance, they may speak very loudly in public. Poor
motor coordination is common, and they tend to be clumsy.
Behaviour problems are common in this group, for example,
aggression or taking things that don’t belong to them. Such
behavioural problems arise from a fundamental lack of
understanding of the rules of social behaviour: ‘... they have
enough language and symbolic development to take in something
of the environment, but not enough to make a coherent whole of
their experience’ (Wing & Attwood 1987:11).
Despite their impairments in specific areas of cognitive activity,
some autistic individuals show islands of skill, for example, some
have an amazing ability to draw accurate and minutely detailed
pictures, some have amazing calendar memory (they can work out
past and future dates and times) and are good at arithmetical
calculations, some can successfully imitate music tones or rote
memorise long chunks of information (e. g., they can repeat,
verbatim, entries in a telephone directory or weather reports they
heard months previously).
Verbatim means ‘word for The autistic symptoms of an individual may change over time. For
word’.
instance, it has also been found that some children who have the
more classic symptoms of aloof autistic behaviour in childhood
may, with effective intervention, become socially passive as they
grow older.
6.2.3.3 Summary of symptoms

Triad means a group of Despite different manifestations of autism and despite differences
three.
in the severity of the disorder, there are specific social, cognitive
and linguistic symptoms that characterise autism. This is referred
to as the triad of impairments. We shall discuss the linguistic features
150
of autism in the following section. Let us focus for now on the

cognitive and social features and consider in what ways they might
impact on language development.
Task 6.4
An important aspect of academic competence is the ability to
generalise, i. e., the ability to identify underlying similarities or
patterns, despite differences in detail. Now that you have read a
description of the different types of autism above, try to identify
at least three features that characterise autistic individuals across
the different groups (i.e., features that are common to all groups).
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
Feedback
● The most striking characteristic of autism is impairment in normal
socialisation and in establishing social relationships. They make little or
no eye contact, are indifferent to people and do not normally engage with
other children in play.
● Their activity is dominated by set habits and repetitive routines. They
resist changes in their environment; they like to follow established
routines and do things in a specific way. This reflects rigidity in thought
and behaviour and poor imaginative play. Autistic children show an
attachment to or fascination with objects (e.g., spinning the wheels of a toy
car) rather than with people.
● They show impairment in language and communication, both verbal and
non-verbal.
We saw from the description above that autistic individuals engage

in very repetitive routines, and they get very upset when their
routines are disrupted. This naturally leads one to ask the question:
Why are routines so important for them?
Autobiographies written by autistic adults in which they describe
their childhood have given doctors, clinicians, researchers, parents
and teachers insight into the way in which autistic children perceive
HSY2601 151
the world. As a result of these ‘insider views’ we have now come to

realise that autistic individuals engage in these repetitive and often
destructive behaviours in an attempt to impose some sense of
constancy and order on a world in which they are overwhelmed by
sensory input that they find difficult to interpret. This is how one
autistic person describes the problems she experiences:
Reality to an autistic person is a confusing, interacting mass
of events, people, places, sights and sounds. There seem to be
no clear boundaries, order or meaning to anything. A large
part of my life is spent just trying to work out the pattern
behind everything. Set routines, times, particular routes and
rituals help to get order into an unbearably chaotic life. ... If
anything were suddenly to change on this planet, a normal
person would be worried about it if they did not properly
understand what this change meant. That’s what autistic
people feel like when things change. Trying to keep
everything the same reduces some of this terrible fear. Fear
has dominated my life ... because I cannot make sense of
what I see.
(Joliffe et al. 1992, in Peeters 1997:82)
Many of the problems that autistic people experience stem from
the fact that they basically lack an understanding of the rules of
social behaviour – they do not understand why people behave the
way they do. As children, they do not respond to people around
them, they avoid making eye contact and prefer to be left on their
own. In what way does this social unresponsiveness influence
language development? Spend a few minutes thinking about
possible ways in which these symptoms affect language
development in autistic children. To help you, here are some
pointers:
● Page back to learning unit 3. What kinds of socialisation take
place in the first year of life? In what ways does a baby establish
social relationships with its parents or caregivers?
● What verbal and nonverbal forms of communication do
children acquire in the first year of life?
● In what way is language a symbolic system of communication?
We shall attempt to find answers to these questions in the next
section, where we look at the development of language and
communication in autistic children.
6.2.3.4 Language development

The term echolalia is The following are some of the characteristic features of language
derived from the word echo.
among autistic people:
152
● Mutism (i.e., not developing expressive language ability);

Echolalia (i. e., repeating verbatim sentences spoken by other
people);·strange speech patterns, such as monotonous
intonation, pronoun reversal (e. g., exchanging I for you), and a
tendency to understand only the literal use of language;
● Severe impairment in acquiring the pragmatic aspects of
language (i.e., knowing what language is for and how to use it
appropriately in different contexts).
Many autistic children do not develop language and remain mute,
while some high functioning autistic people develop language in all
its syntactic complexity and learn to read and write. When autistic
children do develop language, the onset of language development is
delayed, and once it emerges, development tends to be slow and
irregular. Although verbal autistic children do not have major
problems acquiring the morphology and syntax of language, they
have profound problems using the language appropriately in
different social contexts. Let us now look at these linguistic
characteristics more closely.
6.2.3.5 Language and communication in early development

In learning unit 3 we considered some of the ways in which a baby
establishes social relationships with its parents or caregivers and
what verbal and nonverbal forms of communication a baby
acquires in the first year of life. As you will recall, normal infants
engage in reciprocal social behaviour from the first few months of
life. For example, they show greater interest in people than objects,
they are genetically ‘tuned into’ the human voice above other
sounds, they establish mutual gaze and reciprocal smiling, and they
unconsciously coordinate their movements and vocalisations with a
partner (e.g., a baby lying on its back on a bed may smile, kick their
legs, wave their arms in glee and make cooing sounds when seeing
their mother). Even retarded children engage in and respond to
such social behaviour.
Normal children can express, verbally and nonverbally, a limited
range of intentions, such as requesting objects or actions (e. g.,
reaching out for a bottle of milk, wanting to be picked up) or
rejecting them (e. g., turning or looking away), calling attention to
objects and commenting on them. Within the first year they also
start understanding some words and engaging in games such as
peek-a-boo and naming rituals (e.g., a mother may say Where’s your
nose? Here’s your nose! and touch her nose, and the child may smile
and touch their nose in turn). Around 12 months they begin to
realise that words refer to things, after which there is a rapid
increase in receptive and expressive vocabulary. Words that express
HSY2601 153
concepts of appearance (There!), disappearance (All gone!) and

recurrence (More milk) emerge and are related to the child’s
developing awareness of object permanence (see learning unit 2 for
an explanation of object permanence).
What about autistic children? Do they develop such behaviours and
practices? Look now at table 6.1, depicting the development of
language and communication in autistic children in the first four
years of life (taken from Peeters 1997:50) and compare it to the
development of normal children.
TABLE 6.1
Language and communicative development in autistic children
Age in months
6 Crying is difficult to interpret
8 Limited or unusual babbling (e.g., squeals or
screeches)
No imitation of sounds, gestures, expressions
12 First words may appear, but often not used
meaningfully
Frequent, loud crying; remains difficult to interpret
24 Usually fewer than 15 words
Words appear, then drop out
Gestures do not develop; few points to objects
36 Word combinations rare
May echo phrases, but no creative language use
Odd rhythm, tone or stress
Poor articulation in about half of speaking children
Half or more are without meaningful speech
Takes parent by hand and leads to object
Goes to customary location and waits to be given
object
48 A few combine two or three words creatively
Echolalia persists; may be used communicatively
Mimics TV commercials
Makes requests
As you can see from this table, autistic children do not

spontaneously establish social relationships with their caregivers,
154
their language emerges much later than normal children, and takes
longer to unfold. The fundamental process of establishing social
relationships with other humans in one’s environment, and
discerning what is relevant in the external world, namely human
beings and human language, and selectively attending to these
relevant attributes, are missing in the autistic child. Here is an
autistic person’s account of her lack of ability in discerning what
was relevant:
As it was a long time before I realized that people might
actually be speaking to me, so it was a long time before I
realized that I too was a person ... I was not able to pick
people out as being different from objects. When I did realize
that people were supposed to be more important than
objects, things began to take on a new and more difficult
light. ... I cannot remember ever thinking about where my
mother, father, sister, brother were, they did not seem to
concern me. I think this was because for a long time I did not
realize that they were people and that people are supposed to
be more important than objects.
(Joliffe et al. 1992, as quoted in Peeters 1997:87)
As you will remember from learning unit 3, the establishment and
maintenance of joint attention is an important precursor to
language development and, in fact, lays the foundation for
subsequent language acquisition. Because of the social
unresponsiveness of autistic children, they have difficulties
establishing and maintaining joint attention, initiating a topic,
handling different topics in a conversation, and dealing with
different interlocutors. They have problems understanding gestures,
gaze, vocalisation and facial expressions. All these different aspects
of lack of socialisation have negative effects on the language
development of autistic children. In their longitudinal study of the
language development of six autistic children, Rollins and Snow
(1998) found that the autistic children who seldom established or
maintained joint focus of attention made very little progress in
their language development – their MLU was shorter and there was
less syntactic variety in their utterances compared to autistic
children who managed to maintain more joint attention.
Task 6.5
Draw up a table comparing the language and communicative development of normal
children and autistic children, starting at birth and ending at about 48 months. Use the table
taken from Peeters above, and simply add another column to it, in which you enter the
development of normal children at different age milestones. This will help you to
summarise the information and to see at a glance to what extent the language of autistic
children is delayed in comparison to normal language development.
HSY2601 155
Feedback
Your table should look something like the following:
Normal children Age in Autistic children
months
Reduplicative babbling 6 Crying is difficult to interpret
Imitation of sounds, gestures, 8 Limited or unusual babbling (e.g.,
expressions squeals or screeches)
No imitation of sounds, gestures,
expressions
First words appear, and are used 12 First words may appear, but often not
meaningfully used meaningfully
Frequent, loud crying; remains difficult
to interpret
Two-word stage begins 24 Usually fewer than 15 words
Creative use of telegraphic language Words appear, then drop out
Gestures do not develop; few points to
objects
Multiple word utterances 36 Word combinations rare
Increasing vocabulary and May echo phrases, but no creative
grammatical competence language use
Odd rhythm, tone or stress
Poor articulation in about half of
speaking children
Half or more are without meaningful
speech
Takes parent by hand and leads to
object
Goes to customary location and waits
to be given object
Fluent, with good grammatical and 48 A few combine two or three words
communicative competence creatively
Echolalia persists; may be used
communicatively
Mimics TV commercials
Makes requests
156
6.2.3.6 Mutism
One of the major problems in studying language in autistic children
is that many autistic children are mute (they are called nonverbal
autistics). The reason for their mutism is not always easy to
establish. As we saw earlier in section 4.2, autistic people have
problems controlling and understanding the stimuli they receive.
Obviously, if information is not registered in the first place, it
cannot be interpreted, or its meaning inferred. The apparent deaf
behaviour of many autistic children is related to their attempts to
shut down the influx of auditory stimuli that they receive because
they have problems filtering auditory input – such as shutting out
background noise or controlling auditory volume.
Research in the past decade has shown that mute autistics have
smaller brain stems than normal and show abnormalities in brain
stem functioning – an area of the brain that controls auditory input
(Grandin 1995:72) (see fig.1.1 in learning unit 1). Because their
visual-spatial processing is less impaired than their auditory
processing, autistic children often have greater capacity for
language acquisition through the visual medium (e. g., signs,
reading) than through the auditory (i. e., spoken) medium. In this
they are similar to children with Down syndrome (cf. section 2.4).
Speech therapists have found that some nonverbal autistic children
start acquiring language only after they first learn to sing –
apparently the brain circuits used for singing are more normal in
autistic children than the brain circuits for spoken language.
Furthermore, we take the purpose of language (i.e., to
communicate) for granted, and indeed within the first few months
of life, normal babies soon come to realise that language is a
communicative ‘tool’, a means of conveying and exchanging
meaning with other humans. Yet this basic fact of language eludes
autistic children. Sometimes they may ‘know’ language, but they
remain mute because they do not know how to use language as a
social tool to convey meaning. They use gestures to indicate their
needs, for example, an autistic child may indicate his need for food
by taking his mother by the hand to the fridge. Here is one autistic
boy’s description of his silence during childhood.
Because I didn’t use speech to communicate until I was 12,
there was considerable doubt as to whether I would ever be
able to learn to function independently. No one guessed how
much I understood because I didn’t say what I knew. And no
one guessed the critical thing I didn’t know, the one missing
connection that so much else depended on: I didn’t
communicate by talking, not because I was incapable of
learning to use language, but because I simply didn’t know
HSY2601 157
that that was what talking was for. Learning how to talk
follows knowing why to talk – and until I learned that words
have meaning, there was no reason to go to the trouble of
learning to pronounce them as sounds. ... I had no idea that
[using words] could be a way to exchange meaning with other
minds.
(Jim Sinclair, 1992, as quoted in Peeters 1997:64-65)
6.2.3.7 Echolalia
A further complication in studying the language of autistic children
lies in their tendency to practice echolalia, i. e., repetition of the
speech of others. The study of echolalic speech is complicated
because it is difficult to establish whether the repeated language
forms are properly internalised or whether they are just rote
memorised pieces of speech. There are two types of echolalia –
immediate (i.e., the child repeats a sentence immediately after it has
been spoken by another person) and delayed (i.e., the child repeats
a sentence or sometimes even an entire dialogue a few hours, weeks
or even months after it was originally spoken). It must be noted
that echolalia is not restricted to autistic children. It also occurs in
normal children during a specific period in their language
development, and it also occurs among mentally retarded children
who are not autistic. It is considered to be a strategy that some
children adopt to help them acquire language. What distinguishes
echolalia in autistic children from other children is the constant
repetitive nature of the echolalia, at times the sheer length of the
delayed echolalic utterance, and the fact that the repeated sentence
is often said in the same intonation pattern and tone of voice as the
original speaker.
In order to understand echolalia in autistic children, one needs to
situate it within the broader context of the characteristics of autism.
The faithful reproduction of language as reflected in echolalic
language indicates that autistic children do not have problems with
low-level perceptual processes. Instead, the problems seem to lie at
a higher level of processing, that of interpreting or making sense of
incoming stimuli. Some researchers (e. g., Frith & Baron-Cohen
1987:96) suggest that autistic children have a tendency towards a
gestalt learning strategy, as reflected in their echolalic utterances.
This echolalic behaviour suggests that the linguistic stimuli the
autistic child hears are unprocessed or unanalysed. The child has
difficulty breaking language down into component parts and
attaching meaning to the parts and then to the whole, so repeating
whole chunks of language is a coping strategy. In her autobiography,
Donna Williams (1992) reports that if she did not repeat utterances
158
addressed to her, she only understood 5-10% of what was said. The
autistic adult, Therese Joliffe, explains her tendency to repeat
sentences as follows:
... First, you have to work so hard in order to understand
speech, that when the words do eventually go into your brain
they seem to become imprinted in the way you hear them.
Second, because trying to speak is quite an effort ... it is all
you can do to just try and reproduce what your good
memory knows. Third, for a long time you have so little idea
about speech and it is all such an effort that you seem to
believe that the voice of the person used to say the words is
the way that you, too, have to say them. You do not seem to
be aware that there are alternative ways of expressing
things. ...
(Theresa Joliffe, in Peeters 1997:55)
Although some echolalic utterances are self-stimulatory and seem
to be an extension of repetitive behaviour, Peeters argues that
echolalia is not the meaningless repetition of language as was once
thought, but rather ‘an attempt to take control of a situation with
the limited means available’ (1997:56). In other words, echolalic
expressions may have a very concrete origin and continue to have
the same meaning even though the phrase is used in a totally
inappropriate way. For example, Jeremy, an autistic boy, often
repeated the utterance Hands off the radio, you’ll break it!. This
echolalic utterance may seem meaningless, but it was noted that
Jeremy used this phrase whenever he wanted to listen to music. He
first heard this warning when he went near a radio. He thus
associated this phrase with the radio, which in turn he associated
with music, so whenever he wanted to hear music, he reproduced
this sentence (Peeters 1997:54). He was unaware that there were
alternative ways of expressing needs, such as I want to listen to music
or Please play me some music.
6.2.3.8 Phonological, morphological and syntactic development

