UI 2.

ON THE NATURE OF CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Table of contents

UI 2. ON THE NATURE OF CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION ................................. 19

2.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 19
2.2. Aims .............................................................................................................................. 19
2.3. On the nature of child language acquisition ............................................................. 20
2.4. Input and acquisition ................................................................................................. 21
2.4.1. The role of the input ............................................................................................... 22
2.4.2. Motherese ............................................................................................................... 23
2.5. Stages in child language acquisition .......................................................................... 25
2.6. The Critical Period Hypothesis.................................................................................. 27
2.6.1. The case of Genie................................................................................................... 29
2.7. Language acquisition and cognitive development ................................................... 30
2.7.1. The case of Laura ................................................................................................... 30
2.7.2. Specific language impairment (SLI) ...................................................................... 32
2.8. Summary ...................................................................................................................... 33
2.9. Evaluation .................................................................................................................... 34

2.1. Introduction

This chapter introduces and discusses the input and its role in the acquisition of
language. It further introduces the stages in child language acquisition followed by
the critical period hypothesis which holds that there is a critical time for the acquisition of
language as it will be evidenced through the case of Genie. Finally, it brings into discussion the
hypothesis that language is an autonomous organ, independent from other cognitive faculties;
evidence from children with specific language impairment will support this hypothesis.

2.2. Aims

After having completed the chapter, students will be able to:

- to demonstrate a basic knowledge about the stages in CLA
- to demonstrate a familiarity with the critical period hypothesis
- to be capable of discussing the role of the input in the acquisition of language
Time envisaged for covering Unit 1: 2 hours

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 2.3. On the nature of child language acquisition

“So, language acquisition amounts to the child’s

mind fleshing out the skeleton of language
knowledge, already present in its mind, with the
material provided by the environment.” (Cook,
1988. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar)

Fundamental to modern linguistics is the idea that the faculty of language is a common
human possession, independent from the rest of the mind. The language faculty is separate from
other forms of representation in the mind, such as vision, logics and so on (cf. Chomsky 1971),
a view which I too adopt. It is important to mention that this idea is in strong contradiction to
cognitive theories which see the mind as a single unitary system and language as a form of
cognition (cf. Tomasello 1999). The very idea that language is separated from other faculties is
mirrored in its attitude towards language acquisition: it does not see language development as
dependent on cognitive growth.
The faculty of language can be regarded as a state of mind which contains what the
speaker knows at a moment in time, that is- the sum of his linguistic knowledge, also known as
grammar or I-language (internal language). The I-language is “a state of the faculty of
language”, in line with Chomsky (2002:48) which consists of a computational system with a
lexicon, principles and parameters designed for a particular language. However, children are
not born knowing all the lexical items, they are not born with set parameters, but they are born
with a language faculty with the minimal principles, with intrinsic aspects specific to the human
mind, that is, with a Universal Grammar (UG). Thus, the child’s mind starts in the initial state
when the mind contains what is genetically determined about principles (UG) and evolves
towards a steady state (I-language) when the mind knows the lexicon, principles and parameters
for a particular language, as shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1. The development of the language faculty

The main question in language acquisition studies is how the human language faculty
develops from the initial to the final state. The linguistic input that children receive is
insufficient and sometimes deficient thus we can address the following questions: how can

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children who are exposed to such an impoverished linguistic stimulus acquire such a rich
structured system of knowledge? how come languages are acquired the way they are? how can
the regularities be explained. These thought-provoking questions have constituted an
unquenchable source of wonder. One possible explanation is that children are good imitators,
they overgeneralize and use analogy and are given the right type of input during the stages of
acquisition. Or, leaning on the idea that humans are endowed with the language faculty, a
component of the human mind, it may lead us to the conclusion that the child’s linguistic
development is determined by genetically determined principles. In trying to answer these
questions, let us consider the role of the input first, in the section to follow.

