There’s a lot missing from the speech of a typical two-year-old. This in itself is of no great interest--after all, there are lots of other things that two-year-olds aren't that good at. What makes the two-year-old more interesting to the linguist is that there are striking regularities in what gets missed out where...

(Colin Phillips 1995, MIT)

One of the first things that should strike any half observant parent is the speed and apparent accuracy in which a child proceeds to learn his or her own language. This remarkably rapid development seems to fly in the face of many known facts about the nature of language—so much so that it has become widely accepted in the scientific community to think of language and its acquisition as one of many utterly unexplainable mysteries that beset us in our daily lives. Even the most clever of scientists today do not know where to begin with trying to unravel the range of complexities that all of language brings. Even so, the child moves ever onward, seemingly with little deference to this so-called mystery and proceeds with little effort to crack the sacred code nonetheless. How could this be? Firstly, parents provide very little in the way of language instruction to the child—contrary to what might be believed, parents do not teach their children to speak. Most parents wouldn’t even have the means in which to explain language overtly to a child even if they wanted). In fact, parents spend the majority of time correcting falsehoods (those little white lies) rather than correcting erroneous grammars. On the mere face of it, one would think children grow-up being little lawyers seeking out truths rather than little linguists seeking out correct hypotheses to their language. Thank God, the latter indeed prevails. Children will continue to lie in order to take-on an advantage, while, without exception, by-and-by acquiring their mother language. By the time a child enters pre-school, she has more-or-less mastered much of her target language. However, in light of these remarkable achievements, children do seem to go through varying degrees of stages along the way to their full mastery. It is this notion of stages of acquisition that has interested the developmental linguists most.

Stage-1: Examples of early multi-word speech
Him do it. What daddy doing? Me want car. Where go? Yesterday I go.
That John car. Her falled me down. Me no like eat. Why them go there?

It is a fact that children do not produce adult-like utterances from the very beginning of their multi-word speech. And so much of the debate ongoing in child first language acquisition has been devoted to the nature and extent of ‘what gets missed out where’ in regards to their early grammatical systems. Theory internal measures have been spawned every which way in effort to account for the lack of apparent adult-like language in young children. Theories abound. Despite some evidence that would seem to point to the contrary, more robust syntactic theories from the outset continue to view the very young child as maintaining an operative level of language closely bound to abstract knowledge of grammatical categories (Pinker 1984, Hyams 1986, Radford 1990, Wexler 1996, and Radford & Galasso 1998). For instance, Pinker (1996) has described early language production (‘bottom-up’) in terms of a ‘first order’ (general nativist) cognitive account, suggesting a potential bottleneck effect which attributes a limited high-scope memory to account for the child’s truncated syntax of Tense/Agreement and Transitive errors (e.g. Her want), and over-application of Tense errors (e.g. Does it rolls?). In this sense, it is believed that high-scope memory serves as a kind of scaffolding for formal abstraction. One possible interpretation of this would be to suggest that a rule-based abstraction process (syntax) somehow has evolved out of a biological need to handle and compute the vast and newfound quantitative/qualitative store of linguistic material presently endowed to humans due to this increase in memory: i.e., high-scope memory spawns variable abstraction. There is no question that a purely associative-based model of lexical storage, with the entire range of inflections being stored as whole lexical-chunks, would burden the memory process in such a way that it would squeeze out any remaining computational space required for more convoluted syntactic operations (such as movement and the realization of formal functional features).

Radford (1990), on the other hand, has maintained a ‘second order’ (special nativist) maturational account affecting syntactic complexity in order to explain the same lack of adult-like speech. In this sense, memory has nothing whatsoever to do with the emergence of formal syntax (or lack thereof) and a more special nativist stance—special in the sense that we are now operating on a ‘top-down’ scenario—is pursued. Notwithstanding peripheral differences regarding the inherent causes of such errors, it should be noted that these two long standing nativist positions share a more common bond in that they were reactions to much of what was bad coming on the heels of work done in the 1970s—theories which sought not only to account for such errors on purely semantic grounds, but, likewise, seemingly to demote the child’s entire early grammatical apparatus to a mere level of associative-style cognitive learning (e.g., Bloom 1975, Braine 1976, and to some extent Bowerman (1973) among others). (Although it is true that a certain amount of Pinker’s work in this general context continues to ‘bootstrap’ early grammars to semantics, the steering away from potential non-nativistic associative learning-based accounts to proper syntactic-based accounts was viewed by many to be a timely paradigm shift, acting as a safeguard against what might be construed as ‘bad-science’ behaviorism (of the purely semantic kind). This shift adjusted toward a more accurate nativist stance, swinging the Plato vs. Aristotle debate back to Plato’s court, at least of the time being (as witnessed in Chomsky’s entitled book ‘Cartesian Linguistics’)—a move keeping in line with what was then coming down the pike in Chomskyan linguistics. One thing, however, that seems to have caught the imagination of developmental linguists in recent years has been to question again the actual infrastructure of the child brain that produces the sort of immature grammar: namely, a rejuvenation has reappeared in the literature circumscribing new understanding of age-old questions dealing with the computational structure of the mind (see The Dual Mechanism Model).

Second Language Learning

Much of Second Language Learning centers around issues of the nature of learnability. Whereas it is understood that first language acquisition is somewhat a mystery and relies mostly on innate universal principles of constraints and assumptions, second language learning seems to rely more on cognitive mechanism in order to fashion general problem solving learning strategies to cope with the material. This difference between First Language ‘Acquisition’ vs. Second Language ‘Learning’ has been recently articulated as a Fundamental Difference Hypothesis. It goes without saying that children naturally acquire their first language. Adults (post-critical period) do not naturally acquire their second language, as a number of fundamental differences appear in their rationale towards learning. Attempts to juxtapose what we do know about first language development, parameter settings, syntactic-categorical development (Lexical vs. Functional), etc. and comparing and contrasting these to second language have spawned new theoretical models, approaches and theories which seek to address new issues in TESL pedagogy. For a summary of issues, see the paper ‘Second Language Interference and the Pro-drop Parameter’ published here on-line).