Autistic children do not seem to have problems producing speech
sounds, and their phonological development on the whole does not
seem to be negatively affected by the syndrome. However, their
spontaneous speech is often described as ‘monotonous’,
‘mechanical’ or ‘wooden’ (Fay 1988:199).
One of the difficulties of studying the morphosyntactic aspects of
language in autistic children is that it is difficult to distinguish
between spontaneous speech and delayed echolalic utterances. The
general consensus seems to be that morphosyntactic development
in autistic children is similar to that of normal children but occurs
HSY2601 159
at a much slower rate. However, even though autistic children

acquire fairly complex syntactic structures (i. e., the form of
language), their use of such structures (i. e., the function) is
inappropriate. This has led several researchers to conclude that
there is a ‘dissociation’ between form and function in the language
of autistic children. De Villiers and De Villiers (1987) suggest that
the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic knowledge is woven together
in normal children, but in autistic children these strands become
unravelled.
In learning unit 3 you saw that a common feature of early language
learning involves the overextension of words and the
overgeneralisation of grammatical rules. For instance, a child may
call any feline looking creature a ‘cat’ (e.g., lions, tigers, cats may all
be called cat or kitty). Autistic children are unlikely to use this
strategy. Instead, they may associate a label with a specific thing in a
specific context. Here is how a mother described her autistic son’s
labelling activity:
What I noticed about Thomas’s early language development
was that he made up his own names for different objects
which were really the same, but didn’t look exactly alike. For
various things we call bicycle he had other names. He had a
bicycle, a tractor, a wheels in the mud, a wheels in the
grass and also a feet on the pedals. Everyone called him a
‘creative young man’ but I knew that it had more to do with
helplessness. He didn’t understand what I meant when I said
‘Get on your bicycle’ if his feet on the pedals was in front
of him. He couldn’t understand that we called his feet on the
pedals a bicycle as well.
(Hilde de Clercq, in Peeters 1997:51)
The ability to generalise is a fundamental aspect of normal human
cognition. Being able to perceive patterns underlying the things we
perceive in the external world helps us organise our world and
ascribe meaning to it. Tests of verbal memory show differences in
the way that perception and meaning are linked in autistic children
and other children at the same mental age. In such tests, autistic
children usually show superior recall for random, unstructured lists
of words (e. g., chair, apple, truck, into, spade, tickle, horse). However,
they have problems perceiving the underlying categories when
structured lists of words are presented to them, such as apple,
banana, orange, peach and bus, car, truck. Normal and mentally retarded
children at the same mental age are able to perceive that the first
are examples of fruit and the second are forms of transport, but
autistic children tend to have problems recognising that this second
list of words reflects an underlying pattern of meaning.
160
Here is one mother’s description of her son’s problems:

... I also had to teach him about the various categories of
people and objects. He himself didn’t see how things hang
together. He would group pictures of bananas with people,
cows with cars, people with animals, and so on. I had to
teach him everything. When he was five years old I was with
him on the bus. He saw a lady with an eye-catching hairstyle.
He pointed at her and asked loudly ‘Mummy, is that a person
or an animal?’ I whispered in his ear that it was a person, a
‘woman’, a ‘lady’. So then Thomas said ‘What’s that standing
on her head?’
(Hilde de Clerq, in Peeters 1997:90).
Another interesting aspect of autistic language is the deviant use of
personal pronouns. Autistic children often tend to switch the
pronouns you and I, using you to refer to themselves and I to refer
to their conversational partner, for example:
Stan helped you (instead of Stan helped me)
Help you please (instead of Help me please)
I’m wearing glasses (instead of You’re wearing glasses)
(data from Tager-Flusberg 1994:185).
This unusual reversal of pronouns reflects difficulty in
understanding shifting reference between speaker and listener. As
we shall see in the next section, autistic children have problems
understanding that people have different perspectives, i. e., that
another person may perceive and respond to the world in a way
that is different from our own perspective.
6.2.3.9 Pragmatic disabilities

Although the formal aspects of language (e. g., morphology and
syntax) may be present in the language of autistic children, they
have severe problems with regard to the pragmatic aspects of
language (i. e., the appropriate use of language). They are not
socially competent; they do not pay attention to social cues, and
they have problems understanding how and why normal people
think and behave as they do. They thus have problems interpreting
and understanding emotions, intentions and thoughts, and they
lack what we commonly call ‘common sense’. Several researchers
and clinicians argue that the brains of autistic people process
information differently, that in fact they have a different kind of
cognition. Evidence for this can be seen indirectly in the way in
which they acquire and use language. Let us look at some such
examples.
HSY2601 161
Autistic children have problems understanding and expressing

affect (i. e., emotions). They have great difficulty reading or
interpreting gestures and faces and associating emotions with
gestures, for example, associating a hug with friendship or
interpreting a finger to the lips as a request to keep quiet. Consider
the two rows of pictures that follow (Peeters 1997:20).
(a)
(b)
1. In which row, (a) or (b), are the pictures instrumental and
iconic (i.e., there is an explicit connection between the action
in the picture and its meaning)?
2. In which row are the pictures expressive (i.e., they convey an
emotion or state of mind that must be inferred)?
The researchers Attwood et al. (1986, in Peeters 1997:20-22) set up
a series of experiments with autistic children, children with Down
syndrome and normal children, all with a mental age of 5. The
three groups of children were observed to see what kinds of
instrumental and expressive gestures they used, and they were
shown a series of instrumental and expressive pictures and asked to
say what they meant. All three groups of children did equally well
in interpreting the instrumental pictures (as in row b) and also used
these gestures themselves. The normal children and the children
with Down syndrome also used expressive gestures (as in row a)
162
and did not have problems interpreting them in other people.

However, the autistic children never used them and had difficulty
understanding what they meant. The difficulties they have in going
beyond the literal meaning of language is intimately tied up with
the difficulties they have in interpreting what they see – adding
meaning to stimuli.
On the basis of findings such as these, researchers have concluded
that autistic people do not have problems with perception itself;
instead, the problem seems to occur at a higher level of cognitive
functioning, namely interpreting what the stimuli mean, adding
meaning to what is perceived. For example, they don’t associate
tears with sadness – to them tears are simply water coming from
the eyes.
Thomas can’t read facial expressions at all. He didn’t use to
be able to understand when an adult was cross with him, he
often started to laugh when someone’s face changed
expression suddenly. Since then I’ve taught him the
difference between ‘happy’ and ‘frightened’ and ‘angry’.
We’ve practised with dozens of pictures and Thomas can
now name them all perfectly. But unfortunately for him we
don’t all have the same face and it is still difficult for him.
When his sister Elisabeth looked at him crossly the other day,
he asked quite seriously, ‘Elisabeth, what are all those lines on
your face for?’ (Hilde De Clercq, in Peeters 1997:122)
Because their ability to interpret stimuli is disrupted, autistic
individuals have a very literal understanding of language, so the
figurative, metaphorical aspects of language are puzzling to them.
For example, Peeters (1997) relates how one autistic child, on being
told to Wipe your feet after coming back from a walk, took off his
shoes and socks and literally wiped his feet. Another was surprised
on hearing that his mother had cried her eyes out and looked at her
face to see what she looked like without eyes. They have difficulty
understanding jokes, and they have difficulty perceiving the
presuppositions implicit in utterances (e.g., if a person says Oh dear,
Nick forgot to buy the bread, the presupposition is that Nick was
supposed to have bought bread), and understanding implicit
messages in, for example, requests. For instance, if asked Can you tell
me where you live? an autistic child might reply Yes but not furnish the
address, failing to perceive that the question is actually an indirect
request for supplying an address rather than a literal question as to
whether the person is capable or not of giving an address.
The problems that autistic individuals have in understanding the
emotions, intentions and motives of their fellow humans has led
some researchers such as Uta Frith and her colleagues (1989) to
HSY2601 163
suggest that autistic people lack or have an underdeveloped ‘theory

of mind’, i.e., the ability to perceive the meaning behind actions and
events.
Task 6.6
Consider the following experiment that was done by Baron-
Cohen et al. (1985).
Three groups of subjects were included in the experiment: 20
autistic children, 14 children with Down syndrome, and 27
normal preschool children. (The latter were the control group.)
The mean IQ for the autistic group was 82 while that of the
Down syndrome group was 64. All the children, individually,
were presented with a puppet play, and afterwards were asked
three questions about the play.
Method: Test situation: a puppet play
Two dolls, Sally and Anne, are sitting in a room. Sally has a
basket and Anne has a box. Sally has a marble, which she puts in
her basket and then leaves the room. Anne gets up, takes the
marble out of the basket and hides it in her box then sits down
again. Sally comes back into the room.
The experimenter then asked the following questions:
1. Where will Sally look for her marble?
2. Where is the marble really?
3. Where was the marble in the beginning?
Findings: The researchers found that the autistic children
answered Question 1 correctly only 20% of the time, while the
children with Down syndrome answered it correctly 85% of the
time. The normal children had a correct response rate of 86%.
Questions
1. What do you think the researchers were trying to test in this
experiment?
2. What do the findings suggest about differences between the
way in which autistic children differ from children with
Down syndrome? In what way are the children with Down
syndrome similar to normal children?
3. Autistic children have severe problems acquiring the
pragmatic aspects of language. Do the findings from this
experiment support this assertion? Answer Yes or No and
provide a reason for answering the way you did.
Feedback
1. The researchers were trying to test whether the children could perceive
the meaning behind actions and events.
164
2. Autistic children scored very poorly on this task because they have
problems understanding other people’s point of view and the reason
behind people’s actions. (Note that individuals with high functioning
forms of autism, such as Asperger’s syndrome, usually pass this kind
of test). Like normal children, Down syndrome children are able to
perceive the meaning behind actions and events.
3. Yes, autistic children have problems with the pragmatic aspect of
language. The poor performance of the autistic children in answering
the questions shows that they have problems understanding how and
why normal people think and behave as they do. This inability causes
severe problems with regard to the appropriate use of language.
6.2.3.10 Autism and intervention

