Download the Full Version of textbook for Fast Typing at textbookfull.

com

Child Language: Acquisition and Development 2nd

Edition Matthew Saxton

https://textbookfull.com/product/child-language-acquisition-
and-development-2nd-edition-matthew-saxton/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWNLOAD NOW

Download More textbook Instantly Today - Get Yours Now at textbookfull.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Handbook of Parenting and Child Development Across the

Lifespan Matthew R. Sanders

https://textbookfull.com/product/handbook-of-parenting-and-child-
development-across-the-lifespan-matthew-r-sanders/

textboxfull.com

Understanding Formulaic Language A Second Language

Acquisition Perspective Second Language Acquisition
Research Series 1st Edition Anna Siyanova-Chanturia
https://textbookfull.com/product/understanding-formulaic-language-a-
second-language-acquisition-perspective-second-language-acquisition-
research-series-1st-edition-anna-siyanova-chanturia/
textboxfull.com

Second language acquisition 1st Edition Slabakova

https://textbookfull.com/product/second-language-acquisition-1st-
edition-slabakova/

textboxfull.com

Second Language Acquisition and Lifelong Learning 1st

Edition Singleton

https://textbookfull.com/product/second-language-acquisition-and-
lifelong-learning-1st-edition-singleton/

textboxfull.com
The child as musician : a handbook of musical development
2nd Edition Mcpherson

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-child-as-musician-a-handbook-of-
musical-development-2nd-edition-mcpherson/

textboxfull.com

Routledge Handbook of Arabic Second Language Acquisition

First Edition Alhawary

https://textbookfull.com/product/routledge-handbook-of-arabic-second-
language-acquisition-first-edition-alhawary/

textboxfull.com

Research methods in language acquisition: principles,

procedures, and practices First Edition Blume

https://textbookfull.com/product/research-methods-in-language-
acquisition-principles-procedures-and-practices-first-edition-blume/

textboxfull.com

Project Based Learning in Second Language Acquisition 1st

Edition Adrián Gras-Velázquez

https://textbookfull.com/product/project-based-learning-in-second-
language-acquisition-1st-edition-adrian-gras-velazquez/

textboxfull.com

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and

Neurolinguistics 1st Edition Kara Morgan-Short

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-routledge-handbook-of-second-
language-acquisition-and-neurolinguistics-1st-edition-kara-morgan-
short/
textboxfull.com
Child Language
Child Language
Acquisition and Development
2nd Edition
Matthew saxton
SAGE Publications Ltd
1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP
SAGE Publications Inc.
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320
SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area
Mathura Road
New Delhi 110 044
SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd
3 Church Street
#10-04 Samsung Hub
Singapore 049483
© Matthew Saxton 2017
First published 2010
Reprinted 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or
criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any
form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962661
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4462-9561-8
ISBN 978-1-4462-9562-5 (pbk)
Editor: Luke Block
Editorial assistant: Lucy Dang
Production editor: Imogen Roome
Copyeditor: Sarah Bury
Proofreader: Christine Bitten
Indexer: Martin Hargreaves
Marketing manager: Lucia Sweet
Cover design: Wendy Scott
Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in the UK
For Gary, Sue and Alex