2.4. Input and acquisition

We have seen so far that it would be almost impossible for the child to acquire a language
if it hadn’t been genetically endowed with knowledge of constraints (UG), which are part of
the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), as put forward by Chomsky (1959). He described the
LAD as a black box problem, where the input (primary linguistic data) goes into the black box
and what comes out is the output (a generative grammar). In other words, the utterances children
hear from their parents and other caretakers represent the input, the primary linguistic data
which is processes through the black box, the LAD. What comes out of the black box is the
output, the linguistic competence in the language, what Chomsky calls a generative grammar
in their minds, as shown in figure 2 below (adapted by Cook 1988: 53).

Figure 2. The language acquisition device model

In line with Chomsky (1990), the LAD is “a procedure that operates in an ideal
community and constructs from it, in a determinate way, a state of the language faculty”
(Chomsky 1990:69 quoted in Cook 1988:53); it should operate on any child, irrespective of the
language be it Chinese, English or Sesotho. The LAD can also be accommodated into the
Principles and Parameters Theory (see chapter 3 for a discussion); the LAD is synonymous
with the language faculty, UG. The linguistic competence that comes out of the LAD contains
a grammar according to the principles and parameters form. This translation can be seen in
figure 3 below (adapted by Cook, 1988:54).

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 Figure 3. The Universal Grammar model of language acquisition

2.4.1. The role of the input

Children are exposed to positive input in the form of grammatically correct utterances but
the exposure to the negative input is still an open question, for children are rarely informed
about the inadequacy of grammatically erroneous sentences. However, the LAD filters a
deficient input which does not provide any information about the inadequacy of grammatically
erroneous sentences. In the same line of thought, Avram (2002) argues that the input which the
child receives is quite superficial and it does not contain any clues that some sentences or
interpretations are illicit. Following Brown and Hanlon (1970), parents rarely provide
corrective feedback in what concerns the ungrammatical forms; they respond to the truth value
of the sentences uttered by their children, but they tend not to react to ill-formed sentences and
when they do, sometimes correction may not be of any help, as in the example (1) below:

(1) Child: Want other one spoon, daddy.

Father: You mean, you want the other spoon.
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.
Father: Can you say "the other spoon"?
Child: other...one... spoon.
Father: Say "other".
Child: Other.
Father: "Spoon".
Child: Spoon.
Father: "Other spoon".
Child: other...spoon. Now give me other one spoon.
(Braine 1971:161 reported in Avram (2002))

However, there are cases when the child responds positively to the negative input
received, as shown in (2a,b) below.

(2) a. Child: It's even gooder than anything. (repeated 4 times)

Adult: Yes, it's better.
Child: Better, yeah.
b. Child: That policeman falled all the way down to the tiger.
Adult: He fell down.
Child: Yes, he did. He fell down 'caus he likes that tiger.
(Saxton 1997:146, reported in Avram (2002))

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 It has been observed that parents pick up the grammatically erroneous sentences in a
following statement and reformulate them correctly as shown in (3) (example taken from
CHILDES).

(3) CHI: I climb up mummy.

DAD: you did climb over mummy.

So far, empirical data show that the presence/absence of the negative input does not
influence the process of acquisition. If present, it can affect the speed of the learning process,
but its absence will not lead to an ungrammatical output or, even worse to a lack of acquisition.
Children who do not receive input will pass through the stages of acquisition just as those who
receive it, all because of the LAD which filters a deficient input. The child has some a priori
knowledge in detecting linguistic properties. Last but not least, the role of the input cannot be
underestimated for the very idea that a child who is exposed to Romanian will learn Romanian,
or a child growing up in a bilingual family will speak both languages. To strengthen the role of
the input, particular aspects of the lexicon, such as restrictions on lexical alternations, are
extremely sensitive to input and may be set on the basis of exposure to the primary linguistic
data (Avram 2002). Input has often been associated in the literature with the concept of
motherese (mother’s speech) which helps in facilitating the acquisition process. The next
section introduces this notion.