Adherents are the followers The question of what kind of intervention is best for autism is a
of a particular theory or controversial one that can cause much heated debate, and it is not
practice.
the objective of this unit to debate these issues here. Parents should
be aware that there are different therapies, that each therapy has a
different approach to treating autism, that each therapy has its own
group of adherents, and that their child might respond in different
ways to each therapy. Given the different types of autism, it may
well be that different approaches will prove to be effective for
specific kinds of autism stemming from different underlying causes.
However, parents are advised to avoid counsellors who believe that
the causes of autism are psychological.
Whichever therapy is chosen, the general consensus is that the
social abilities of autistic individuals tend to improve with age, and
also with educational intervention.
SUMMARY
The different types of autism should not be seen as falling into
rigid, homogeneous groups but should rather be perceived as part
of a spectrum, ranging from mild to severe. As we saw above, the
social disabilities of autistic people are regarded as one of the
defining characteristics of the syndrome. These social disabilities
have profound effects on autistic individuals’ pragmatic
competence. Although language development in autistic children is
delayed, they seem to go through the same stages of language
acquisition with regard to morphosyntactic development as normal
children, albeit at a slower pace. Some aspects of language
development are unusual, such as pronoun reversal, and the
semantic categorisation and generalisation of words. Even though
the symptoms of autism may abate in some children as they get
older, the pragmatic aspects of language continue to pose problems.
HSY2601 165
Educational intervention can help them to achieve higher levels of

functioning, or at least to reduce some of the behavioural problems.
Studies on the language development of autistic children have led
to some interesting speculation about the relationship between
language and the mind. The fact that morphology and syntax seem
to be relatively unaffected (at least in the acquisition of English) by
the disorder has led some researchers (e.g., Tager-Flusberg) to the
conclusion that the language faculty is separate from the mind.
However, not everyone supports this position. Rollins and Snow
(1998) for example, argue that the pragmatic disabilities of autism
impact on the acquisition of the formal aspects of language. The
formal grammatical components of language are meaningless
without the simultaneous acquisition of pragmatic competence.
The failure to integrate incoming information and to interpret it at
a higher level of processing and give it meaning can result in
profound and pervasive social isolation.
6.2.4 Dyslexia
Developmental dyslexia is defined as a ‘disorder manifested by
difficulty in learning to read despite conventional instruction,
adequate intelligence, and socio-cultural opportunity’. This means
that dyslexic children have an unexpected disability when it comes
to reading, one that is not caused by a more general intellectual
disability or an environment that does not promote literacy.
(Remember that at the beginning of the learning unit we
characterised a specific developmental disorder as slow or faulty
development in one particular skill area while other aspects of
development and learning are unaffected.) For example, a 12-year-
old dyslexic child may have normal intelligence but a reading age of
8-10 years and a poor ability to match regular spelling and sounds
and therefore to write and comprehend written text. An adult
dyslexic may have a spelling age of only 12 years, a very low reading
speed and a tendency to lose concentration while reading. Similar-
looking words like snip and ship, beg and bog, dig and big pose
particular problems for dyslexics.
The exact causes of developmental dyslexia are still uncertain
although dyslexia tends to cluster in certain families, indicating that
there is a genetic component to the disability. There is a higher
prevalence of dyslexia in males than females, which also points to a
genetic or chromosomal cause. Some researchers believe the
symptoms of dyslexia result from a visual impairment in which eye
movements are not well controlled and 3-D perception is poor,
while others see it as a result of a poor phonological ability – the
ability to segment speech into sounds. Quite often the poor ability
166
to segment words into strings of sounds goes hand in hand with

earlier speech problems such as lisping, stuttering or delayed
language development (Stein 1991:38). In fact, most dyslexics seem
to have both phonological impairments and visuo-spatial
impairments. One theory is that dyslexia is associated with
inadequate lateralisation of the two brain hemispheres. You will
recall from learning unit 1 that lateralisation involves the brain
hemispheres specialising in different skills. While our linguistic
ability, including the ability to segment speech into sounds, is
controlled by the left hemisphere, our visuo-spatial ability is
controlled by the right hemisphere. Reading thus differs from
speaking and listening in that it requires simultaneous processing in
both hemispheres. Evidence from dichotic listening tests and PET
and MRI scans suggests that dyslexia is characterised by an over-
reliance on one brain hemisphere for processing written text. In
some dyslexics it is the right hemisphere that is dominant for
processing text and in others it is the left hemisphere.
Acquired dyslexia is a similar reading disorder which emerges
after patients have suffered brain damage. Acquired dyslexia affects
the ability to read, just as aphasia affects patients’ spoken language
after brain damage.
Proposed therapies for dyslexia include drug therapy, high vitamin
doses and chiropracty, but none of these have been proven
conclusively to help. Reading intervention such as training in letter-
sound correspondences can improve the spelling and reading
comprehension of dyslexics to some extent. One theory suggests
that ‘multisensory’ approaches are beneficial in helping dyslexics
make the link between reading a word, writing a word and hearing a
word (Thomson 1991:244). For example, children are taught to
hear a word, say it aloud, spell it out aloud, write it down while
saying each letter as it is written and then read the word.
6.3 CONCLUSION
The discussions of various language disabilities in this chapter have
provided us with valuable insight into the relationship between
language and other factors such as biological, physical, cognitive
and neurological factors. However, there are many questions about
the causes and treatments of these disabilities that remain
unanswered. It is still too soon to come to any definitive
conclusions about the relationship between language and the mind.
What the existing research does indicate is that although the human
brain is massively interconnected, an impairment in one aspect of
cognitive processing does not affect all aspects of processing, and
islands of skill can exist in the face of severe disability. Children
HSY2601 167
with disabilities are born with many qualities and abilities and
parents and caregivers should develop these to the full. With
effective intervention programmes, many of these children can lead
more fulfilling and independent lives. A slogan that parents are
encouraged to remember is: Never lower your expectations of your child!
168
LEARNING UNIT 7
The Evolution of Language
Learningunit7
�
20-30 hours
Contents
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Ontogenesis vs. phylogenesis
7.3 The evolution of language vs. biological evolution
7.4 Problems facing theories of the evolution of language
7.4.1 The continuity controversy
7.4.2 The language universals problem
7.4.3 The nature-nurture problem
7.5 The phylogenesis of language in the human species
7.5.1 The sudden genetic mutation view
7.5.2 The gradual evolutionary view
7.6 Language universals in a gradual evolutionary view of the phylogenesis of language
7.6.1 Short-term memory limitations, chunking and language universals
7.7 Information and the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of language
7.7.1 Information and the phylogenesis of language
7.7.2 Information and the ontogenesis of language
7.8 Conclusion
HSY2601 169
LEARNING UNIT 7 THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
LEARNING OUTCOMES
● contrast the development of the linguistic ability in the human species and in human infants and
show why these two domains of study are relevant to each other
● describe the differences between the two main theories of the evolution of language with reference
to the kinds of problems they try to account for and the nature of their explanations
● present evidence in support of the hypothesis that language universals are innate
● describe some of the evolutionary developments in the ancestors of the human species that
predisposed humans for the evolution of language
● present evidence in support of the hypothesis that language universals develop from more general
principles of cognition and information processing
evolution primate
phylogenesis continuity controversy
ontogenesis phatic communication
genetic mutation/saltation precursors/preadaptations
gradual evolution chunking
hominid
Preview
Up to this point the learning units of this module have dealt with questions such as: How
do children acquire language?; How is language organised in the brain?; and What can go
wrong with the language ability because of language disorders and brain damage? All of
these questions deal with the language ability of individuals. We now turn to questions
about the language ability in the human species as a whole. In this learning unit, we try to
give answers to questions such as: Where does the uniquely human ability to communicate
by means of language come from? and How does human language differ from animal
communication?
7.1 INTRODUCTION
This learning unit is all about evolution, more specifically, the
evolution of the human language ability. Evolution refers to the
natural way that plants and animals have developed throughout
history to become the modern plants and animals we know today.
Modern humans have a highly developed intellectual capacity that
enables us to organise sophisticated information and perform the
complex tasks of everyday life. It comes as no surprise then that
human beings are the only animal species with elaborate
communication systems such as oral language, writing systems and
sign language. Yet, despite the significance of the linguistic ability in
human life, we seldom, if ever, ask questions about its origins. Have
you ever thought of where the languages of the world come from,
170
The Evolution of Language Learning unit 7
whether they have a common ancestor, whether the linguistic

ability is uniquely human or whether other animals also have some
form of language, and whether human language and animal
communication systems are related? Think for a moment about
these questions.
Speculations about the origins of language make rather interesting
reading. Let us briefly take a look at some of these:
● The Bow-wow Theory
According to this theory, language originated as imitations of
natural sounds, such as animal sounds. How do you imitate in
your language the sound of a dog, a cow and a cat?
.....................................................
According to the Bow-wow theory these imitations are
supposed to be the primitive beginnings of language.
● The Pooh-pooh Theory
This theory claims that language originated from instinctive
emotional utterances. What sounds do you make when you
experience severe pain, when you touch a hot plate, and when
you are shocked?
.....................................................
Such emotional exclamations are purported to be the humble
beginning of language.
● The Yo-he-ho Theory
What sound do you make when you try to pick up a heavy
object or when you try to move a heavy piece of furniture?
.....................................................
According to this theory we make involuntary noises when we
are engaged in labour activities such as those above and these
noises form the basis of language development.
(If you want to know more about these theories and their merits
and demerits you can read The Story of Language by C.L. Barber.) If
none of these theories sounds particularly convincing to you, you
may have your own ideas. Can you do better in your answers as to
the why and the how of the origins of language? If you can,
compare your answers to the ones given in the learning unit. If you
don’t have any answers, then this learning unit is for you. Needless
to say, there is no final or correct answer.
7.2 ONTOGENESIS VS. PHYLOGENESIS

The theme throughout the learning units of this module is the
remarkable and apparently unique ability of humans to
HSY2601 171
communicate through language, with a particular focus on the

ability of children to acquire language. This learning unit looks at
language development from a different perspective, namely the
development of the language ability in the human species.

Look up the meaning of the word ‘genesis’ in a dictionary and
write it down.
Definitions:
genesis = .........................................
If onto- refers to an individual and phylo- refers to an entire
phylum or species, what can you deduce about the meanings of
the following words?
Ontogenesis = .........................................
phylogenesis = .........................................
Now compare the meanings of the words ontogenesis and
phylogenesis and write down the similarities and differences
between their meanings:
similarities = ..........................................
..................................................................
differences = ..........................................
..................................................................
Feedback
You should have noticed that both terms involve ‘the origin and development
(genesis) of something’. In the case of ontogenesis the ‘genesis’ part of the
word refers to the origin and development of an individual being (onto-) or
the origin and development of a characteristic feature in an individual being.
In phylogenesis, on the other hand, the ‘genesis’ part of the word still
refers to origin and development, but now with reference to a whole group or
subgroup of individuals (phylum, i.e., a species). The ontogenesis of language
then, refers to the origin and development of the language ability in an
individual human being and the phylogenesis of language refers to the origin
and development of language in the human species within the animal world.
172
7.3 THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE VS.

BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
Before we examine the phylogenesis of language we need to take a

brief look at evolution in general. The biological theory of
evolution is an answer to the question about the origins of all living
things. Most biologists, if not most scientists, believe that all living
Charles Darwin (1809- things descended from a single common ancestor. All living things,
1882), author of The Origin including humans, are therefore related. According to the theory of
of Species and father of evolution, different species of living things came about because
evolutionary thinking. (Brace
1979:12)
different living environments required different biological
adaptations. Some biological adaptations appear suddenly and
unpredictably, i.e., there is no obvious reason for their occurrence.
Such a sudden adaptation is called a genetic saltation (i. e., a
genetic jump in a new direction giving rise to a new species). Most
adaptations however involve gradual evolution over extended
periods of time. But since we cannot go back in time, how can
biologists trace the evolution of living things if the evolutionary
process extends over millions of years? Evolutionists employ two
methods to trace the phylogenesis of a species: they compare the
anatomy of different species, and they study the development of
infants of a species. Let us take a closer look at these two methods.
Biologists can work out how closely related different species are by
looking at shared characteristics. Such shared characteristics then
give a picture of the evolution of the various species. Thus, human
beings are vertebrates because they have a backbone; they are
mammals because they have hair, milk-producing glands and three
separate bones in the middle ear; they are primates because they
have finger- and toenails and an opposable (i.e. a movable) thumb;
and humans are apes because they have no tail, their shoulder
blades are at the back, not on the sides, and they have a Y-shaped
pattern on the surface of the molars (chewing teeth).
You recapitulate when you The second method derives from a very significant, but rather
repeat something or go over controversial hypothesis in the theory of evolution, namely:
it again.
‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. That is, the biological
development of an infant reflects the evolution of the species to
which the infant belongs. According to this hypothesis, the
evolutionary adaptations which define a species may be revealed by
studying the various stages of the development of an infant of that
species.
There is in fact also a third method that is far more sophisticated
than the first two, namely the study of biological relations by means
of the genetic code known as DNA. The DNA of every species is
different, but by comparing the DNA of different species,
HSY2601 173
biologists can establish the relationships between them.

