Linguistic Development Research Paper (Page 29 of 37) in pdf

11 DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES

that is the reason why we ﬁnd him producing such generative grammars. The discussion in section

4.1.1 demonstrates that there the physical diﬃculties of perception and decoding and attention ver-

sus the problems of controlling the many parts of the speech apparatus make such an ideal state of

aﬀairs rather unlikely.

It was felt that if the multilevel approach was correct then a child should possess from an early age

the transformational rules embedded in the LAD. The child could thus begin to infer the structure

of language. This would enable them to understand utterances from an early age. Some research

might suggest that children have a d-structure since they are able at 1 ; 6 to form three overloaded

meanings on a single word.

Studies performed in 1969, tested the hypothesis that even within the holophrastic stage words could

be made to have diﬀerent meanings. The words did not serve the simple task of naming objects or

events. recordings were made of children aged between 1 ; 6 and 1 ; 8 and it was found that children

could produce words with intonations that indicated either declaration, imperative or questioning.

It was concluded that “although the data are extremely limited there appear to be indications that the

child’s single utterances are not simply names of objects and events. the child uses prosodic features

of language generatively, productively or creatively according to the rules to create sentence types”

[see p.218 Menyuk and Bernholtz (1969)].

Such results seem to support the theory that quite young children are using generative rules at the

holophrastic stage. On closer inspection the conclusion only states that adults can use prosodic

features to comprehend the child’s utterances, and that children themselves may not actually use

these features generatively to signal these distinctions.

Other research was done on telegraphic speech the conclusion of which was that utterances could be

classiﬁed as grammatical sentences from which certain words had been omitted. It was also found

at that stage that the ordering of words was important. For instance children are very likely to use

words with a structure like “me want coat”, but are very unlikely to use sentences like “want coat

me”.

Other researchers have concluded that children have an innate propensity to use rules. Such a

propensity would lead them to make such striking over-generalization errors, from which linguists

could infer the structure of the grammar being used. The structure of the sentences that children

were using did not come from adult models, but it did seem that children had produced them

themselves on the basis of simple grammatical hypotheses. If this was true it would be consistent

with an LAD theory.

It is interesting to note in passing that at the age of 18 months children have started using diﬀerent

modes of speech. One should ﬁnd it suggestive that the children even have such modes at that age,

regardless of whether they are able to use them consistently. Another suggestive ﬁnding is that from

an early age children act as if they expect language to be governed by rules.

Recent results have contradicted the assumption that there is a critical age at which language

learning can take place. It was shown to be an unfounded assumption of the early proponents of

the language instinct. It has been suggested that the LAD did not arise before birth, but from the

prelinguistic knowledge. It was felt that in the pre-linguistic period children are still developing

perceptual systems and some ability to categorize the world. Also they are learning to diﬀerentiate

sound and other perceptual stimuli. these faculties are developed prior to any ability to express it.

As other research has shown there may be numerous precursors to a linguistic skill. For example it

is believed that the prelinguistic precursor of the noun is the tendency to point at things. Nouns

and pointing serve the same purpose of ﬁxating the attention on a thing. Labeling would thus come

later as a pragmatic development of that tendency when the child realizes the role of sound as a

medium of communication.

Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 29

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