First Language Acquisition: The Essential Readings (review)

First language acquisition: The essential readings is a gift to the language acquisition community. The book contains twenty-nine of the most widely read and cited papers exploring how children learn language—papers you always wanted your students to read but were afraid to assign (because students like to read self-contained books rather than selections of articles). It is difficult to teach language acquisition from a textbook—students need to see and think about real live data to get a feel for the complexity of the problem that faces the child (and the researcher). Students need primary sources and this book supplies some of the very best. Indeed, one of the criteria that the editors imposed on their selections for the book was that the papers be data-rich with examples from observations of children if at all possible. A second criterion was that the papers be classics, works that launched the field and influenced its direction. To achieve this goal, the editors chose papers that were published before the late 1980s (a few were published as long ago as the 1950s) and that continue to be cited today. In addition, the editors chose papers with a linguistic focus—attention to form, meaning, and the mapping between the two. When introducing students to a field, there is always a tension between assigning classic papers and assigning papers at the cutting edge. The beauty of the classics that Lust and Foley have chosen is that these papers really did set the stage for modern-day research and thus provide an excellent introduction to, and framework for, the current literature.

The readings are organized into three parts that are nicely explicated and motivated in an introduction by the editors. Part 1, ‘Theory of language acquisition’, begins with a selection from Noam Chomsky’s Knowledge of language, followed by Chomsky’s legendary review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal behavior. These papers do a good job of laying out the problem that faces the language-learning child and pointing out that learning theories of the day were not able to explain how children solve the problem. Two additional papers included in later parts of the book also make this point (and really belong in Part 1). K. S. Lashley’s classic paper on the serial order of behavior (found in Part 3) makes a Chomskyan argument at the physiological level: sequences of action cannot be explained in terms of successions of external stimuli and require a more complex, hierarchical neural organization. James L. Gould and Peter Marler’s paper, ‘Learning by instinct’ (in Part 2), also challenges behaviorism and presents phenomena from the birds and the bees that illustrate a variety of ways in which organism and environment can interact to create communication.

In addition to contrasting the Chomskyan position with Skinner’s behaviorist approach, the book also contrasts Chomsky’s position with Jean Piaget’s cognitive approach to language learning through papers written by Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, and Hermine Sinclair, and through selections from the debates between Piaget and Chomsky (edited by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini). Although I am, in general, a fan of Piaget’s, I found these selections to be less rewarding. What is most striking about the debates is the lack of common ground between Piaget and Chomsky. Piaget takes on faith that the development of general cognitive structures can account for linguistic structures and does not illustrate the point with substantive examples. Although Sinclair (1967) has explored parallels between particular linguistic structures and Piagetian cognitive structures, these findings are published only in French and thus are not reprinted in the book. In the absence of concrete examples from Sinclair’s work, the debate has a vacuous, at-cross-purposes, feel.

Part 2, ‘The nature-nurture controversies’, should have had a more encompassing title like ‘Explorations of mechanisms of...