Unfortunately, this method is beyond the scope of this learning unit.
In addition to tracing the evolution of a species, say, the human

species, evolutionists can also trace the evolution of a specific trait
or characteristic of a species. The trait that we will look at in this
learning unit is the evolution of a uniquely human ability, namely
human language. In particular, we will consider two contrasting
views of the evolution of this ability. One of these views claims that
the human linguistic ability evolved in the form of a sudden
saltation. The other view claims that the human linguistic ability
evolved gradually as a result of several, seemingly unrelated,
biological adaptations that gave rise to the human species.
In this introductory learning unit on the evolution of language you
will see how linguists make use of the methods based on shared
characteristics and child development to trace the origin of the
linguistic ability of humans.
7.4 PROBLEMS FACING THEORIES OF THE

EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
Any theory of the evolution of the linguistic ability in humans has
to try and answer a number of questions:
There is controversy about 1. Is human language merely an extension of animal
something when many communication systems or is it a different system altogether?
people disagree about it.
This is known as the continuity controversy. That is, can
human language, though more elaborate and complex than
animal communication systems, be considered as an extension
of animal communication?
2. Why do all the languages of the world seem to be structured
the same way? This is known as the language universals
problem. Although the languages of the world are different
enough to each other to make them incomprehensible to
speakers of other languages, they share a significant range of
common structural properties.
3. Why do all children, despite differences in their intellectual
abilities, acquire reasonably effective linguistic competence in
their mother tongue at more or less the same age? This is the
nature-nurture problem that we encountered in learning
unit 2. The question is, do children acquire language through
interaction with their caretakers (nurture) or do they have an
inborn ability (nature) to acquire language?
Let us now take a closer look at these controversies.
174
7.4.1 The continuity controversy

Humans, as we have noted above, belong to the primate family.
The dictionary definition of a primate is ‘any member of the order
Primate, which includes the monkeys, apes and humans, typically
having dexterous hands and feet, binocular vision, and a well-
developed brain’. In terms of shared characteristics, humans are
closely related to the apes, but diverged from the ape family in
another family called Hominids.
Homo habilis
● The ape family consists of gorillas, gibbons, orang-utans and
An artifact is an object chimpanzees.
made by a human being. ● The Hominid family consists among others of:
Homo habilis (‘handy man’) (2.5-1.6 million years ago) Homo
erectus (‘upright man’) (1.6 million years ago)
Homo sapiens (‘wise man’) (from about 100 000 years ago to
modern man)
The only living member of the Hominid family is Homo sapiens
sapiens, i. e., modern humans. However, we know about the other
members of this family from fossils and artifacts such as stone
tools.
Both in the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic senses of language
development, human beings are unique among the apes: only
humans can communicate by means of language and only human
infants can acquire a language. Although chimpanzees and humans
share 98% of their genes (Foley 1997:48), only humans have
language in the highly structured and elaborate format
characteristic of all languages. Even in the Hominid family, only
humans seem to have the ability to develop language, although
scientists disagree on this (cf. Leaky & Lewin 1992). These
observations raise all sorts of questions about the status of human
language in relation to animal communication systems (the
continuity controversy).
Although chimpanzees also communicate by means of oral sounds,
their communicative system is typically a phatic system, i.e., one
which is composed only of gestures and facial expressions. Humans,
on the other hand, typically communicate orally, although their
communicative system also includes gestures and facial expressions.
So, in a sense, the communicative systems of chimpanzees and
humans are very similar in that they both employ the visual and
auditory modalities (i. e., sounds and signs). However, the human
system differs both quantitatively and qualitatively from the animal
system. The range of meaningful expressions in human language is
open-ended and capable of expressing complex and abstract ideas,
whereas the range of meaningful expressions in the chimpanzee
HSY2601 175
system is highly restricted. Similarly, human language allows scope

for creativity, i. e., the expression of novel meanings, whereas the
chimpanzee system is largely determined and limited by instinctive
communicative behaviour.
To summarise: some researchers believe that human and animal
communication systems are unrelated, while others believe that
human language is an elaborated version of animal communication.
7.4.2 The language universals problem

All the languages of the world share a host of common properties.
Some of these properties are so obvious that we do not even
recognise them. The properties shared by all languages are called
language universals. Consider the list of properties below and
decide whether they are universals or not by ticking the yes or no
box:
Yes No
The sounds of all languages consist of
consonants and vowels.
The words of all languages are divided into
syllables.
All the languages of the world have the word
categories noun and verb.
All the languages of the world can express
questions, commands, etc.
If you ticked all these properties as universals you are right. But
these are rather simplistic universals. By far the most significant
universals and by far the most difficult universals to detect and
describe are universals that control the structural patterns of
sentences – the so-called syntactic universal principles. Basically,
there are three universal syntactic principles. (Those of you who did
LIN101-W should be familiar with these principles.) These
syntactic principles are:
● The classifiability principle, which assigns each word to a
category – noun, verb, etc.
● The linearity principle, which governs word order.
● The hierarchic principle, which groups words into larger
constituents such as phrases.
The question that any theory of language evolution has to answer
is: Where do these language universals come from? Was there one
common ancestor for all languages or do all human beings have a
mental device that specifies the nature of language universals?
176
Furthermore, are these universals unique to human language or do

they also control animal communication systems? If the universals
are unique to human language, then obviously human language
could not have evolved from animal communication systems. If the
universals are also found in animal communication systems, then
apes such as chimpanzees should be able to master a human
language. (There are, in fact, a number of current experimental
projects which have attempted to teach chimpanzees English or
American Sign Language – but all with very limited success.)
7.4.3 The nature-nurture problem

In learning units 2-5 on developmental psycholinguistics, you
studied the various stages of language acquisition in children. All
children (even children with disabilities to some extent),
irrespective of their culture or language, go through these stages. In
fact, we may add these stages to the list of language universals
above. Furthermore, all normal children seem to effortlessly
acquire the same basic level of linguistic competence at more or
less the same stage despite differences in intellectual capacities.
Do children simply learn their mother tongue by imitating their
caretakers’ language use (an extreme form of the nurture view) or
do children have an inborn language acquisition ability (the nature
(nativist) view)? As we saw in learning unit 2, the answer to these
questions need not be either/or answers; both of these possibilities
may indeed be part of the language acquisition of children. In fact,
unless we accept some form of the nurture view, we cannot
account for the fact that children do indeed acquire different
languages. Similarly, we have to accept some form of inborn ability
to acquire the syntactic universals of their languages, because these
universals cannot be simply imitated or even explicitly taught by
caretakers as we shall see further on.
Let us now turn our attention to the phylogenesis of human
language and see how different theories of the evolution of
language come to terms with the problems listed above.
7.5 THE PHYLOGENESIS OF LANGUAGE IN THE

HUMAN SPECIES
A mutation is a biological Naturally, we cannot deal with all the relevant issues pertaining to
change that results in a new such a complex issue as the phylogenesis of language within the
species.
limits of a single learning unit. To some extent the main theme of
this module, namely child language acquisition (the ontogenesis of
language), determines the focus in our study of the phylogenesis of
language. The emphasis of this learning unit therefore is on the
question: What can studies of the phylogenesis of language in the
HSY2601 177
human species tell us about the ontogenesis of language in the

individual? Conversely, what can the ontogenesis of language tell us
about the phylogenesis of language? In this learning unit we will
restrict ourselves to theories of the phylogenesis of language that
are linked to the ontogenesis of languages and will focus on the
evolution of the linguistic ability in human beings rather than the
stages in the evolution of a specific language.
The two theoretical points of view that we will consider in this
learning unit fall within the limits given above: their concern is with
both the ontogeny and the phylogeny of the language ability in the
human species.
Before we take a look at the two theoretical frameworks in more
detail, a brief overview of the essence of their claims is in order.
Generally speaking, evolution is a gradual process extending over
thousands of years, but occasionally there may occur sudden,
inexplicable mutations, also known as saltations. It is exactly on
these two characteristics of the evolutionary process that the two
theoretical perspectives on the phylogenesis of language are
differentiated. The one viewpoint claims that a sudden genetic
mutation gave rise to the linguistic ability in the human species;
the other claims there was a gradual evolution of the linguistic
ability as a result of a whole range of biological adaptations in the
species which, taken together, made language possible.
Let us now take a closer look at these two different theories,
starting off with the sudden genetic mutation theory.
7.5.1 The sudden genetic mutation view

A trait is a particular According to this view, some or other ancestor in the human
characteristic of something.
evolutionary line developed the linguistic ability through a sudden
genetic mutation and passed this ability on to its offspring through
its genes. Essentially, this means that within the primate family (i.e.,
the family to which humans belong) only humans possess the
linguistic ability and that all human beings possess the linguistic
ability in equal measure. The linguistic version of this view is
expressed in the so-called Innateness Hypothesis – Chomsky’s
version of nativism. According to this hypothesis, the universal
properties that characterise language (i.e., those properties common
to all languages) are part of the biological make-up of all human
beings. Thus, these universal properties cannot be learned or
acquired from an external source. Some proponents of the genetic
mutation view even go so far as to claim that the innate linguistic
ability is a biologically determined specialised mental organ
comparable to other biological organs such as the heart (Chomsky
1980:185ff). Notice that this viewpoint explicitly claims that the
178
innate universals are specifically linguistic universals (i. e., they are
unique to language). However, there are some linguists and
psychologists that support the claim that some human cognitive
abilities are innate and genetically determined, but they do not
accept the view that there are independent innate linguistic
universals (see section 5.1 in learning unit 2).
The problem with the sudden genetic mutation view of the
evolution of the human linguistic ability is that other evolutionary
traits of the species are simply ignored. Some of these other traits
may be very relevant for our understanding of the development of
the linguistic ability. In fact, some of these evolutionary
developments may indeed suggest radically different answers to
questions about the nature of the linguistic ability, both in its
phylogenetic as well as in its ontogenetic senses. In a sense, the
sudden mutation view forces one to subscribe to the Innateness
Hypothesis, i. e., to view the linguistic ability as a biological organ
(such as wings, or hearts, etc.) which specialises in linguistic
knowledge. It also forces one to view language universals as being
genetically determined.
The sudden genetic mutation view of the phylogenesis of language
has been proposed as an explanation for a whole range of
problematic phenomena. We will concentrate on only one of these
phenomena here, namely the unlearnability of certain language
universals because it is also a prominent phenomenon in the
ontogenesis of language. In fact, the sudden mutation view of the
phylogenesis of language seems to follow directly from the
ontogenetic hypothesis that has been proposed to account for the
unlearnability of language, namely the Innateness Hypothesis (or
Universal Grammar).
The following task should demonstrate to you what is meant by the
unlearnability of language. If you cannot do the task, then certain
aspects of language are unlearnable.
HSY2601 179
Task 7.2
Try to formulate one rule that will tell you who is doing the
‘leaving’ in the following sentences:
1. John tried to leave.
2. John told Mary to leave.
3. John was told by Mary to leave.
Write down your rule:
Feedback
In the case of sentences 1 and 2 the answer may seem to be quite obvious:
The subject of the verb ‘to leave’ is simply the noun that is closest to the verb
– John is doing the leaving in the first sentence and Mary is doing the leaving
in the second sentence. Unfortunately, this rule, which is based on proximity
between elements, does not work in the third sentence, John was told by Mary
to leave. Who is doing the leaving here? According to the rule formulated
above, it should be Mary, because Mary is closest to the infinitive verb. But
it is John that is doing the leaving. It is extremely difficult to identify a
general rule covering all three cases illustrated above. Now, remember
children learning English as their mother tongue must be able to identify such
a rule simply from what they hear. However, if you, as a linguistics student,
find it extremely hard to formulate a valid rule, how much more difficult
would it be for children to work out the rule on the basis of the sentences they
hear, or for parents to find a rule whereby they can teach their children how
to identify subjects of infinitive clauses. The point is: If a rule cannot be
formulated by speakers (including teachers), then the rule cannot be learnt by
or taught to children.
The facts that we have considered above lead to a highly

controversial but seemingly unavoidable conclusion: certain parts
of the knowledge of our language are unlearnable. Interestingly
enough, no speaker of English (including children after a certain
stage) has any difficulty in assigning the correct subject to infinitive
clauses in English. So where does this knowledge come from if it is
not learnable? Within the sudden mutation view it is claimed that
this knowledge derives from the language universals that are innate
in the human species. It is claimed that just as our bodies consist of
organs that are species-specific, i. e., genetically determined and
unique to humans, so our minds consist of mental organs such as a
linguistic ability that are genetically determined. Chomsky
(1980:134), the main proponent of the sudden mutation view,
claims that ‘in certain fundamental respects we do not really learn a
language, rather grammar grows in the mind’.
180
This grammar that ‘grows in the mind’ has an initial state that
comes from the human evolutionary ancestor with the language
gene. In its initial state this grammar contains all the language
universals common to all language and is therefore called
Universal Grammar (UG) (see also learning unit 2).
As we have noted, the syntactic structure of all sentences in all
languages is based on three universal principles:
● Classifiability: The words in a sentence belong to different
categories, e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
● Linearity: The words in a sentence must follow one another in
a specified order according to their categorial status.
● Hierarchy: The words of a sentence form groupings at various
hierarchic levels.
Classifiability: Using the classifiability principle, say why
sentence (a) is grammatical and sentence (b) is ungrammatical:
(a) John likes coffee.
(b) *John Mary coffee.
Write your answer here:
............................................................
............................................................
Linearity: The words in a sentence must follow one another in a

specified order. Using this principle, say why the sentence below
is ungrammatical:
*Man the looking is door the for.
(The man is looking for the door.)
Write your answer here:
............................................................
............................................................
Hierarchy: The words of a sentence form groupings at various

hierarchic levels. Using this principle, identify the group of words
that the question word replaces in each one of the sentences
below:
Statement: I met him in the park.
Question: Where did you meet him?
............................................................
Statement: I shot him in the park.
HSY2601 181
Question: You did what?