Drawing of Alex Saxton by Colin Saxton

Contents
Acknowledgements
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Notes on the Organization of this Book
Companion Website page
1 Prelude: Landmarks in the Landscape of Child Language
From burping to grammar in the pre-school years
Levels of language
Listen in mother
The cat in the hat in the womb
Some conclusions on sound
Word learning: From 0 to 14,000 in five years
Say ‘mama’
Estimating vocabulary size
The gavagai problem
Morphology: Bits and pieces
Syntax: Putting it all together
Language in context: Perceptual, cognitive and social development
The study of child language
The lie of the land
2 Can Animals Acquire Human Language? Shakespeare’s Typewriter
What is language?
The infinite monkey theorem
Language, talk and communication
The design of language
Teaching words to animals
Talking versus sign language
Lexigrams
Barking up the right tree: Word learning in dogs
Alex, the non-parroting parrot
Animal grammar
Combining words
Comprehension of spoken English by Kanzi
The linguistic limitations of animals
Is speech special?
Categorical perception in infants and primates
Statistical learning
 Back to grammar: Infants versus monkeys
The language faculty: Broad and narrow
3 The Critical Period Hypothesis: Now or Never?
What is a critical period?
A musical interlude
Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis
Designing research on critical periods
Cats’ eyes: An example from animal development
How to identify a critical period
The effects of linguistic deprivation
The royal prerogative: Experiments on people
Feral children
Genie
Different critical periods for different aspects of language
A happier ending: The case of Isabelle
Conclusions from cases of deprivation
Age of acquisition effects in second language learning
Early versus late starters: Effects on language outcomes
Age effects may not be due to a critical period
Plastic fantastic: The receptive brain
Deafness and late language learning
Two more cases of linguistic deprivation: Chelsea and E.M.
Early versus late learning of American Sign Language
4 Input and Interaction: Tutorials for Toddlers
Talking to young children
Characteristics of Child Directed Speech
Phonology
Vocabulary
Morphology and syntax
A dynamic register
Individual differences and their effects
Child Directed Speech: Summary
Lack of interaction: Can children learn language from television?
Imitation
Linguistic creativity: Children make their own sentences
Skinner and Chomsky on imitation
Imitation as a mechanism in cognitive development
 Imitation: Who, when and how?
Individual differences in imitation
Corrective input
Recasts: Adult repetition of the child
The ‘no negative evidence’ assumption
Contrastive discourse
Negative feedback
Corrective input: Summary
Universality of CDS
Input and interaction in language acquisition
5 Language in the First Year: Breaking the Sound Barrier
Hunt the phoneme
In the beginning
Drops of sound in a river of speech
Categorical perception
Specialization towards the native language
Why I don’t speak Nthlakapmx
Loss or decline?
Enhancement of native contrasts
Individual differences in infant speech perception
Summary: Breaking the speech sound barrier
Word segmentation
The baby statistician
Learning in the real world
Prosodic cues to speech segmentation
Relative cue strength
Grammar from the babble
Phonemes, words and grammar: Summary
6 The Developing Lexicon: What’s in a Name?
Approaches to word learning
First words
Comprehension versus production
What do one-year-olds talk about?
Overextension
Categorically wrong
Lexical plugs: Pragmatic errors
Losing it: Retrieval failures
 Lexical processing
Up, up and away: The vocabulary spurt
Why so fast?
Spurt? What spurt?
The rate of word learning
Ten words a day?
Fast mapping
Slow mapping: The gradual accretion of meaning
Biases
The return of the gavagai problem
A noun bias in the child and in research
Nouns are easy
Verbs are hard
The shape bias
The rise and fall of word learning biases
Associative learning: The origin of biases?
Where do biases go?
Some lexical gaps
Computational modelling based on probability theory
7 The Acquisition of Morphology: Linguistic Lego
Inflection
The acquisition of inflection
Whole word learning
The past tense debate: Rules or connections?
A dual-route account: Words and Rules theory
The acquisition of words and rules
The blocking hypothesis
Words and Rules: The story so far
