Empirical findings in language acquisition
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C4P134
2025-12-13
45
Empirical findings in language acquisition
The empirical study of first language acquisition is known as developmental psycholinguistics. Since the early studies in developmental psycholinguistics such as Braine (1976) and Bowerman (1973), one of the key cross-linguistic findings to have emerged is that infants’ earliest language appears to be item based rather than rule-based: infants first acquire specific item-based units (words), then more complex item-based units (pairs and then strings of words), before developing more abstract grammatical knowledge (grammatical words and morphemes, complex sentence structures and so on). Cognitive linguists argue that this provides evidence for a usage-based theory of language acquisition, and that more recent empirical findings in developmental psycholinguistics, particularly since the late 1980s and early 1990s, support this view. Let’s look in more detail at what it means to describe early language acquisition as item-based. When a child first produces identifiable units of language at around the age of twelve months (the one-word stage), these are individual lexical items. However, these lexical items do not equate with the corresponding adult forms in terms of function. Instead, the child’s first words appear to be equivalent to whole phrases and sentences of adult language in terms of communicative intention. For this reason, these early words are known as holophrases. These can have a range of goal-directed communicative intentions. In a study of his daughter’s early language, Tomasello found that his daughter’s holophrases fulfilled a number of distinct functions, which are illustrated in Table 4.5.
Secondly, the item-based nature of first language acquisition is also revealed at the two-word stage, which emerges at around eighteen months. After holophrases, children begin to produce multi-word expressions. These are more complex expressions than holophrases in that they contain two or more lexical items. Some of these early multi-word utterances are of the type ball table, when a child sees a ball on the table and concatenates two units of equal status (here nouns) in order to produce a more linguistically complex utterance. However, the majority of early multi-word utterances are not like this. Instead, many early multi-word utterances exhibit functional asymmetry. This means that the expressions contain a relatively stable element with ‘slots’ that can be filled by other lexical items. In other words, early multi-word utterances, rather than containing two or more words of equal status, tend to be ‘built’ around a functionally more salient and stable word. Tomasello calls expressions like these utterance schemas (which are also known as pivot schemas). Like holophrases, utterance schemas reflect the communicative intention of an equivalent adult utterance, but represent the acquisition of more schematic knowledge, allowing a wider range of lexical items to fill the slots. The obligatory element is known as the pivot. Representative examples of utterance schemas are provided in Table 4.6. In this table, X represents the slot that is ‘filled in’ and corresponds to a word that describes an entity (noun), shown in the left column, or an action (verb), shown in the right column. (There is no significance to the order in which these utterances are listed in the table.) Because most utterance schemas appear to revolve around verb-like elements, Tomasello (1992) labelled these units verb-island constructions. Only later do these verb-island constructions develop into the more familiar constructions of adult-like speech.
Tomasello argues that the third way in which early acquisition is item-based rather than rule-based is in its lack of innovation. In other words, early language use is highly specific to the verb-island constructions that the child has already formed and resists innovation. Tomasello argues that this is because early utterance schemas are highly dependent on what children have actually heard rather than emerging from abstract underlying rules. In an experiment carried out by Tomasello and Brooks (1998), two to three year old children were exposed to a nonsense verb tamming (meaning ‘rolling or spinning’) used in an intransitive frame. This is illustrated in example (18).
This usage is intransitive because the verb tamming does not have an object. Children were then prompted to use tamming in a transitive frame, with an object. One such prompt was a picture in which a dog was causing an object to ‘tam’. The question presented to the children was What is the doggie doing? However, children were found to be poor at producing tamming in a transitive frame (e.g. He’s tamming the car). Moreover, they were also found in a further study to be poor at understanding the use of tamming in a transitive frame. Tomasello draws two conclusions from these findings: (1) two and three year olds were poor at the creative use of the novel verb tamming; and (2) early utterance schemas are highly dependent on contexts of use in which they have been heard. Tomasello argues that it is only later, as children acquire more complex and more abstract constructions, that they come to be more competent in the creative use of language.
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