How children learn language (review)

In Ingram 1989, I divided child language researchers into two camps, the language acquisition approach, consisting primarily of linguistic researchers with strong nativist biases, and the child language approach, consisting of data-oriented researchers from a range of fields with a focus on language processing. There are some researchers who cannot be pigeonholed into one of the groupings, and William O’Grady is one of them. O has shown in his publications, particularly O’Grady 1997, an ability to straddle both of these approaches, combining a strong theoretical interest with a focus on processing to develop his own theoretical model, most recently described as an emergentist approach (O’Grady 2005).

Given O’s independent-mindedness, I was particularly interested to see the result of his effort to write an introductory book on first language acquisition. The book is part of the series ‘Cambridge approaches to linguistics’, where the goal is to provide books on current topics that present findings ‘in a lucid and nontechnical way’. O is an obvious choice for this task, given his ability to present technically challenging material in a clear manner and his nonalignment with the approaches alluded to above.

Introductory books on language acquisition have typically made one of two choices in terms of their organization. One option is to follow language acquisition by language domains, with chapters on semantics, syntax, phonology, and so on (e.g. Berko Gleason 2005). The other option is to follow children through stages, starting with prelinguistic development, and then covering first words, then first sentences, and so forth to more advanced syntax (Ingram 1989). As might be expected, O has opted out of either approach and has instead developed his own unique trip through the language-acquisition process. There are seven chapters, with catchy titles that only give a hint of the information within. The chapters are, with my translations within parentheses: 1. ‘Small talk’ (introduction), 2. ‘The great word hunt’ (lexical acquisition), 3. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ (semantics), 4. ‘Words in a row’ (early grammar), 5. ‘What sentences mean’ (sentence comprehension), 6. ‘Talking the talk’ (phonological acquisition), and 7. ‘How do they do it?’ (theoretical issues). There are also two appendices—one on how to do language sampling and one on the sounds of English.

The general style of the book is to highlight the interesting aspects of language acquisition through numerous examples from children, graphics (drawings and charts), and a minimal amount of jargon and technical terms. For example, the section on how children can use syntactic structure to determine the meaning of verbs includes a list of child utterances with verbs, a table showing the distribution of verb meanings by age (activities vs. accomplishments), and two drawings of a monkey and a bunny showing how we can test for verb understanding. This general mixture is found throughout. Most importantly, though, is that this effort is made without compromising the need to explain language acquisition. O continually raises fundamental issues in language acquisition in terms of why children do what they do. That said, his interpretations appropriately are put forth with a sense of caution. For example, in the discussion of the vocabulary spurt, O points out that there is no consensus on whether the spurt is the result of a cognitive shift of some kind, or just a myth with no significance. This even-handedness continues in the final chapter when he compares modularity to emergentism (without referring to them that way) and doesn’t take a stand, although we know from his other writings that his views on this are clearly in support of the latter.

After a brief chapter on why children’s language is interesting, O discusses lexical learning in Ch. 2, ‘The great word hunt’. Topics include the word spurt, word segmentation, analytic vs. synthetic styles of learning, inflections (and the ‘wug’ test), and word creation through conversion, derivation, and compounding. The chapter covers word learning from the first words to advanced vocabulary acquisition. Ch...