Connectionism and a single-route account
Problems with connectionist models
Crosslinguistic evidence
Summary: One route or two?
Compounding and derivation
Derivation
Compounding
Derivation: The influence of productivity
Early compounds
 Relating the parts to the whole in compounds
Complex compounds: Three processes combined
Morphology in the school years
Morphological awareness
Connections with vocabulary, reading and spelling
Morphological awareness in teachers
8 Linguistic Nativism: To the Grammar Born
Universal Grammar
The problem of linguistic diversity
Core versus periphery
Parameters of variation
Setting parameters: Triggers
Arguments for linguistic nativism
Some initial observations
Limited exposure to linguistic input
No direct instruction
Ease and speed of language acquisition
The poverty of stimulus argument
Plato’s problem
Degenerate input
Negative evidence: Corrective input for grammatical errors
Knowledge in the absence of experience: The case of structure
dependence
The origins of structure dependence
The imitation of grammatical structures
Evidence from children
Poverty of the stimulus: Summary
The contents of UG: What precisely is innate?
Conclusion
9 The Usage-based Approach: Making it Up as You Go Along
Language knowledge from language use
Social cognition
Dyadic and triadic interaction
Collaborative engagement and intention-reading
Collaborative engagement as a basis for language
development
Early constructions: A route into grammar
 In the beginning was the utterance
From single-unit to multi-unit speech
Does the child go from fully concrete to fully abstract?
The productivity puzzle
The transitivity bias
Pattern finding
Type frequency: A route to productivity
Sounds familiar: The role of frequency
Early productivity: Syntactic bootstrapping
Constraining productivity
Conservative learning
Entrenchment
Pre-emption
Summary: Reining back on productivity
10 You Say Nature, I Say Nurture: Better Call the Calling Off Off
Nature and nurture in the study of child language
The genetic basis of language development
Integrating ‘nurture’ into theories of syntax acquisition
Some basic facts
Dietrich Tiedemann (1787)
Child language: A timeline
The ‘nature’ in nature–nurture: Something must be innate
Learning mechanisms
Domain-general learning: How general?
Linguistic nativism: The need for learning mechanisms
Methodology: Limitations and possibilities
Language acquisition: The state of the art
Child language: Acquisition and development
Answers to Exercises
Appendix 1: Observations on Language Acquisition Made by Dietrich
Tiedemann (1787)
Appendix 2: Pronunciation Guide: English Phonemes
Glossary of Linguistic Terms
References
Author Index
Subject Index
Acknowledgements
I have had much help and encouragement in the writing – and updating – of
this book from family, friends and former colleagues in academia. It has also
been gratifying to receive help from colleagues further afield, in the wider
world of child language research, many of whom I have yet to meet, but all of
whom responded to my queries with considerable generosity of spirit. In
particular, I should like to thank Ayhan Aksu-Koç, Shanley Allen, Ben
Ambridge, Misha Becker, Heike Behrens, Ruth Berman, Raymond Bertram,
Joan Bybee, Robin Campbell, Shula Chiat, Anne Christophe, Alex Clark, Eve
Clark, Gina Conti-Ramsden, Annick de Houwer, Holly Garwood, Jonathan
Ginzburg, Roberta Golinkoff, Marisa Teresa Guasti, Bart Guerts, Margaret
Harris, Maya Hickmann, Josephine Howard, Christine Howe, Dick Hudson,
Jane Hurry, Evan Kidd, Sarah King, Mike Kirkman, Shalom Lappin, Elena
Lieven, Brian MacWhinney, Michael Maratsos, Theo Marinis, Chloe
Marshall, Cecile McKee, Evelyne Mercure, David Messer, Gary Morgan,
Vicki Murphy, Letitia Naigles, Keith Nelson, David Olson, Mitsuhiko Ota,
Anna Papafragou, Lisa Pearl, Colin Phillips, Li Ping, Dorit Ravid, Maritza
Rivera Gaxiola, Stuart Rosen, Caroline Rowland, Jenny Saffran, Colin
Saxton, Susan Sciama, Yasuhiro Shirai, Melanie Soderstrom, Morag Stuart,
Mike Swan, Michael Tomasello, Michael Ullman, Angelika van Hout,
Athena Vouloumanos, Catherine Walter, Dan Weiss and Charles Yang.
Beyond the professional, there is the personal. My husband, Gary Yershon, is
constant in his support. My son, Alex – a grown man now – features
throughout the book with examples from a diary study I did with him during
my doctoral studies. In the field of child language, it is not enough simply to