2.4.2. Motherese

It is easy to acknowledge the fact that when talking to their young, mothers use short
utterances, of a single clause, which are clearly enunciated, without almost any grammatical
errors and most of the times, they talk about things that are in view by using basic vocabulary
items and somewhat exaggerated intonation (Newport 1977, Snow and Ferguson 1977, Hoff-
Ginsburg and Shatz 1982, O’Grady 2005 a.o.).
There has been a general position in the literature, known as The Motherese Hypothesis,
that these special characteristics of motherese (mother’s speech) play an important role in
language acquisition. What is special about motherese is that mothers restrict their choices from
a variety of allowable structures, that is, they restrict the sentence types and language contents
in order to make the acquisition process faster and errorless. Following O’Grady’s (2005:177)
analysis, some of the properties of motherese are listed below:

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 Table 1. Properties of motherese

Slow and careful articulation can make children grasp the speech easier, while restricted
vocabulary and short sentences may lead to a better comprehension of what is uttered. And is
not only mothers who adjust their speech, but also fathers (whose adjusted speech is known as
fatherese) and siblings, however, not as much as mothers do. Children are very attracted to
motherese and studies have indicated that four-months-old turn their heads more frequently
when they hear their mother’s speech, as opposed to adult speech (cf. O’Grady: op. cit). As
suggested so far, the characteristics of motherese bring about a better compression of the
mother’s speech, however, it does not mean that motherese is a necessary condition for
language acquisition to occur. Furthermore, it has been shown that mother’s speech is
associated with certain social classes and it may be absent from others as is was/still is the case
of the Afro-American population from the working-class town of Trackton. During her research
in the 1970s, Shirley Heath noticed that mothers do not simplify their speech when talking to
their babies and still, they learn the language (cf. O’Grady op. cit). It has also been observed
that Japanese mothers and fathers do not use an exaggerated intonation when they talk to their
young ones and they themselves also get to master the language. We may stress here that
irrespective of the social class and nationality, irrespective of the degree of exposure to

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motherese, the use of this input is not a necessary condition in the process of language
acquisition.
Another evidence in favour of the advantages that motherese brings is brought by
Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman (1977) who found that a preponderance of YES/NO questions
leads to an early acquisition of verbal auxiliaries. As Newport et al (1977) put it “the effects of
maternal input are only those that match the processing biases of the learner. There is an effect
of the characteristic maternal style, to be sure, but only to the extent that is congruent with the
initial biases of the learner: how he is preprogramed to represent the sound wave to himself”
(1977: 74).
So far, we have seen that both the role of the input/ environment and innateness
play an important role in the process of language acquisition. As previously
observed, the genetically determined LAD through the close interaction with the
input/environment, transforms our faculty of language into an articulated system.
Last but not least, let us remember that in the beginning of language acquisition, the baby knows
no language, known as initial state, containing only UG. At the end, is the final state which
includes the principles, parameter settings and lexicon. Maybe it’s more convenient to look at
these two stages of the acquisition process, however, the language development goes through
several stages which are worth discussing and the following section is dedicated to this.

2.5. Stages in child language acquisition

There is a consensus in the literature (Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff 1996, O’Grady 2000
a.o.) that first language development goes through several ordered stages, as follows:

(4) 0-12 months: the prelinguistic stage /ba/ /ma/

12-18 months: the single word stage (SWS) banana
18-24 months: early multi-word stage (EMWS) (I) want banana.
24-30 months: later multi-word stage (LMWS) I want to have a banana

At the very beginning of the prelinguistic stage (0-12 months), babies are still unable to
identify the effects his facial expression have on those around him. Vegetative sounds occur in
the first two months since birth when they start burping or crying. Later on (2-5 months) they
start cooing and laughing, where the former refers to vocalizations that the baby makes when
happy. At first, cooing is involuntary and later on (3-4 months) is produced in a controlled way.
During vocal play, babies produce either consonants and vowels [b], [p], [m] and [a] which
gradually become varied, turning into syllables as /ba/, /ma/. We refer to these varied