............................................................
Feedback
The three universal syntactic principles illustrated above are innate and
therefore need not be learned. Essentially, these principles determine the
syntactic interpretation of all sentences in all the languages of the world.
These very same principles, particularly the hierarchic principle, also enable a
child to identify the correct subject of an infinitive clause in English. Of these
three principles, the hierarchic principle is perhaps the most significant
because it controls a host of other universal principles. We will return to this
notion further on.
The sudden mutation view of the phylogenesis of human language

accounts for all three problems which face theories of the
evolution of language by postulating a genetically determined
innate linguistic ability or mental faculty in the human species. This
innate linguistic ability places a limit on the variations among
languages so that all languages conform to the same genetically
determined linguistic principles.
The ability of children to master these structural characteristics of
languages effortlessly and in a remarkably short period of time is
accounted for by the assumption that every child is born with
linguistic knowledge in the form of a Universal Grammar. This
knowledge did not evolve over thousands of years in the
evolutionary line of the human species, i.e., there are no structurally
simple languages compared to structurally complex languages. The
linguistic ability of the human species originated from a sudden
genetic mutation in one or other ancestor of the species and was
then genetically inherited by all human beings.
This view of the phylogenesis of language therefore believes there
is no evolutionary continuity between animal communication
systems and human language. The linguistic ability of humans is
unique – it is not an extension of, say, the gestures, facial
expressions and vocalisations of chimpanzees. In the sudden
mutation view of language, the significant similarities and
differences between the bodies and habits of primates and humans
are considered to be immaterial and irrelevant. According to the
sudden mutation view, humans have a language ability and the
other primates do not – there is no continuity between the phatic
communication systems of primates and human language. It is
argued that it would therefore not make much sense to compare
the bodies and the habits of various primates and humans in order
to explain why language is possible in humans but not in primates.
182
Although this view of the phylogenesis of language forms the basis

of one of the dominant linguistic theories of our times, it is not
necessarily a satisfactory theory. In fact, the proponents of this
theory simply argue that since there is no alternative explanation
for language universals, the discontinuity between animal
communication systems and human language, and the language
acquisition abilities of children, their theory is currently the only
acceptable one to account for these problems.
But are there no other alternative explanations? That is what we are
going to find out in the next section.
7.5.2 The gradual evolutionary view

According to the gradual evolutionary view, the development of the
language ability in humans relates to changes in a number of
seemingly unrelated subsystems in the ancestry of the human
species. For instance, the evolution of the ability to walk upright
rather than on all fours had an effect on the shape of the vocal
tract that, in turn, made speech possible. Such an approach requires
that we look beyond language as such and consider the evolution
of different abilities in the human species. These abilities might
have contributed, in one way or another, to our ability to speak, or
to the highly structured nature of language and the universality of
certain properties common to all languages. In this view, the ability
to speak a language may not even be a genetically determined
ability at all, but rather the end result of a whole range of biological
adaptations in the species which, taken together, made language
possible. Although it is virtually impossible to order these various
changes in the different subsystems into a sequence of causes and
effects, it is possible to identify their respective contributions to the
development of the linguistic ability.
Adaptation is the process The supporters of the gradual evolutionary viewpoint disagree with
of adapting to fit a changed the sudden mutation theory and argue that human language would
environment.
Adaptations are the not have been possible without significant biological adaptations
changes that result from this (evolutionary changes) which make our bodies quite distinct from
process. the other primates. The phylogenesis of language (including written
language and sign language) went hand in hand with major
anatomical, neurological, cognitive and social adaptations in
humans. These anatomical, neurological, cognitive and social
evolutionary changes are called preadaptations or precursors of
the language ability because they took place before the emergence of
language. In this section we will consider some of the more
important preadaptations for the language ability in humans.
HSY2601 183
You are predisposed to Before we look at these precursors, we must draw a few
behave in a certain way if
precautionary guidelines for the interpretation of the role of these
something has influenced
you and caused you to precursors in the phylogenesis of language. As we have noted
behave in that way. before, we cannot simply line up these preadaptations in a
sequence of causes and effects that led up to the evolution of the
language ability. None of the biological and social adaptations
characterising the evolution of the human species has anything
directly to do with the development of a language ability as such.
For instance, most, if not all, the body parts that are involved in
speech processing (e. g., the tongue, lips, lungs and vocal cords)
have other primary functions that are not related to language, for
example, chewing and swallowing food, regulating breathing,
coordinating muscle movements and motion, etc. Even though
these bodily organs and systems are ideally suited for speech
purposes, their linguistic use seems to be secondary to these other
functions. Nevertheless, the suitability of these body parts for
speech production is quite remarkable. It seems that the
evolutionary changes in these body parts predisposed humans for a
linguistic ability. The remarkable preadaptations of these body parts
for language may be one of the important reasons why linguists
that support the sudden mutation theory hold the view that we are
actually preprogrammed for language, specifically language through
the medium of sound, i. e., speech. However, human beings are
probably just as much predisposed for developing writing systems,
science and mathematics, athletics and other mental and physical
abilities as we are predisposed for speech because of certain
evolutionary preadaptations.
The fact that adaptations in so many different systems and
subsystems are (indirectly) involved in the phylogenesis of language
suggests that the language ability (including speech, writing,
signing) is not a unitary system or single ‘mental organ’. On the
contrary, the linguistic ability seems to relate to the anatomy and
physiology of the human body, to the information processing and
coordinating abilities of the brain, to the cognitive abilities of the
mind, to the emotional and social needs of the human individual,
etc. It is therefore an ability that is widely distributed over many
different systems of the human body, brain and mind.
A typical question about evolutionary adaptation is: What
motivated an adaptation, i. e., why did it happen? This is a tricky
question in the case of the phylogenesis of language, partly because
the phylogenesis of language has so many diverse preadaptations,
and partly because the linguistic ability is a multi-functional and
multi-purpose ability. The point is that if the linguistic ability is not
a single suddenly evolved genetic ability but rather a predisposition
that came about because of several, not specifically linguistic,
184
adaptations, it would be virtually impossible to identify a specific

adaptive purpose for the phylogenesis of language. Very often the
research focus of linguists and other scientists with an interest in
the language ability becomes biased by singling out a particular
adaptive purpose for the phylogenesis of language. We will return
to this issue further on.
The following discussion of some of the major biological
adaptations that predisposed the human species for a language
ability is necessarily superficial. It would be impossible to deal with
all the relevant adaptations in great detail within the limits of a
single learning unit. However, the adaptations that we will consider
are sufficient to illustrate the gradual evolution of the linguistic
ability in humans.
Note that the order in which these adaptations is presented does
not necessarily represent the chronological order in which they
evolved. It is in fact impossible to order these adaptations on a
time scale although the order in which the apes, the hominids and
Homo sapiens evolved would be suggestive of the time scale of the
evolution of the various adaptations. The main era that concerns us
here is the Pleistocene era, which began about 1.6 million years ago.
Major changes in the geological and climatological conditions on
earth several million years ago created environmental conditions
conducive to the evolution of mammals. (Recall that humans are
also mammals.) One of the most significant changes was the drop
in world temperatures approximately 14 million years ago. This
drop in temperatures caused large ice sheets to form in the higher
regions, ‘locking up enough water to lower world sea levels by
about ... [40 metres]’ (Fagan 1998:28). The warmer climatic
conditions in the drier lower regions led to the growth of forests,
which required animals to live in trees (an arboreal lifestyle), and
ultimately to the spreading of savannas (grasslands) over large areas,
thus enabling a terrestrial (land-based) lifestyle. These changes in
climatic conditions created ecologies in which the preadaptations
underlying the phylogenesis of language evolved.
Let’s have a closer look now at some of the preadaptations that
made human language possible. The preadaptations we will look at
in the next sections are binocular vision, bipedalism, the
lowering of the larynx, premature birth, the opposable thumb
and toolmaking and increased brain size.
7.5.2.1 Binocular and colour vision

Binocular vision refers to the ability of both eyes to observe the
same visual field in three dimensions, i. e., in depth. Binocular
vision is an evolutionary prerequisite for the arboreal lifestyle of
HSY2601 185
primates since it is essential for hand-eye coordination in grasping

objects and locomotion in the trees (swinging from branch to
branch). The evolution of binocular vision in primates correlates
with several other significant adaptations that may be seen as
preadaptations, directly or indirectly, for the evolution of language:
● Binocular vision allows a switch from an essentially olfactory
(smelling) based communication system to a visual based
communication system using facial expressions and gestures.
The use of facial expressions for communication requires an
increased, more elaborate set of facial muscles which in turn
enables the finely tuned articulatory movements of speech.
● Binocular vision went hand in hand with an increase in brain
size which improved memory capacity and the ability to make
associations (such as remembering food locations). Colour
vision also enables the development of cognitive abilities such
as discrimination, generalisation and categorisation.
● Binocular vision makes the manual manipulation of objects
(such as the use of sticks and rocks to gain access to food
sources) possible and as such it creates the potential for
toolmaking.
● Binocular vision also creates the potential to form mental
images (i. e., pictures in the mind), which are essential for
language.
7.5.2.2 Bipedalism
If bi means two and ped means foot, what do you think bipedalism
means?
........................................................
I’m sure you managed to work out that bipedalism is the ability to
walk upright on two legs (rather than on all fours).
Hands (or feet) are

prehensile when they can
Figure 7.1: Ape locomotion vs. human locomotion (Zihlman 1982:55)
be used to grasp onto
things.
Primates are adapted for an arboreal lifestyle, particularly with their
prehensile hands and feet and their binocular vision. The
prehensile hands and feet of primates can be seen as an
evolutionary precursor of bipedalism in the sense that the muscular
control required for grasping enables primates to walk upright for
186
limited periods. Zihlman (1982:55) observes that Chimpanzees are

‘jacks of all trades’ in locomotion; whereas humans are ‘masters of
one’.
One thing is concomitant Besides climbing, hanging, walking and running on all fours,
with another when it occurs chimpanzees occasionally walk bipedally for short distances.
at the same time.
Humans are specialised for walking long distances even while
carrying food, tools or babies. Bipedalism is not only the most
striking distinction between humans and primates but is in all
probability the adaptation with the widest and most significant
anatomical, physiological and behavioural effects that could be
linked to the development of the linguistic ability in humans. But
why did bipedalism evolve?
The apes are restricted to the forests of the African continent.
During the Late Miocene period, which lasted from 23 to 5 million
years ago, temperatures began to fall, and forests therefore
decreased, with a concomitant increase in open land. The increase
in savanna land during the Miocene period thus created a new
ecology in Africa which ‘chased some apes out of the forests onto
the savannas’. The arboreal lifestyle alone was no longer feasible.
Some of the apes had to adapt to a terrestrial lifestyle that required
bipedal locomotion, hence the hominids, who were the direct
ancestors of modern humans.
Hominids were relatively large compared to other warm-blooded
animals and therefore required more food. The abundance of
animals in the savanna habitat provided an additional food source
and so the hominids became hunters as well. Not only did
bipedalism allow the speed, agility and endurance required for
effective hunting, but it also freed the hands. Thus, in addition to
the bodily adaptations to cope with living conditions on the savanna,
such as bipedalism and the development of sweat glands, certain
behavioural adaptations were also required such as developing
hunting skills and creating shelters. Both of these activities would
have benefited greatly from the availability of tools, however
rudimentary. Once again, bipedalism seems to be a significant
factor – the hands were free to engage in toolmaking, rather than
walking or swinging in the trees. The range of preadaptations
following from bipedalism is truly remarkable, but none more so
than in the preadaptations for the ability to speak and write. And
since our concern in this learning unit is with the phylogenesis of
language we now turn to these linguistically relevant preadaptive
effects of bipedalism.
HSY2601 187
7.5.2.3 The vocal tract
Figure 7.2: Vocal tract comparisons (Trask 1999:17; Miller 1981:46)
Task 7.4
Compare the diagrams of the vocal tract of chimpanzees,
neanderthal man (i. e., early human), human infants and human
adults in figure 7.2 with reference to the position of the larynx
(the voice box) and the length of the pharynx (the area of the
throat above the larynx). The various parts of the vocal tract have
been identified in the diagram of the chimpanzee (Trask 1999:17).
You can identify the comparable parts in the diagram for the
vocal tract of a human infant, neanderthal man and human adult
with reference to the full representation of the vocal tract in an
adult male (Miller 1981: 46). Refer also to learning unit 3 for
some ideas.
Feedback
What is so remarkable in this comparison is that chimpanzees and human
infants are much closer to one another with regard to the position of the
larynx and the length of the pharynx than human infants and human adults.
In a sense, the similarities between the vocal tracts of chimpanzees and
human babies suggest that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ , i.e., that the
evolutionary stages of a species (phylogeny) can be traced through the study of
the developmental stages (ontogeny) of an individual (Leaky & Lewin
1992:261-2.) Be that as it may, the position of the larynx and the length
and shape of the pharynx, among other things, are directly responsible for the
range of speech sounds that makes speech possible. Neither chimpanzees nor
human babies can produce this range of speech sounds because of the high
position of the larynx in the throat. The high position of the larynx in
animals and human babies is not accidental. It is crucial for the prevention
of choking. Unlike human adults, chimpanzees and human babies can
breathe and swallow food simultaneously without the danger of choking
because of the high position of the larynx.
188
The larynx in human babies begins to move down the throat between 18
months and 2 years and reaches the adult position by the age of about 14
years. The lower position of the larynx in human adults seems to be a direct
consequence of bipedalism. The shape of the human skull is adapted for
walking upright with a distinct curvature at its base which seems to have the
effect that the larynx is forced lower down in the throat. Surgical experiments
on mice whereby the shape of the base of the skull was changed in this way
had the same effect – the larynx moved lower down the throat (Lieberman
1991:74). It has also been suggested that the lower position of the larynx in
the throat enhances breathing through the mouth which may be linked to the
endurance required to survive in a savanna landscape (Lieberman 1991:74).
It seems clear that the lowering of the larynx is motivated both anatomically
(through changes in skeletal structure due to bipedalism) and physiologically
(to enable mouth breathing). The lowering of the larynx created the vocal
tract shape and length necessary for the production of a wide range of speech
sounds. But since the changes are motivated by reasons other than merely the
production of speech sounds, the lowering of the larynx cannot be seen as an
adaptation specifically for speech, but rather as a preadaptation that made
speech possible.
7.5.2.4 Premature births and longer postnatal dependency