breed one’s own data. One needs also a son with a generous spirit who is
happy to share his early ventures into language with the wider world. My
father, Colin Saxton, drew the picture of Alex as a newborn which features as
the frontispiece. And my mother, Josephine Howard, created the painting
which has been used for the book cover. Finally, friends, family and
colleagues make numerous appearances in these pages, embedded in the
examples of linguistic structures. To them all, I offer my heartfelt thanks.
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
The author and publisher wish to thank the following for the permission to
use copyright material:
We thank APA for granting us permission to reproduce:
Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object permanence in 3½-month-old and 4½-month-
old infants. Developmental Psychology, 23(5), 655–664. Fig. 1, p. 656.
Ganger, J. & Brent, M.R. (2004). Reexamining the vocabulary spurt.
Developmental Psychology, 40(4), 621–632. Fig. 1. A spurtlike function
(logistic) superimposed on slightly modified data from Child 041B (p. 623).
Fig. 2. A nonspurtlike curve (quadratic) superimposed on the same data
shown in Figure 1, p. 623.
We thank Cambridge University Press for granting us permission to
reproduce:
Gershkoff-Stowe, L., Connell, B. & Smith, L. (2006). Priming
overgeneralizations in two- and four-year-old children. Journal of Child
Language, 33(3), 461–486. Figure 1, p. 464. Levels of processing and lexical
competition involved in naming a perceived object.
Dromi, E. (1987). Early lexical development. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Figure 1, p. 111. Keren’s cumulative lexicon at the one-
word stage.
Bates, E. & Goodman, J.C. (1997, p. 517, Fig. 2) in E. Bates, I. Bretherton &
L. Snyder (1988). From first words to grammar: Individual differences and
dissociable mechanisms. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, L.B. (2001). How domain-general processes may create domain-
specific biases. In M. Bowerman & S.C. Levinson (Eds.), Language
acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 101–131). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Figure 4.1. Sample stimuli from Landau, Smith
& Jones (1988). All stimuli were three-dimensional objects made of wood,
wire, or sponge.
We thank Elsevier for granting us permission to reproduce:
A figure from Johnson, J.S. & Newport, E.L. (1989). Critical period effects in
second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the
acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21(1),
60–99.
Nicoladis, E. (2003). What compound nouns mean to preschool children.
Brain and Language, 84(1), 38–49. Fig. 2. ‘Sun bag’ target for
comprehension, p. 43.
Benasich, A.A., Choudhury, N., Friedman, J.T., Realpe-Bonilla, T.,
Chojnowska, C. & Gou, Z.K. (2006). The infant as a prelinguistic model for
language learning impairments: Predicting from event-related potentials to
behavior. Neuropsychologia, 44(3), 396–411. Fig. 1. Photograph of a 6-
month-old child seated on his mother’s lap during an ERP testing session
using a dense array Geodesic Sensor Net system (Electric Geodesic, Inc.,
Eugene, Oregon, USA), p. 399.
We thank the Linguistic Society of America for granting us permission to
reproduce Brooks, P.J. & Tomasello, M. (1999). How children constrain their
argument structure constructions. Language, 75(4), 720–738. Figure 1. Novel
‘directed motion’ and ‘manner of motion’ verbs, p. 724.
We thank MIT Press for granting us permission to reproduce Hirsh-Pasek, K.
& Golinkoff, R.M. (1996). The origins of grammar: Evidence from early
language comprehension, Figure 6.1, © 1996 Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, by permission of the MIT Press.
We thank Wiley-Blackwell for granting us permission to reproduce:
Gertner, Y., Fisher, C. & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules:
Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension.
Psychological Science, 17(8), 684–691. Figure 1, p. 686.
Saffran, J.R. (2003). Statistical language learning: Mechanisms and
constraints. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(4), 110–114.
Figure 1, p. 111.
Fenson, L., Dale, P.S., Reznick, J.S., Bates, E., Thal, D.J. & Pethick, S.J.
(1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development, 59(5). Figure 1, p. 35 and Figure
2, p. 38.
Notes on the Organization of this Book