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vocalizations as babbling. It is important to mention that children babble irrespective of the
social linguistic environment they belong to and the reason why they babble is because they
learn to interact with others by the responses their babbling gets. Studies have shown that
children who are not spoken to and are neglected, stop babbling. These series of consonant-
vowel syllables /ba/, /ma/ turn into utterances ma-ma, da-da, be-be (Ro baby). Following
Jusczyl et al (1992), babies are able to differentiate between their mother tongue and a foreign
language from a different class and, at around 4-5 months, they are able to differentiate between
their mother tongue and a foreign language from the same rhythmic class (Spanish vs. Catalan).
During the single-word stage (12-18 months), also known as the holophrase, children
understand multi-word utterances but they only utter words in isolation. Following Avram
(2002), half of the words they use during this stage are words for names of objects and never
functional words (in, the, and etc.)
The early- multi word stage (18-24 months), marks the beginning of simple “reduced”
sentences, with a vocabulary of about 50 words. Word order expresses semantic roles and
sometimes they just reproduce structures from their caretakes whose meaning they don’t know.
They use no syntactic markers, no inflection for number, no tense, no overt grammatical
formatives as in baby sleep, bye-bye doggie, here pretty. Pronouns are rare with the most
common structures being you pretty, me do. Moreover, they omit determiners (5a), auxiliaries
(5b), complementizers (5c) as seen in the examples from English. Examples taken from
Romanian show that during the early-multi word stage, children omit auxiliaries (6a),
pronominal clitics (6b), weak pronouns and the indefinite article (6c) and complementizers
(6d).

(5) a. Doggy [is] big

b. Mummy [has] thrown it
c. want [to] go out (Radford 1990)
(6) a. [a] cădut pe jos
[Has] fallen on the ground
b. Mo] Nicolae [le-][a] adus
Saint Nicholas [them][has] brought (Avram and Coene 2001)

Moreover, at this stage intonation is used in forming YES/NO questions as in (7a,b)

below.

(7) a. Fraser water?

b. No eat? (Goodluck 1991)

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 The majority of questions are where and what and they are formulaic, in line with
Radford 1990, as shown in (8a-c):

(8) a. Where horse go?

b. Who that?
c. What this?
d. Where Kitty? (Goodluck 1991)

The later multi-word stage (24-30 months) is associated with intricate and complex
grammatical structures. At the beginning of this stage, the child starts with a vocabulary of 400
words and at the end his vocabulary will measure around 900 words, with slight variations,
depending on the child. According to Goodluck (1991), grammatical morphemes are acquired
in a certain order and the order is language-specific; as for English, the morphemes will be
acquired as follows: “-ing”, plural “-s”, copula, auxiliary, participle, irregular past tense forms,
3rd person singular “-s” and possessive. The “-ing” grammatical morpheme seems to be used
correctly, in 90% of the cases, as compared to the plural “-s”morpheme which proves to be
particularly slow.
One observation for this stage is that subject-auxiliary inversion does not take place in
wh-questions, despite its use in YES/NO questions, as illustrated in (9a, b) (cf. O’Grady 2000:4

(9) a. What can he ride in?

b. Can I have candy? (O’Grady 2000:4)

So far, we have seen that there is an orderly progression of stages in the acquisition
process, and, in the end, the child manages to reach an adult knowledge of his target
language. Brown (1973) argues that there are some factors which are involved in these
developmental sequences such as: morphological regularity, frequency of occurrence, semantic
transparency, and perceptual salience. Generativists raise other questions, starting from the
assumption that UG is biologically given, as follows: is UG fully available from the onset of
acquisition and if so, why are there differences between the child and adult speech?
2.6. The Critical Period Hypothesis

Apart from the many properties of language discussed so far, there is one more
characteristic which adds to its status of biologically programmed ability: a critical age for its

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acquisition. Inspired by Chomsky’s innovative ideas on language, scholars have argued that
there is a certain age beyond which out ability to fully acquire language is reduced.
Lenneberg’s (1967) Critical Period Hypothesis holds that there is a critical period for
language acquisition, which starts from the age of two to the onset of puberty. According to the
theory, while language is seen as adaptive, favoured by natural selection, the critical period is
not seen as adaptation but it emerges from the interplay of genetic factors in relation to language
acquisition. Similarly, it holds the idea that if people are not exposed to language before the
start of puberty language cannot be fully developed:
“Between the ages of two- and three-years language emerges by an interaction of
maturation and self-programmed learning. Between the ages of three and the early teens
the possibility for primary language acquisition continues to be good … After puberty,
the ability for self-organization and adjustment to the physiological demands of verbal
behavior quickly declines. The brain behaves as if it had become set in its ways and
primary, basic, skills not acquired by that time usually remain deficient for life.”
(Lenneberg, 1967: 158)