Bipedal locomotion required significant structural modifications in
the pelvis of humans. These structural changes meant that for the
survival of both mother and child, babies had to be born at a much
earlier stage of physical and mental maturity. In fact, we may
perhaps say that bipedalism made premature births necessary. Trask
(1999: 167), for example, notes that:
In contrast with the young of most other mammals (except
marsupials), human infants are born at an extraordinarily
early stage of development. A baby deer can stand and walk
within minutes of birth, but a human infant cannot even turn
or crawl until months after birth. At birth, the infant’s skull is
not yet fully formed; the myelin sheaths which insulate the
neurons in the brain are not yet fully developed; even the
visual system in the brain is not yet working properly. Indeed,
it has been estimated that human infants really ‘ought’ not to
be born until after eighteen months, instead of the actual nine
months.
This ‘premature birth’ requires a much longer period of maternal
care after birth. The close bond between mother and child over an
extended period played a major part (directly or indirectly) in the
evolution of language and still plays a significant role in the
development of language in individuals, as we learned in learning
unit 5 (see also Papousek & Papousek 1997:98).
HSY2601 189
The close bonding between mother and child in humans helps to

satisfy three basic needs of the helpless human infant: nutrition,
protection and emotional needs. However, recent research shows
that the dependency of the human infant on its mother is also
crucial for satisfying a cognitive need, the need to acquire
knowledge of the environment and how to relate to it. The longer
period of infant dependency may therefore be directly correlated
with the increase in highly flexible learned behaviour. According to
Turner (1997:215), the ‘almost instantaneous emotional
attunement’ between mother and child gives ‘biologically immature
infants ... access to nonlinguistic channels for early learning’.
Research on the close interaction between infants and mothers
suggests that infants ‘have predispositions for learning, and parents
predispositions for teaching’ (Papousek & Papousek 1997:100).
During this early period of development, the phylogenetically
evolved communication system involving gestures, facial
expressions and physical contact forms the basis for the
ontogenesis of verbal communication (Goldschmidt 1997:229).
7.5.2.5 The opposable thumb and toolmaking

the human thumb to touch the tips of any one of the other fingers
is known as the opposable thumb. Although the opposable thumb
evolved in the primates, it is unclear whether it derived directly
from the free hands associated with bipedalism. Nevertheless, this
Chimpanzees can use tools, ability, together with free hands, had a significant impact on the
but they cannot use tools to nature and direction of evolution in the human species. Instead of
make tools. (Natural History adapting to an environment, human beings can alter the
Museum Publications 1991:
53)
environment through tools. Free hands and the opposable thumb
allowed humans not merely to use objects in the environment as
tools (chimpanzees can do this as well) but to manufacture tools
for specific purposes. Compare the grasping and holding of tools
in chimpanzees and humans in figure 7.3.
190
Chimpanzee Early Hominid Human
Figure 7.3: The opposable thumb and grasping abilities of chimpanzees,

early hominids and humans (Zihlman 1982:102)
The ability to manufacture tools became gradually more

sophisticated through the ages. In particular, the length of the
cutting edge that a toolmaker could produce from the same
quantity of stone increased dramatically. The hand axes used by
Homo habilis two million years ago consisted of lumps of tapered
stone with a very rudimentary cutting edge, compared to
neanderthal stone tools from approximately 100 000 years ago that
were much sharper and more effective. By 30 000 years ago, Homo
sapiens sapiens had developed the technology to produce blades
from metal and other materials, making the tools more efficient still.
This progressive sophistication in stone tool technology suggests a
remarkably simple motivation for the evolution of language.
According to Pinker (1995:352),
... many archaeologists have tried to infer our extinct
ancestors’ language abilities from their tangible remains such
as stone tools and dwellings. Complex artifacts are thought to
reflect a complex mind which could benefit from complex
language. Regional variation in tools is thought to suggest
cultural transmission, which depends in turn on generation-
to-generation communication, perhaps via language ...
The level and quantity of information required by the stone tool
technology at a certain point in time entails a sophisticated
information processing system or systems. The increase in
information may therefore be one of the reasons why humans
developed both an oral and (much later) a written linguistic system.
Lecours (1995: 232), for example, explains the motivation for the
development of speech and writing as follows:
It might be that, about 35 000 (if not a few million) years ago,
environmental pressures exerted on the human brain led it to
HSY2601 191
exploit its genetic potential and to invent spoken speech; and

that, in due time, about 5 300 years ago, other social
pressures – of another nature, although generated to a large
extent by the impact of the first invention – led the human
brain to exploit its genetic potential anew, and to invent
writing systems ...
7.5.2.6 Enlarged brain and increased connectivity between regions in the

brain
Figure 7.4: A comparison of the brain size of chimpanzees and humans

(Natural History Museum Publications 1991:52)
Increase in the volume of the brain and the connectivity between

regions of the brain played a major role in the evolution of the
primates. The increase in brain size happened mainly in the cortex.
As we saw in learning unit 1, the function of the cortex is to
integrate all the functions of the nervous system. The cortex
receives and transmits messages to and from all the sensory organs
rather than specialising in controlling specific functions like other
parts of the brain do. This part of the brain is therefore ideally
suited for the acquisition of new knowledge and behaviours.
The increase in brain size in the apes seems to stem at least partly
from the development of binocular vision. Thus, the elaboration of
the visual and association areas in the primate brain presumably
laid the foundation for neuronal connectivity which is one of the
most significant features of the human brain. The extent of
neuronal connectivity and interactivity in the human brain is
probably the single most important factor underlying learnt
behaviour as opposed to instinctive behaviour. This increase in the
ability to learn is what distinguishes man from all other animals
(Foley 1997:59).
Lateralisation of the brain may be the result of this increase in brain
size and the interconnnections between regions in the brain.
(Remember that lateralisation is the process whereby one of the
two hemispheres becomes dominant for certain cognitive
functions.) Ringo (1991:5) quoted by Foley (1997:60) suggests that
192
‘big brains need hemispheric specialisation, because of

interconnectedness getting out of hand . . .’
The increase in brain size and connectivity are essentially
evolutionary preadaptations for the linguistic ability. Language
requires interaction between various regions in the brain: the region
that controls motor action (required for speech articulation) must
be connected to the auditory system; the areas that control the
various senses must be connected to the system that controls
emotions; and all of these regions must be connected to the cortex
where the functions of the nervous system are integrated, and
holistic concepts and associations are formed. Without these
connections, the conceptual-functional properties characteristic of
language would be impossible to realise.
7.5.2.7 Summary
In this section we have discussed various preadaptations in the
evolution of the human species that predispose the species for
language, both verbal and written. We have also suggested a
possible motivation for the development of a sophisticated and
elaborate communication system such as language. What remains
to be done is to find an alternative answer for the language
universals problem which served as the major justification for the
sudden genetic mutation view of language based on the innateness
hypothesis. This alternative answer will be explored in the next
section.
7.6 LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS IN A GRADUAL

EVOLUTIONARY VIEW OF THE PHYLOGENESIS
OF LANGUAGE
Before we take a closer look at language universals from a gradual
evolutionary perspective, we need to clear up a misconception in
the assumption about the uniqueness and independence of
language universals of the sudden mutation view.
A typical assumption of the sudden mutation view is that the innate
Universal Grammar that specifies universal linguistic principles
such as syntactic classifiability, linearity and hierarchy is a unique
and independent mental ability of human beings. That is, although
Universal Grammar may be linked to other cognitive abilities of
humans, it is an ability that evolved separately from all other
cognitive abilities and is dedicated to innate linguistic knowledge. In
the following task you will see that this assumption is based on a
misconception in the sense that the same principles that underlie
certain linguistic universals also govern other cognitive abilities,
such as short-term memory.
HSY2601 193
Task 7.5
1. Read the following telephone number once and without
looking at the number again, try to recall it from memory
(don’t cheat!):
0113659981
Were you able to recall it on the first attempt? I guess not,
except for those of you with photographic memories. Read
the same number again but written in a slightly different
format. Now try to recall it from memory.
011-365-9981
Were you more successful this time? If so, why?
All this sounds very interesting, but what has this got to do
with syntactic universals? Well, let us try a similar
experiment with an English sentence.
2. Read the following English sentence once in a monotone (i.
e., do not modify your intonation at any stage) and then try
to recall it from memory. (All the punctuation marks have
deliberately been omitted.)
Andrew the master of ceremonies while on his way to discuss the
programme with me suddenly fell ill
If you read the sentence according to the instructions you
may have experienced great difficulty in recalling it from
memory. Again, breaking up the sequence of words by
means of punctuation marks and proper intonation should
make a big difference to your recalling ability. Read the
sentence below and then try to recall it from memory.
Andrew, the master of ceremonies, while on his way to discuss the
programme with me, suddenly fell ill.
Feedback
The phenomena above indicate that the short-term memory of human beings
is rather limited. However, this limitation can be overcome by dividing a
complex piece of information into smaller bits. The cognitive process
underlying the ability to cope with quantities of information beyond the
capacity of short-term memory is called chunking and human beings are
adapted to perform this chunking intuitively.
7.6.1 Short-term memory limitations, chunking and

language universals
Let us now see what short-term memory limitations and the
cognitive process of chunking can tell us about language universals.
194
In 1956 the psycholinguist George Miller published his research on

the limits of short-term memory in the phonological processing of
speech in an article entitled The magical number 7, plus or minus two:
Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Miller found that
the ideal number of bits of information that can be handled by
short-term memory is 7, which could be extended to 9. More than
9 pieces of information cause a breakdown in the recall ability of
short-term memory. This finding has been confirmed in many
other studies on short-term memory since then (cf. Loritz 1999).
One of the most amazing features of short-term memory is that its
upper limit on recall – 9 bits on the same level – can be exceeded
by means of chunking. By restructuring bits of information into
less than 9 chunks or groups, one can recall rather complex bits of
information. This is exactly what we did in the tasks above. In both
cases we had more than 9 bits of information but by means of
chunking we turned the same information into manageable
quantities enabling short-term memory to handle them.
The limitations on short-term memory are not restricted to special
kinds of information such as telephone numbers or ID numbers
only, but also apply to the processing of linguistic information. Like
telephone numbers and ID numbers, bits of linguistic information
often exceed the limitations of short-term memory. Thus, even
though the human species has the wonderful ability to produce a
range of sounds rich enough to make verbal communication
possible, if the verbal utterances are not structured in such a way
that short-term memory can cope, all the articulatory abilities
would come to nothing. So let us see how linguistic systems
overcome short-term memory limitations.
7.6.1.1 Phonetic chunking

A characteristic feature of human speech is the rapid transmission
of speech sounds at about 15 to 20 elements per second
(Lieberman 1991). If the production of phonetic elements in the
utterance of a word is slowed down, understanding is impeded.
This is typically the case when young children learn to read by
sounding words out letter by letter – they simply don’t understand
what they are reading until they say the whole word because the
production of the phonetic elements is way below the 15 to 20
elements per second required. Thus, while spelling the letters or
sounds b-o-o-k, they don’t know that what they spell means ‘book’
until they pronounce the whole string as [buk]. For the same reason,
morse code is not a very effective means of communication as it is
transmitted at such a slow speed that it is hard to interpret.
HSY2601 195
But, clearly, the 15 to 20 elements per second required by speech

processing, is a blatant violation of the maximum of 9 items per
second limitation of short-term memory. How is this paradox
solved in languages? Once again, the answer is chunking. A
universal feature of words is that they are made up of syllables (i.e.,
all languages have this feature). A syllable is a phonetic string
consisting of vowels (V) and consonants (C). Different languages
have different syllable structures, but all of them have syllables.
Consider the syllable structures of English and isiXhosa below.
English: explanation > ex-pla-na-tion > VC+CCV+CV+CVC
isiXhosa: amadodana (‘young men’) > a-ma-do-da-na > V +CV
+CV+CV+CV
The syllabification of words is a linguistic manifestation of
chunking and together with stress patterns and tones, it helps us to
process words in short-term memory.
7.6.1.2 Hierarchies as forms of chunking and information processing

You will recall that, of the three syntactic principles that we
mentioned earlier, the hierarchic principle is considered to be the
most significant one. We will demonstrate below that the hierarchic
principle is a general cognitive principle rather than a strictly
linguistic principle. Clearly, the hierarchic principle is also
motivated by chunking as a result of short-term memory limitations.
But more importantly, it is also a fundamental principle in the
general processing of information, particularly categorisation.
The demonstration below begins with a very interesting parable.
Herbert Simon (1962), an American scientist, made up this parable
to demonstrate how effective hierarchical chunking could be and
why organisms would select hierarchies in their evolution. I
adapted this parable from Sampson (1980).
The parable of two watchmakers – Hora and Tempus

Two watchmakers, Hora and Tempus, produce watches of
equal quality. They use the same number of parts, say 1 000
parts, in each watch that they respectively make. But their
respective watches are differently structured. Tempus
constructs his watches by assembling all the parts in a
continuous process in piecemeal fashion. Thus, he takes a
part and adds it to another part, to which he adds another
part and so on. If he is interrupted while making a watch, the
partly constructed watch will fall apart, and he must start at
the beginning when he resumes his watch building. Hora
produces his watches by making sub-assemblies of the
various parts, say ten sub-assemblies of a hundred parts each.
196
If Hora is interrupted, he has to reassemble only the sub-

assembly he was busy with – the other sub-assemblies remain
intact. Hora is a successful watchmaker, Tempus isn’t. Hora
produces 4 000 watches for every one produced by Tempus.
The key to Hora’s success is not the quality of the end product, but
rather the fact that the structure of his watches is hierarchic.
Consider the graphic illustration below of the two types of watches:
Figure 7.5: Tempus and Hora (Sampson 1980:134)
The very same principle that made Hora such an efficient

watchmaker, namely hierarchy, makes human beings exceptionally
good managers of conceptual information. The following task will
help you to understand this.
Organise the following list of objects into a hierarchically

structured information set:
lion, dog, kudu, cat, tiger, cow, horse, eland
Feedback
When presented as a list, the conceptual relations between the various
elements in the list are completely obscure. But when the list is restructured in
a certain way, various bits of conceptual relations are revealed. The elements
in the list can be rearranged in various ways depending on the kind of
information we want to convey. For example:
� �
a. Animals b. Animals
� �
Domestic Wild Carnivores Herbivores
� �
(meat eaters) (plant eaters)
Pet Farm lion, kudu

dog, cat cow, horse tiger, eland lion, tiger kudu, eland
HSY2601 197
The question is now: How does the general cognitive hierarchic

principle relate to the universal linguistic hierarchic principle? Is it
the same principle, or are they altogether different principles?
Complex sentences in all the languages of the world are typically
hierarchically structured and this hierarchical structuring would
obviously assist in overcoming the limitations of short-term
memory. However, there is another reason for hierarchical
structuring that relates significantly to the efficient processing of
complex information.
Consider the sentences below:
This house is a national monument.
This house was built in 1762.
This house was built by Jack.
Jack was a famous architect.
Say there was a stage in the evolution of language when only simple
sentences of the sort illustrated above could be formed by English
speakers. A lot of important information would have been lost. Let
us see what would have been lost.
● Can we infer from these sentences that we are talking about the
same house in all three sentences? No, not necessarily.
● Can we infer from these sentences that the individual Jack is the
same person in the two relevant sentences? Once again, the answer
is no.
● Is the fact that the house is a national monument due to the fact
that it was built in 1762 and/or that it was built by the famous
architect, Jack? If we cannot link the meanings of the two sentences in
some way or another, we cannot make such an inference.
● Do we have any reason to believe that Jack lived and practised
his profession as an architect in an around the year 1762? No,
there is no justification for such an inference unless we can link the
information in the different sentences.
But there is a way in which we can actually capture all the semantic
relations between bits of information that the single sentences
could not express.