This text is aimed principally at students of psychology with an interest in
child language. It is suitable for use at undergraduate level, and also at
postgraduate level, in cases where the field is new. In both cases, I am keenly
aware that most psychology students have no prior training in linguistic
theory. In fact, if you’re like me – the member of a lost generation – you may
not even have learnt very much at all about language at school. For this
reason, I have tried to take nothing for granted as far as linguistic
terminology is concerned, not even with common items like noun or verb. Of
course, you can always skip over the linguistic interludes, if it’s all old hat,
and stick with the main event. Either way, the aim of this book is to equip
you to appreciate more fully the arguments and evidence advanced in the
study of child language. The following menu of pedagogic features should
sustain you on the journey ahead.
Glossary of linguistic terms
Linguistic terms are highlighted in bold to indicate their appearance in
the glossary, towards the end of the book. There you will find
definitions of all things linguistic. You can test your knowledge of
terminology via the related website, where you will find eFlashcards to
help you.
Pronunciation guide: English phonemes
A list of the special symbols used to represent the consonant and vowel
sounds of English. And yes, the terms phoneme, consonant and vowel all
feature in the glossary.
Boxes
Boxes have been used for two kinds of diversion from the main text: (1)
to expand on essential terminology from linguistic theory; and (2) to
provide extra information on key background concepts.
References and further reading
As well as the list of references at the end of the book, I have ended each
chapter with a few suggestions for further reading. These latter are
annotated with potted reviews and notes.
Website addresses
The internet makes life easy for students in all kinds of ways. But with
regard to reading material, articles found on the internet can be
intrinsically unreliable. The crux of the matter is this: one cannot always
tell, with any certainty, who wrote a given internet article. Nor can one
always be sure if the claims made in internet sources are reasonable,
valid, and backed up by reference to genuine and appropriate research.
That said, many sources are perfectly respectable – as testified by the
burgeoning number of electronic journals now available. I have been as
careful as I can in my listing of websites, but approach with caution. I
have included the academic web pages of some key child language
researchers, and these should be pretty reliable. In particular, many
academics now post downloadable versions of research articles on their
university homepages.
Discussion points
Discussion points are sprinkled throughout the book wherever they seem
like a Good Thing. They can be used in seminars or in student self-study
groups (never tried the latter? – give them a go). For some of the
Discussion points, you should equip yourself by reading the relevant
chapter in advance and/or reading an item from the Further Reading
section.
Exercises on linguistic concepts (with answers)
Like cod liver oil, linguistic exercises are unpalatable, but very good for
you. The idea is to limber up with some practice on unfamiliar concepts,
before tackling the literature. Model answers are provided at the end of
the book.
PowerPoint slides
These slides are intended for use by your lecturers. They fillet the main
points from each chapter, allowing room to expand on the main points in
classroom teaching sessions. But they could also quite easily be used for
private study, as the basis for identifying key points for revision and
reflection.
Multiple choice questions
You will find a set of MCQs for each chapter on the companion website.
They will help sharpen your understanding of key concepts. Or maybe
they’ll just reveal how lucky you are.
Author index
Find your favourite authors, as mentioned in the text, and source their
work in the list of references. Then challenge yourself to find other
work, especially recent research, by the same authors (your university
library will help if you’re new to the sport of Reference Hunting).
Subject index
Separate from the author index, because it makes life a little less
cluttered. Relevant topics from each chapter are included to enhance the
sum total of your learning happiness.
Companion Website page