Lenneberg’s (op cit) theory has been contested in the literature. Firstly, Snow (1987)
notes that language acquisition begins before birth and the offset of any critical period is five
years, as most of the grammar is in place by the age of five. Long (1990) mentions that the
sensitive period for phonology ends around 5-6 years of age while for morphology and syntax
ends later, around puberty. The fact that the period for phonology ends so early can provide an
explanation why the acquisition of a second language which begins later can never achieve
native like accent. Similarly, Johnson and Newport (1989) argue that after puberty there is a
continuous decline in ability and not a sudden drop-off, as the hypothesis implies. Language
does not become totally unlearnable; however it is true that learners cannot reach the same level
of proficiency as early learners would do.
Aitchinson (1989) makes an interesting comment on the existence of the critical period
by stating that “there is no evidence of a sudden onset or final endpoint of the supposed critical
period. Instead, we are dealing with a phenomenon well known in animals, the fact that young
brains are more flexible than others (1989: 89). There clearly isn’t a final endpoint of the so
called “critical period”; there are no chances for the learner to acquire language, as there is so
much evidence which shows that the older we get, the harder it is to master a second language
and the fewer the chances are for us not to be detected as foreigners.

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2.6.1. The case of Genie

Support for the critical period hypothesis comes from cases of neglected children whose
exposure to language was delayed until puberty. Once such case is Genie who has been
deprived of language and of any other type of interaction until the age of 13. Her case proves
that there is a critical period for the acquisition of language and that there is something intricate
about the maturational state of children’s brains.
Genie was discovered in 1970 at the age of thirteen, isolated from any human contact,
deprived of language, emotionally disturbed and unlearned. Her tragic story revealed that up
until the age of thirteen she had been isolated in a closed room, tied into a potty chair where
she sat almost all day; sometimes, she was kept in a covered infant crib. She suffered from
nutritional neglect, she was only fed cereal and baby food by her mother. As her father couldn’t
tolerate any noise, there was no radio in the house and she was kept away from any kind of
acoustic stimuli, thus no linguistic input was available for her. Sadly, according to her mother,
her father and brother never spoke to her, but they barked at her instead.
According to what has been observed (see Rigler 1972), she was a perfectly normal child
at birth and there is no evidence to support an early brain damage, mental deficiency or autism.
Due to the psycho-pathological behaviour of her parents and to the extreme isolation to which
she was exposed, at the time of discovery, she was diagnosed with retardation, however no
other mental or physical disease was found.
At the outset of her linguistic observation, Genie began to imitate words and respond to
the speech of those around her, however, it was quite difficult to grasp the level of
comprehension. Soon after, comprehension tests have been administered, 11 months prior to
her isolation. What the tests revealed was that Genie had a growing ability to understand and
produce individual words and names. However, she had almost zero comprehension of
grammatical structures. Genie was facing the task of first language acquisition with a post-
pubescent brain. Some of the grammatical structures that she comprehended were: singular-
plural contrasts of nouns, possessive constructions, prepositions (under, next to, over…),
conjunctions and the comparative and superlative form of adjectives.
Due to her language deprivation, at the age when children learn how to control their vocal
organs to produce sounds, Genie was learning how to repress any sounds because of the
physical punishment she had to go through, thus her earliest imitative utterances were either
whispered or produced as silent articulations. In spite or her trauma, prior to her isolation
Genie’s speech production improved, with the help of linguists, and her phonological