Try to combine all four of the sentences above into one sentence
by making use of the hierarchic principle of organising
information. Then go through the four questions above and see
to what extent your combined sentence changes the nature of the
information.
Write your sentence here:
............................................................
198
Write your comments on the changes in the nature of the

information here:
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
Feedback
Your combined sentence could be any one of the following:
This house, which was built in 1762 by the famous architect, Jack, is a
national monument.
This house, which is a national monument, was built in 1762 by Jack,
who was a famous architect.
The famous architect, Jack, built this house, which is a national
monument, in 1762.
There are more possibilities, but these sentences clearly show certain crucial
relations between the various bits of information, relations that cannot be
expressed in simple sentences.
Since hierarchical organisation is already required by human short-term
memory in order to cope with large quantities of information, hierarchically
structured linguistic expressions simply encode semantically integrated
complexes of information by the same means.
7.6.1.3 Summary
It is clear from our foregoing discussion that the hierarchical
structuring of information is not unique to language but is part of
general human cognitive processes. Furthermore, the linguistic
hierarchic principle does not seem to be a unique principle of an
innate Universal Grammar. On the contrary, it seems to be part of
the general cognitive abilities of human beings. The ability to
hierarchically structure information may have evolved in the
human species because of short-term memory limitations.
Hierarchically structured information was also required by the
massive growth in information that humans generated as a result of
using tools to modify the environment rather than adapting to an
environment.
In the final section of this learning unit, we will briefly take a closer
look at the role of information in both the ontogeny and the
phylogeny of the language ability in humans.
HSY2601 199
7.7 INFORMATION AND THE ONTOGENETIC AND

PHYLOGENETIC DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE
Even though the principle that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’
has never been seriously entertained in evolutionary theories, there
is a remarkable correlation between the ontogenetic and the
phylogenetic development of language that seems to lend some
support to this principle. It seems that quantity of information
plays a crucial role in the correlation between the ontogeny and
phylogeny of language. Before we explore this correlation further,
let us first look at the role of information in the phylogenesis and
the ontogenesis of language separately.
7.7.1 Information and the phylogenesis of language

In the case of the apes, all (or most of) the information relevant for
survival is in their genetic make-up on the one hand, and in their
environment, on the other hand. The apes have evolved to live and
survive in an arboreal world. The kind of information that they
need for these living conditions is innate – it is part of the genetic
make-up of their bodies. Even their communication systems (visual
as well as vocal or auditory) are genetically given. They will never
be able to increase or modify their range of instinctive visual or
vocal signals. As we saw earlier, they simply don’t have the vocal
tract necessary to produce a rich variety of sounds, even if the
volume of their brains increased to the level of human beings.
But, perhaps more importantly, the apes don’t need language (vocal
or written) because they don’t need elaborate information systems
to cope with their environment. Their environment contains all the
information that they need, and their bodies are attuned to this
environment. That is why the apes will simply disappear if their
environment or ecology (the tropical forests) is destroyed.
In contrast to the apes, human beings, because of their toolmaking
ability and their larger and more interconnected brains, do not have
to rely only on genetically determined information in order to
survive. Neither do humans have to rely on a specific ecology to
which their bodies are genetically attuned. Humans, as we have
seen, ‘are free’. They can live anywhere – on the moon, in the air, in
the polar regions – without being genetically adapted to do so.
Why? Because human beings can modify their environment and for
this the human species has been preadapted.
In the early days of human evolution, the modifications in the
environment may have been fairly simple, with simple stone tool
technologies, simple shelters, simple social relations, and so on. In
fact, in early hominids much of the information necessary for
200
survival may still have been in their bodies and in the environment
rather than produced by their brains. But as the tool technologies
improved, as we have noted, and the modifications of their
environment became more sophisticated, they had to rely more on
information produced by their brains. To manage large and
complex quantities of information you need a code. And language
provides such a code. Once again, the human species is, as we have
noted, preadapted for language.
Up to a certain level, the quantity and complexity of information
can be handled by an oral linguistic system which relies heavily on
memory capacity, for which the human species is also well adapted
with a larger and more sophisticated brain. Since oral language
leaves no traces, we can only speculate on the developmental stages
of oral language in the evolution of the human species. There is
however evidence of symbolic abilities at some stages in the
evolution of the human species that may be suggestive of some
linguistic abilities (cf. also Fagan 1998). For example, from the
various tool technologies one can get a reasonably good idea of the
level of sophistication of information at a particular prehistorical
period. Furthermore, studies of hominid skeletons give some
indication as to when a structure of the vocal tract emerged that
would make linguistic utterances possible.
At some point the modifications of the environment or the
sophistication in the tools needed to modify the environment,
increase the quantity of information beyond the limits of even
modern humans’ memory capacity. Then we need an information
coding system of a more permanent nature which lies outside our
brains. This is where written language comes into play in the
phylogenesis of language. Once again, humans are preadapted for
this need. Apart from the complex brain structures and visual
abilities, the opposable thumb and toolmaking abilities enabled the
invention of writing systems that made the recording of large
quantities of complex information possible.
7.7.2 Information and the ontogenesis of language

The fact that humans are less dependent than apes on genetic and
environmental information creates a rather special problem for
human infants. Where do they get their information from, if, by
virtue of their species, neither their bodies nor a specific habitat
can provide the information? The answer is that human infants
have a special environment – their mothers or caretakers. Human
babies are largely dependent on the information in the brain of
their mothers or caretakers. The need for more information
HSY2601 201
increases quite rapidly during this early period of dependence and

there is therefore a very strong urge to acquire language.
As Papousek and Papousek (1997:100) indicate, the urge to learn
and the ability to teach a linguistic communication system may have
evolved in the human species. To some extent, the amount and
complexity of the information required during the various stages of
language acquisition correlate well with the various stages of
linguistic development in the human species. In the continuum
below we attempt to correlate the various ontogenetic stages
(babbling, the one-word stage, the two-word stage, etc.) with
(highly speculative) phylogenetic stages in terms of similarities in
the levels of information that the human species and human
infants have to deal with at each developmental stage.
Figure 7.6: A correlation of language development in children (ontogenesis)
and the human species (phylogenesis)
Phylogenesis:
Linguistic stages: simple vocalisations – object and action related one-

word utterances – simple phrases – simple sentences – complex
sentences
Levels of information: pre-conceptual – imitative – simple concepts –