The second edition of Child Language is supported by a wealth of online

resources for both students and lecturers to aid study and support teaching,
which are available at https://study.sagepub.com/saxton2e.
For students
Multiple choice questions to test your knowledge of key concepts and make
sure you have retained the most important parts of each chapter.
Weblinks direct you to relevant resources to broaden your understanding of
chapter topics and link to real conversations about social research.
Flashcard glossary so you can test yourself on all the key terms from the
book and check your understanding.
For lecturers
PowerPoint slides featuring figures, tables, and key topics from the book can
be downloaded and customized for use in your own presentations.
1 Prelude: Landmarks in the Landscape of
Child Language
Contents
From burping to grammar in the pre-school years 2
Levels of language 4
Listen in mother 5
The cat in the hat in the womb 5
Some conclusions on sound 7
Word learning: From 0 to 14,000 in five years 7
Say ‘mama’ 7
Estimating vocabulary size 8
The gavagai problem 9
Morphology: Bits and pieces 10
Syntax: Putting it all together 13
Language in context: Perceptual, cognitive and social development 16
The study of child language 18
The lie of the land 22
Overview
By the end of this chapter you should have some appreciation of the
challenges facing the newborn infant in the acquisition of language.
Major landmarks in language development are presented at each of the
following four levels of linguistic analysis:
phonology (the sound system)
vocabulary
morphology (parts of words, especially those parts used for
grammar)
grammar
We will consider some of the philosophical problems facing the child
(for example, how does the child know what a word is, or what it might
refer to?). And we will introduce the nature–nurture problem: to what
extent do genetic factors determine the development of language? To
set the child’s language learning achievements in context, an overview
is provided of the child’s achievements in other developmental
domains (cognitive, perceptual–motor and social), before sketching out
the contents of the chapters that follow.
From burping to grammar in the pre-school years
Have you ever had a chat with a toddler? A rather precocious two-year-old,
known as Eve, came out with the following one day, while in conversation
with her mother:
(1) Eve aged two years (Brown, 1973):
he go asleep
want more grape juice
putting sand in the pail
I have get my crayons
where other baby?
We can see straight away that Eve is fairly savvy about a number of different
topics. But however impressed we are by Eve’s knowledge of crayons, sand
and juice, it is clear that not one of the sentences would pass muster if they
were uttered by an adult in the same setting. If nothing else, this reminds us
that language develops.
As we shall discover in this book, though, Eve has already come a long way
by the age of two years. A typical newborn is capable, vocally, of no more
than reflexive crying and fussing, plus a small repertoire of vegetative
sounds, principally, burping, spitting up and swallowing (Stark, 1986). This
repertoire is lent some charm at about eight weeks, with the emergence of
cooing and laughter. But if we fast forward to the typical five-year-old, then
we suddenly find ourselves in the company of a linguistic sophisticate,
someone with an extensive vocabulary who is able to put words together in
interesting, complex sentences that, for the most part, are perfectly well
formed.
(2) Ross aged 5;1 (MacWhinney, 2000):
I had the worst dream of my life
I wish I could let you in here, but there’s no room
You thought he couldn’t go to school because we didn’t have the
medicine
Box 1.1 Notation for the Child’s Age
There is a standard convention for denoting a child’s age in the
child language literature. A child aged two years, three months
would be recorded as 2;3. The child of four years, six months
appears as 4;6, and so on. Note the use of the semi-colon to
separate years from months. When even more fine-grained
 analyses are required, we can also add the number of days after a
period (.). For example, 1;9.10 is read as one year, nine months
and ten days.
This shorthand, in which we note months as well as years, is very
useful. Things can move fast in child language and important
distinctions might otherwise be lost. For example, take two
children, both aged one year. The first child, aged 1;0, might not
yet have produced her first word, whereas the second child, aged
1;10, might already be stringing multi-word utterances together.
Eve aged 1;10 (Brown, 1973):
Sue make some
oh my Graham cracker broke
here Fraser briefcase
have to drink grape juice first
The acquisition of language is a staggering feat. It is all too easy to overlook
the monumental nature of this achievement, because language learning seems
to come so easily to all typically developing children. Perhaps we take the