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development was close to that of a normal child. At first, her utterances consisted of one-word
utterances, consonant-vowel (CV) monosyllables and later on these turned into complex
syllable structures (i.e. (C) (L/G) V (C); L- stands for liquid and G -glide, both optional
elements) and, later on, words of two and three syllables emerged.
Eight months later, she began to produce utterances of the type Modifier + Noun (more
soup) and then Verb+ Noun (want milk) or Subject + Verb+ Object (Tori chew glove) and four-
word predications (Marilyn car red car), in line with Fromkin et al (the quoted work). She also
produced negative sentences (no more) and prepositions also occurred in her utterances (Like
horse behind fence). Strings of verb-phrases followed (Want go shopping) and sometimes she
used them in co-occurrence with noun-phrases (Want buy toy refrigerator) (see Curtiss et all
(1973) for further details).
In spite of her remarkably fast cognitive ability in the beginning, after years of
rehabilitation, her linguistic level remained at the level of a two-and-a-half-year-old child which
supports the critical period, at least on a syntactic level. This allows us to bring into discussion
the development of lateralization in close relationship with language acquisition. By
lateralization we refer to the idea that each hemisphere of the brain is specialized with different
cognitive functions and the left hemisphere is dominant for language, fact which is supported
by aphasia studies and various experiments with split brains. The following two sections are
devoted to this discussion.

2.7. Language acquisition and cognitive development

As we have seen throughout the chapter the language faculty is a refined human property
which separates us from other species; language is “what makes us thick”, as Pinker nicely
described it. The human brain seems to be perfectly suited for the acquisition of language in
such a way that no other species is. The literature points towards language as an autonomous
organ, independent from other cognitive faculties with evidence coming from (i) studies of
individuals whose cognitive abilities are dysfunctional but show a perfect mastery of language
but also from (ii) intellectually capable individuals whose speech is impaired.

2.7.1. The case of Laura

Laura’s case is notable because it provides a dissociation of language from other non-
linguistic cognitive abilities in that, her linguistic abilities are remarkable, in sharp contrast to
the other cognitive capacities. Her profile supports the view according to which language is an

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ability specific to humans, driven by a set of principles which cannot be found in any other
cognitive domain and refutes the theory that cognitive, social interactive and perceptual factors
can explain language acquisition.
During her study (Yamada 1990), Laura was an adolescent who had reached the apex of
her development in all linguistic and non-linguistic areas. In contrast to other teenagers of her
age, she had been developmentally delayed behaving at a preschool level. Her language was
well developed; however, she could not read, count, tell the time or tell her age. She spoke
loudly, repeating the same thing and interrupting the flow of conversation. During her early
years, she manifested developmental delays, and she was diagnosed as mentally retarded by her
paediatrician. From the diary kept by her mother, we know that at 20 months old, Laura could
understand a few words (hand, mouth, milk, etc) and, as she grew, language development burst.
She could use complex sentences (relative clauses, infinitival complements, complements with
participial forms), passive constructions and she correctly used tense and agreement markers,
temporal adverbials, modifiers, adjectives, and elliptical utterances. However, in spite of being
able to produce all these construction types in spontaneous speech, she failed to use them
appropriately in conversation, when giving answers.
Laura was deficient on various non-linguistic tasks such as classification, rule abduction
or hierarchical constructions, however, she was able to construct complex hierarchical
structures from a linguistic point of view (Curtiss, Yamada and Fromkin 1979). Thus,
hierarchical organization does not imply the same mechanisms across domains, and this brings
us to another conclusion- that language is dissociated from other cognitive abilities. This view
has also been shared by Chomsky who argued that “there seems little reason to suppose that the
principles of grammar or universal grammar have any close analogue in other systems, though
naturally one must keep an open mind about the matter” (1980:245). At the other side of the
spectrum, Klatsky (1975) noted that aspects of language are linked to aspects of cognition as
follows: semantics is linked to the conceptual development and syntax is tied to short memory
and sequencing. In light of this, deficiencies in short term memory could result in poor syntax.
Laura’s case shows exactly the opposite: in spite of her poor memory span, she had good
syntactic skills. Yamada (the quoted work) further reports that Laura had a special talent for
syntactic knowledge, while her vocabulary was much less sophisticated; this challenges the
assumption that syntax depends on semantics. Her semantic knowledge reflected her conceptual
limitations. Moreover, she had an ease at acquiring lexical items that she did not understand,
and she used them in her speech, in appropriate positions, just as normal children do (this is
known as a normal stage in normal development).