simple related concepts – simple causal relations – advanced
coherent conceptual complexes
Ontogenesis:
Linguistic stages: babbling/cooing – one-word stage – two-word
stage – simple sentences – complex sentences
7.8 CONCLUSION
This unit provided an overview of the evolution of language from
different theoretical perspectives. It also discussed the role of
nature and nurture in the development of language over time.
202
REFERENCE LIST
Unit 1
Akmajian, A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K. & Harnish, R.M. 1990. Linguistics: An introduction to
language and communication. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Akmajian, A., Demers, R.A., Farmer, A.K. & Harnish, R.M. 2010. Linguistics: An introduction to
language and communication. (6 ed.) Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Crystal, D. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Fromkin, V. & Rodman, R. 2014. An Introduction to Language. (10 ed.) Wadsworth/Cengage
Learning.
Goodglass, H. 1976. Agrammatism. In Whitaker, H. & Whitaker, H.A. (eds) 1976. Studies in
Neurolinguistics. Volume 1. New York: Academic Press.
Goodglass, H. & Kaplan, E. 1972. The Assessment of Aphasia and Related Disorders. Philadelphia:
Lea & Febiger.
Goodglass, H. & Kaplan, E. 1983. The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. Boston: Lea &
Febiger.
Hudson, G. 2000. Essential Introductory Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Knecht, S., Dräger, B., Deppe, M., Bobe, L., Lohmann, H., Flöel, A., Ringelstein, E. &
Henningsen, H. 2000. Handedness and hemispheric language dominance in healthy
humans. Brain: A Jouurnal of Neurology 123 (12) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/
123.12.2512 2512-2518.
Menn, L., Obler, L. K. & Miceli, G. (eds) 1989. Agrammatic Aphasia: A cross-language narrative
sourcebook. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mirman, D., Qi Chen, Yongsheng Zhang, Ze Wang, Olufunsho K. Faseyitan, Branch Coslett,
H., Schwartz, M. F. 2015. Neural organization of spoken language revealed by lesion–
symptom mapping. Nature Communications 6762 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7762.
Obler, L. K. & Gjerlow, K. 1999. Language and the Brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Pinker, S. 1995. The Language Instinct: The new science of language and mind. New York: Penguin.
Rispens, J. & Krikhaar, E. 2010. Using Event-Related Potentials in language acquisition
research. In Blom, E. & Unsworth, S. (eds) Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition
Research. Amsterdam and Philadephia: John Benjamins 95-114.
Scott, S. K. & Wise, R. J. S. 2003. Functional imaging and language: A critical guide to
methodology and analysis. Speech Communication 41:7–21.
Slobin, D. 1979. Psycholinguistics. Glenview: Scott, Foresman.
Traill, A. 1970. Transformational grammar and the case of a Ndebele speaking aphasic. Journal
of the South African Logopedic Society 17(1): 48-66.
Troster, A. I. & Parsons. T. D. 2006. Sodium amytal testing and language. In Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics 11: 500-502.
Weinstein, E.A., Lyerly, O.G., Cole, M. & Ozer, M.N. 1972. Meaning in jargon aphasia. In:
Sarno, M.T. (ed.) Aphasia. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts 92-104.
HSY2601 203
REFERENCE LIST
Unit 2
Bates, E. & McWhinney, B. 1987. Competition, variation, and language learning. In
McWhinney, B. (ed.) Mechanisms of Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum:
157-94.
Berko, J. 1958. The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14:150-77.
Berko Gleason, J. 2005. The Development of Language. (6 ed.) Boston: Pearson.
Berko Gleason, J., Johnson, J. & Peters, J. 1990. Fine-tuning of utterance length to preverbal
infants: Effects on later language development. Journal of Child Language 17:511-26.
Berko Gleason, J. & Bernstein Ratner, N. 1998. Psycholinguistics. (2 ed.) Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
Bloom, P. 1993. Overview: Controversies in language acquisition. In Bloom, P. (ed.) Language
Acquisition: Core readings. Hempel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Brown, R. 1973. A First Language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Press.
Crystal, D. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. (2 ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dale, P. S. & Goodman, J. C. 2005. Commonality and individual differences in vocabulary
growth. In Tomasello, M. & Slobin, D.I. (eds) Beyond Nature-Nurture: Essays in Honor of
Elizabeth Bates. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum 41-78.
Demuth, K.A. (no date) Aspects of Sesotho Language Acquisition. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Linguistics Club.
Department of Linguistics 1990. Study Guide 2 for LNG100-S (Language in use). Pretoria: Unisa.
Department of Linguistics 1992. Only Study Guide for LNG204-3. Pretoria: Unisa.
Department of Linguistics 1996. Only Study Guide for LNG100-S. Pretoria: Unisa.
Fenson, L., Marchman, V., Thal, D., Dale, P., Reznick, J.S. & Bates, E. 2007. MacArthur-Bates
Communicative Development Inventories: Users’ Guide and Manual. (2 ed.) Baltimore: Paul
Brookes.
Foster-Cohen, S. H. 1999. An Introduction to Child Language Development. New York: Addison
Wesley Longman.
Hollich, G.J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Michnick Golinkoff, R., Brand, R.J., Brown, E., Chung, H.L.,
Hennon, E., Rocroi, C. and Bloom, L. 2000. Breaking the Language Barrier: An
Emergentist Coalition Model for the Origins of Word Learning. Monographs of the Society
for Research in Child Development 65 (3): 1-135.
Johnson, E. & Zamuner, T. 2010. Using infant and toddler testing methods in language
acquisition research. In Blom, E. & Unsworth, S. (eds) Experimental Methods in Language
Acquisition Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Piaget, J. 1926. The Language and Thought of the Child. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Slobin, D.I. 1997. The Cross-Linguistic Study of Language Acquisition Vol 5: Expanding the Contexts.
Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stoll, S. 2009. Crosslinguistic approaches to language acquisition. In Bavin, E. L. (ed) The
Cambridge Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Unit 3
Berko Gleason, J. 1989. The Development of Language. (2 ed.) Columbus, Ohio: Merrill.
Department of Linguistics 1990. Study Guide 2 for LNG 100-S (Language in use). Pretoria: Unisa.
204
Reference list
Foss, D. J. & Hakes, D. T. 1978. Psycholinguistics: An introduction to the psychology of language.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Wesley Longman.
Kuhl, P. 1980. Perceptual constancy of speech-sound categories in early infancy. In Yeni-
Komshian, G., Kavanagh, J. & Ferguson, C. (eds) Child Phonology Vol 2: Perception. New
York: Academic.
Pye, C. 1988. Towards an anthropology of language acquisition. Language Science 10 (1): 123-46.
Reich, P.A. 1986. Language Development. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Unit 4
Berko Gleason, J. (ed.) 1989. The Development of Language. (2 ed.) Columbus, Ohio: Merrill.
Bowerman, M. 1973. Early Syntactic Development: A cross-linguistic study with special reference to
Finnish.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Department of Linguistics 1990. Study Guide 2 for LNG100-S (Language in use). Pretoria: Unisa.
Ehri, L. C. 1991. ‘The development of reading and spelling in children: An overview.’ In
Snowling, M. & Thomson, M. (eds) Dyslexia: Integrating theory and practice. London:
Whurr.
Foster, S.H. 1990. The Communicative Competence of Young Children: A modular approach. London:
Longman.
Wesley Longman.
Funnell, E. & Stuart, M. (eds) 1995. Learning to Read: Psychology in the classroom. Oxford:
Blackwell.
MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. (3 ed.) Mahwah, New
Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Reich, P.A. 1986. Language Development. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Stuart, M. 1995. ‘Recognizing printed words unlocks the door to reading: How do children
find the key?’ In Funnell, E. & Stuart, M. (eds) 1995. Learning to Read: Psychology in the
classroom. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tager-Flusberg, H. 1989. Putting words together: Morphology and syntax in the preschool
years. In Berko Gleason, J. (ed.) The Development of Language. (2 ed.) Columbus, Ohio:
Merrill. 135-65.
Taylor, I. & Taylor, M.M. 1990. Psycholinguistics: Learning and using language. Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Vorster, J. 1983. Aspects of the Acquisition of Afrikaans Syntax. DLit et Phil thesis. University of
South Africa.
HSY2601 205
REFERENCE LIST
Unit 5
Bates, E., Bretherton, I. & Snyder, L. 1988. From First Words to Grammar: Individual
differences and dissociable mechanisms. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Berko Gleason, J. & Bernstein Ratner, N. 1998. Psycholinguistics. (2 ed.) Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
Bloom, P. Roots of word learning. In Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S. C. 2001. Language
Acquisition and Conceptual
Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connelly, M. 1987. Basutho children’s early development of speech. African Studies 46:229-
39.
Crystal, D. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. (2 ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Demuth, K. A. (no date) Aspects of Sesotho Language Acquisition. Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Department of Linguistics 1990. Study Guide 2 for LNG100-S (Language in use). Pretoria:
Unisa.
Foster-Cohen, S. H. 1999. An Introduction to Child Language Development. New York:
Addison Wesley Longman.
Fowler, W. 1990. Talking from Infancy: How to Nurture and Cultivate Early Language
Development. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Brookline Books.
Kloth, S., Janssen, P., Kraaimaat, F. & Brutten, G.J. 1998. Communicative styles of mothers
interacting with their preschool-age children: A factor-analytic study. Journal of Child
Language 25: 149-68.
Lenneberg, E. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley.
McDonald, L. & Pien, D. 1982. Mother conversational behaviour as a function of
interactional intent. Journal of Child Language 9:337-58.
Nelson, K. 1973. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for
Research in Child Development Vol 38 (1-2).
Newport, E.L. 1991. Contrasting concepts of the critical period for language. In Carey, S. &
Gelman, R. (eds) The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays on Biology and Cognition.
New Yorker April 13 and 20 1992. A silent childhood: 41-81 (Russ Rymer).
Pinker, S. 1995. The Language Instinct: The new science of language and mind. New York:
Penguin.
Reich, P.A. 1986. Language Development. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Strapp, C.M. 1999. Journal of Child Language 26: 373-91.
Tamis-Lemonda, C.S. et al. 1998. Predicting variation in the timing of language milestones in
the second year: An events history approach. Journal of Child Language 25: 675-700.
Wells, G. 1992. Variation in child language. In Fletcher, P. & Garman, M. Language
Acquisition: Studies in first language development. (2 ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wood, J. T. 1994. Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture. Belmont:
Wadsworth.
206
Reference list
Unit 6
American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders. (4th ed.) Washington, D.C.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A.M., & Frith, U. 1985. Does the autistic have a ‘theory of mind’?
Cognition 21.
Bellugi, U., Marks, S., Bihrle, A. & Sabo, H. 1988. Dissociation between language and
cognitive functions in Williams syndrome. In Bishop, D. & Mogford, K. (eds) Language
Development in Exceptional Circumstances. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone: 177-
189.
Buckley, S. 1993. Language development in children with Down Syndrome: Reasons for
optimism. Down Syndrome Research and Practice 1(1): 3-9.
Buckley, S. 1993 Developing the speech and language skills of teenagers with Down’s
syndrome. Down Syndrome Research and Practice 1(2): 63-71.
Buckley, S. & Bird, G. 1992. Mainstream or special school: How do we decide? Portsmouth
Down Syndrome Trust Newsletter 2(2).
Capirci, O., Sabbadini, L. & Volterra, V. 1996. Language development in Williams syndrome:
A case study. Cognitive Neuropsychology 13: 1017-1039.
Christianson, A. L. 1997. Down syndrome in Sub-Saharan Africa. Journal for Medical
Genetics 1:
Cohen, D. J., Paul, R. & Volkmar, F. R. 1987. Issues in the classification of pervasive
developmental disorders and associated conditions. In Cohen, D.J., Donnellan, A.M. &
Paul, R. (eds) 1987. Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders. New
York: John Wiley & Sons.
De Villiers, P.A. & de Villiers, J.G. 1987. Commentary on language and autism. In Cohen, D.J.,
Donnellan, A. M. & Paul, R. (eds) 1987. Handbook of Autism and Pervasive
Developmental Disorders. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Down Syndrome South Africa 1998. We Are Very Much Like You: A basic introduction to
Down syndrome. Pretoria: National Department of Health.
Fay, W.H. 1988. Infantile autism. In Bishop, D. & Mogford, K. (eds) Language Development
in Exceptional Circumstances. London: Churchill Livingstone.
Foster-Cohen, S. H. 1999. An Introduction to Child Language Development. New York:
Addison Wesley Longman.
Frith, U. 1991. Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Frith, U. & Baron-Cohen, S. 1987. Perception in autistic children. In Cohen, D.J., Donnellan,
A. M. & Paul, R. (eds) 1987. Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental
Disorders. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Laws, G., Buckley, S., Bird, G., MacDonald, J. & Broadly, I. 1995. The influence of reading
instruction on language development and memory in children with Down Syndrome.
Down Syndrome Research and Practice 3(2): 59-65.
Lenhoff, H. M., Wang, P. P., Greenberg, F. & Bellugi, U. 1997. Williams syndrome and the
brain. Scientific American December :42-47.
MacKenzie, J. 1997. Language and communication in children with Down syndrome. Down
Syndrome South Africa 1:4-5.
McTear, M.F. & Conti-Ramsden, G. 1992. Pragmatic Disability in Children. London: Whurr
Publishers.
HSY2601 207
REFERENCE LIST
Paul, R. 1987. Communication. In Cohen, D. J., Donnellan, A. M. & Paul, R. (eds) 1987.
Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders. New York: John Wiley
& Sons.
Peeters, T. 1997. Autism. London: Whurr Publishers.
Ratner, N. 1989. Atypical language development. In Berko Gleason, J. (ed.) 1989. The
Development of Language. Columbus: Merrill Publishing Company.
Rollins, P. R. & Snow, C. A. 1998. Shared attention and grammatical development in typical
children and children with autism. Journal of Child Language 25: 653-673.
Rutter, M. 1979. Diagnosis and definition of childhood autism. Journal of Autism and
Childhood Schizophrenia 8: 139-161.
Snowling, M. & Thomson. M. (eds) Dyslexia: Integrating theory and practice: London:
Whurr.
Tager-Flusberg, H. 1994. Dissociations in form and function in the acquisition of language by
autistic children. In Tager-Flusberg, H. (ed.) Constraints on Language Acquisition:
Studies of atypical children. Hillsdale, NJ.:Lawrence Erlbaum.
Thomson, M. 1991. The teaching of spelling using techniques of simultaneous oral spelling
and visual inspection. In Snowling, M. & Thomson, M. (eds) Dyslexia: Integrating
theory and practice: London: Whurr.
Wing, L. & Attwood, A. 1987. Syndromes of autism and atypical development. In Cohen, D.
J., Donnellan, A. M. & Paul, R. (eds) 1987. Handbook of Autism and Pervasive
Developmental Disorders. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Unit 7
Barber, C.L. 1972. The Story of Language. London: Pan Books.
Bolhuis, J. J., Tattersall, I., Chomsky, N. & Berwick, R. C. 2014. How could language have
evolved? PLoS Biology 12 (8): e1001934. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001934
Brace, C.L. 1979. The Stages of Human Evolution. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Changeux, J-P. & Chavaillon, J.(eds). 1995. Origins of the Human Brain. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Chomsky, N. 1980. Rules and representations. Oxford: Basel Blackwell.
Coppens, Y. 1995. Brain, locomotion, diet, and culture: How a primate, by chance, became a
man. In Changeaux & Chavaillon (eds) 1995: 104-112.
Fagan, B. M. 1998. People of the Earth: An introduction to world prehistory. (9 ed.) New
York: Harper Collins.
Foley, W.A. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Goldschmidt, W. 1997. Nonverbal communication and culture. In Segerstrale & Molnar (eds).
1997: 229-243.
Leaky, R. & Lewin, R. 1992. Origins Reconsidered: In search of what makes us human.
London: Little, Brown and Company.
Lecours, A R. 1995. The origins and evolution of writing. In Changeaux & Chavaillon (eds).
1995: 213-235.
Lieberman, P. 1975. On the Origins of Language: An introduction to the evolution of human
speech. New York: Macmillan.
Lieberman, P. 1991. Uniquely Human: The evolution of speech, thought, and selfless
behaviour. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Loritz, D.A. 1999. How the Brain Evolved Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
208
Reference list
Maryanski, A. 1997. Primate communication and the ecology of a language niche. In

Segerstrale & Molnar (eds) 1997: 191-209.
Miller, G.A. 1956. The magic number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review 63: 81-
97.
Miller, G A. 1981. Language and Speech. San Francisco: W H Freeman and Company.
Natural History Museum Publications. 1991. Man’s Place in Evolution. Rugby: Jolly & Barber.
Papousek, H. & Papousek, M. 1997. Preverbal communication in humans and the genesis of
culture. In Segerstrale & Molnar (eds). 1997: 87-107.
Pinker, S. 1995. Facts about human language relevant to its evolution. In Changeaux &
Chavaillon (eds) 1995: 262-283.
Sampson, G. 1980. Making Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scupin, R. 1995. Cultural Anthropology: A global perspective. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice
Hall.
Segerstrale, U. & Molnar, P. (eds). 1997. Nonverbal Communication: Where nature meets
culture. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Trask, R.L. 1999. Language: The basics. New York: Routledge.
Turner, J. H. 1997. The evolution of emotions: The nonverbal basis of human social
organization. In Segerstrale & Molnar (eds) 1997: 211-228.
Zihlman, A.L. 1982. The Human Evolution Coloring Book. New York: Harper Perennial.
HSY2601 209

LIN2601 Guide

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

LIN2601 Guide

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

LIN2601 Guide

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

© 2015 University of South Africa

Revised edition 2023

All rights reserved

Printed and published by the

Shutterstock.com images used

Editor and Styler

Orientation and Welcome (iv)

ii. The purpose and outcomes of this module

iii. The outcomes of the module

v. Learning material for this module

vi. The course content

vii. Studying in this module

viii. How do I use this study guide?

ix. Assessment in this module

Assignments and the exam

x. Orientation to using myUnisa/myModule site

myUnisa menu option What you will find here

myUnisa menu option What you will find here

In interacting online, always remember to be mindful of and respectful towards your

2. Academic vocabulary building

‘Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.’

1.2 THE DISCIPLINES THAT STUDY LANGUAGE AND

Introduction for brief descriptions of each subdomain). Each of

You will have noticed that both psycholinguistics and

1.3 THE STRUCTURE OF THE BRAIN

Figure 1.1: Cross-section of the brain (Based on Akmajian 1990:444)

Figure 1.2: The left hemisphere of the brain (Hudson 2000:152)

An important fact about our brain is that the two hemispheres

The cerebrum consists of two hemispheres.

1.4 LANGUAGE AREAS IN THE BRAIN

In 1861, Paul Broca, a French surgeon and anatomist,

1.5 INVESTIGATING THE BRAIN

1.5.1 Sodium amytal test

1.5.2 Dichotic listening tests

shown about 80% left-dominance for language in dichotic

1.5.3 Brain-imaging techniques

observing how magnetic fields pass through it. In an fMRI

Figure 1.3: fMRIs of language tasks

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) are another non-invasive way

Some other examples in Shona are:

1.6 APHASIA STUDIES

● Identify the instructional keywords in your question (discuss,

Plan your paragraph:

Write your paragraph:

Here is a better answer to the same question:

1.7 BROCA’S APHASIA

1.7.1 Characteristics of Broca’s aphasia

https://youtu. be/gocIUW3E-go in which a patient attempts to

Figure 1.4: The ‘cookie-theft’ picture

English and Dutch are not morphologically rich languages, so

1.8 WERNICKE’S APHASIA

3. This area is also underdeveloped in the brains of higher

1.8.1 Characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia

it as a jargon word. It is as if words have lost their meaning to these

Doctor: What is your main trouble?

Note that the initial part of the patient’s sentences seem

3. Wernicke’s aphasia is characterised by fluent but _____

Use the information above to help you identify the type of