miracle of language learning for granted because, as adults, we typically take
the possession of language itself for granted. Every cognisant reader of this
book has an extensive, complex, rich knowledge of language. But this
knowledge is such universal currency – so very much part of everyday life –
that we often fail to notice or appreciate the great gift it affords the human
species. Exercise 1.1 (below) throws a spotlight on the position of language
in human society.
Exercise 1.1
Imagine a world without language. Consider the world we live in and
consider the ways in which we depend on language. In some ways, this
is an incredibly easy task. In others, it is quite overwhelming. Once you
begin, there seems to be no end to the ways in which we rely, either
directly or indirectly, on our ability to communicate with language.
Write down two or three topics that characterize some aspect of the
human experience (I provide a few suggestions below, but don’t feel
restricted by these). Consider the ways in which they depend on
language for their existence.
bridges
governments
 a family meal
travelling from London to Paris
football
laws
taking a shower
gardens
Levels of language
In this section, we will try to get a sense of the magnitude of the task facing
the newborn child. The first thing to note is that the child is battling on
several different fronts at once. Language has different components, or levels,
each of which must be tackled.
The Big Four levels of language:
phonology: concerned with the sounds of speech
vocabulary: the storehouse of meaning (words)
morphology: bits of meaning encoded in the grammar, like the plural
ending, -s in dogs
grammar: the rules dictating how words are put together into sentences
By way of hors d’oeuvre, the current chapter will sample from each of these
key areas of language, to get some flavour of how the child tackles them.
Our division of language into four levels stems from linguistics, the study of
language. In academia there are typically many different ways to dissect an
issue in analysis. It all depends on one’s theoretical perspective. For example,
we could add pragmatics to the list above, if we believe that the way
language is used is especially important (see Chapter 4 for more on this). Or
we might reduce our list to just two factors: meaning and sound. We know
that language is used to communicate meanings. And we know that,
typically, the human vocal apparatus is used to transmit those meanings via
sound. The study of language (and also child language) could thus be reduced
to working out how meaning and sound are connected (Chomsky, 1995).
From the perspective of child language, our problem is not just one of
deciding how to cut up language into its component parts (see Chapter 2). It
is also one of working out how they interconnect and influence each other.
Highlighting different aspects of language is useful. At the same time,
though, there are times when the divisions seem artificial, especially if we
focus on one level at the expense of another. For example, we could examine
the development of phonology in isolation. How does the infant come to
distinguish one sound from another in the torrent of speech assailing their
ears? This is a big question. But if we concentrated solely on the problem of
phonology, we would fail to notice that the child is also learning something
about words, and even grammar, in the first year of life, long before they ever
produce speech of their own (see Chapter 5). Unfortunately, research has
tended to consider each level of language independently, as though the child
had a series of different boxes to tick off in a particular order. Traditionally,
this has been seen as phonology first, followed by words and then
morphology and finally, grammar (Bates & Goodman, 1997). We can still
examine each level of language in its own right (and the chapters in this book
follow that general pattern), but we will be mindful that the levels of
language do not comprise the rungs of a ladder for the child to ascend.
Simultaneous development and mutual influence are more characteristic of
language acquisition.
Listen in mother
Imagine what it is like to hear language for the first time. No, really: imagine.
Did you picture yourself in a crib listening to your mother? Understandable,
but think again. We hear language before we are even born. As you will
know from those noisy neighbours who drive you mad, sound passes through
solid barriers – not just the walls of houses but also through the wall of the
womb. And it has long been known that the human ear begins to function
several weeks before birth, in the third trimester (or third) of pregnancy at
about seven months (Sontag & Wallace, 1936). The foetus can respond to the
sound of bells, and can even discriminate between different tones. But
sensitivity to sound is not the same as sensitivity to language. Can the foetus