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 Her case is very instructive in investigating the relationship between syntax and
semantics and the role they play in the acquisition of language. Two questions can
be raised: do children use the semantics of words to predict the syntax (also known
in the literature as semantic bootstrapping) or do children use the syntax to learn
about individual words (known as syntactic bootstrapping). Where does the learner begin?
These two questions will be discussed in chapter 4.

2.7.2. Specific language impairment (SLI)

In contrast to Laura’s case, the literature also points towards cases of intellectually
capable individuals whose speech is impaired. The interesting aspect here is that their language
deficit is not a result of a cognitive problem and more interesting, it is not a deficit that affects
all areas of language. The syntactic-semantic features may be affected while the thematic
relations for instance, may be normal, unimpaired. The same errors will be found in
spontaneous speech, grammatical judgement, repetition and writing.
Developmental dysphasia has been characterized in the literature as a delay in the onset
of language and disorders in language, involving different aspects of speech and language.
Gopnik (1990) reveals that there is a class of linguistic errors typical to dysphasic children. One
rule in particular seems to be affected, the syntactic-semantic feature marking and agreement.
There is no feature marking on number, gender, animacy, nouns, proper names, person, tense,
which shows that there is a deficit on the discrete, surface, level of grammar which marks
syntactic-semantic features. Similarly, since most nouns are morphologically marked for the
plural by an “-s”, data on dysphasics has shown that most of the manifestations of plural are
impaired, as shown in the examples below:

(10) a. They put present under the Christmas trees. (Gopnik 1990:147)
b. You make one points. (Gopnik 1990:147)
c. two motor boat (Crystal et al 1976: 150)

As seen in (10a), errors are made in the morphological marking of number, where the “-
s” marked form for the plural is syntactically incorrect, while in (10b) the noun marked for the
plural which occurs with a numerical determiner makes the sentence illicit. The same stands
for (10c) where the noun is unmarked for the plural while functioning with a numerical
determiner. Gopnik (op cit) suggests that numerical determiners occur quite often in
spontaneous speech, in illicit sentences. Errors also occur with pronouns (he, it, they) in

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spontaneous speech and they are used to mark the difference between singular and plural
referents, as shown in (11a) where they, used anaphorically, refers to a singular noun or in (11b)
where he and they refer to the same referent.

(11) a. Red Riding Hood arrive at his grandma’s house. Now they say “Oh, what
big eyes you got”
b. Jimmy starting eat his breakfast. He don’t like it. Now they drop the bowl
on the floor. (Gopnik 1990: 149)

Dysphasics also violate the rule according to which proper names do not take
determiners, as shown in (12a,b) below:
(12) a. The Marie-Louise look at the bird.
b. The wolf is hide on the back of the trees on the Red Riding Hood.
(Gopnik 1990:152)

Past forms do not occur in spontaneous speech and, instead, present tense is used as
illustrated in (13a,b) where last times is used to mark the past

(13) a. Last time we arrive.

b. Last time I bring a one box of doughnuts.

So far, we have seen that there is a deficit among dysphasics in the ability to mark
syntactic-semantic features. In the absence of these features, the rules in morphology
cannot operate, thus constraints among determiners and nouns are absent. As a
result, lexical devices (see 13a,b) must be used to convey the meanings usually
carried by these features, which are absent here. Gopnik (op cit) further argues that this deficit
persists throughout life, despite language therapy.

2.8. Summary
This unit has provided an insight into the nature of language acquisition. We have
seen that the input helps in facilitating the acquisition process and one clear
example would be motherese. The chapter also discussed the ordered stages of CLA together
with the critical period hypothesis which brings evidence that language is a biologically
programmed ability.

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2.9. Evaluation

1. Define the role of the input

2. What are the properties of motherese?
3. Define the four stages in child language acquisition
4. What does the critical period hypothesis hold?
5. Why is Laura’s case so special in connection language acquisition?

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