2020/1 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

How children learn language

We have minds and in our minds we have the means for producing and comprehending speech. But how did we come to have such abilities? At birth we cannot comprehend speech, nor can we produce speech. Yet, by the age of 4 years we have learned vocabulary and grammatical rules for creating a variety of sentence structures including negatives, questions, and relative clauses. And although 4-year-olds still have passives and some other elaborate syntactic structures to learn, along with a never-ending stock of vocabulary items, they have already overcome the most difficult obstacles in language learning. This is true of children the world over, whatever the language may be.

Indeed, the language proficiency of the 4- or 5-year-old is often the envy of the adult second-language learner, who has been struggling for years to master the language. It is one of the fundamental tasks of psycholinguists to explain how children learn language.

For reasons that will become apparent later, we will separate language into two distinct, but related, psychological processes: speech production and speech comprehension. We will deal with each in turn and then consider how they are related.

1.1            The development of speech production         

1.1.1         From vocalization to babbling to speech

1.1.1.1        Vocalization to babbling

Prior to uttering speech sounds, infants make a variety of sounds – crying, cooing, gurgling. Infants everywhere seem to make the same variety of sounds, even children who are born deaf (Lenneberg et al., 1965). The abil- ity and propensity to utter such sounds thus appear to be unlearned. Later, around the seventh month, children ordinarily begin to babble, to produce what may be described as repeated syllables (‘syllabic reduplication’), e.g. ‘baba’, ‘momo’, ‘panpan’. While most of the syllables are of the basic Consonant + Vowel type (‘baba’ and ‘momo’), some consist of closed syllables

of the simple Consonant + Vowel + Consonant variety (‘panpan’). This struc- ture of babbling as repeated syllables has been found to be produced by children in all studied languages.

The sounds that infants make involve many but not all of the speech sounds that occur in the languages of the world. For example, English sounds like the ‘th’ in ‘though’ and the ‘th’ in ‘thin’ are rare, as are the click sounds common in various African languages such as Zulu. In time, however, such vocalizations take on the character of speech. From as early as 6 months of age infants from different language communities begin to babble somewhat distinctively, using some of the intonation of the language to which they have been exposed (Nakazima, 1962; Lieberman, 1967; Tonkova-Yampol’skaya, 1969). Research seems to indicate that in languages where the intonation contours are quite distinctive, native speakers can tell the difference between the babble of infants who were learning their (the native speakers’) lan- guage as opposed to the babble of infants learning other languages (de Boysson-Bardies et al., 1984).

The production of sounds using the intonation contours of the first lan- guage is obviously a learned phenomenon because when infants babble they follow the intonation contours of the language which they hear. This is something that deaf infants deprived of hearing speech do not do. While such infants are able to vocalize and cry, they do not progress to babbling. Interestingly, deaf infants who have been exposed to sign language from birth do the equivalent of babbling – with their hands (Petitto and Marentette, 1991)!