distinguish noises, like a power drill or the banging of a door (those
neighbours again), from the sound of their own mother’s voice? Remarkably,
the answer is ‘yes’. Moreover, the foetus has already begun to recognize the
distinctive properties of their native language (May, Byers-Heinlein, Gervain
& Werker, 2011). The brain responses of newborn infants (0–3 days old)
differ when they hear a foreign language (in this case, Tagalog from the
Philippines) versus the language heard in the womb (English). Even more
remarkable, the unborn baby can learn to recognize the telling of a particular
story.
The cat in the hat in the womb
In an ingenious experiment, DeCasper & Spence (1986) asked women in the
later stages of pregnancy (7½ months) to make recordings of three different
children’s stories. One was the first part of the classic 1958 Dr Seuss story,
The cat in the hat. The second story, The dog in the fog, was created by
adapting the last part of The cat in the hat, including, as you can see from the
title, some changes to vocabulary. The third story, meanwhile, The king, the
mice and the cheese, was unrelated to the first two, but all three stories were
of very similar length, with equal-sized vocabularies. Even a good proportion
of the actual words in all three stories was shared (about 60–80 per cent of
the total, depending on which two stories are compared). But note, The dog in
the fog shared the rhythmic properties of The cat in the hat, while The king…
story did not. The influence of rhythm was thus controlled for in a study that,
in many ways, provides an excellent model of well-designed research.
The pregnant women were asked to read just one of the three stories out loud
twice a day which meant that, on average, they recited their particular story
67 times prior to giving birth. At just three days old, these neonates displayed
a clear preference for the particular story they had heard in the womb. You
might wonder how a newborn baby tells you which story they want to hear.
Infant interest was measured via their sucking behaviour on a nipple, with
high rates of sucking being taken as a sign of increased attention (see Box
5.1, Chapter 5). For example, babies exposed in the womb to The cat in the
hat sucked more fervently when they heard this story played to them than
when either of the other two stories were played. The same result was found
irrespective of the story: newborns prefer the particular story they have
already heard in the womb. This finding is remarkable, but what can we
conclude about the linguistic abilities of the foetus? No-one would claim that
these infants knew anything about the characters in the story or the
development of the plot. But clearly, something rather specific about the
story was familiar to them.
Infant preference was unlikely to be influenced by either the length of the
story, or its rhythmic qualities, or the particular vocabulary used. As noted
above, these factors were controlled for. We can also rule out voice quality as
the source of infant interest. As you will know, one human voice is distinct
from another. The unique qualities of each person’s voice allows us to
recognize family, friends, or even celebrities’ voices (Philippon, Cherryman,
Bull & Vrij, 2007). Given this ability, it is conceivable that the infant’s
display of interest (high amplitude sucking) is driven by preference for the
mother’s voice (not the story). As it happens, infants do prefer to listen to
their own mother’s voice (Mehler, Bertoncini, Barrière & Jassik-
Gerschenfeld, 1978), but that was not the critical factor here. We know this
because every story heard by every infant in every condition was read to
them in their own mother’s voice. So their marked preference for one story
over the others was not based on voice quality or recognition of the mother.
Instead, we are left with intonation as the critical factor. One might think of
intonation as the ‘music’ of speech. Modulations in pitch, up and down,
during the course of an utterance provide speech with its melody. It turns out
that the unborn child can perceive and later recall very specific information
from the intonation contours produced in the telling of each story.
A further point of interest is that foetal sensitivities to speech intonation seem
to be confined to low-frequency sounds (think bass guitar). This restriction
might point to an immature hearing system in the foetus. But the more likely
explanation is that the quality of sound that the foetus hears through the
barrier of maternal body tissue (including the womb wall) is degraded. In
particular, high-frequency sounds (think school recorder) do not penetrate the
womb very well. We know this from a further study by Spence & DeCasper
(1987). They found that newborns prefer to hear a low-frequency version of
their mother’s voice. This special version was created by filtering out high-
frequency sounds to simulate what the baby would have heard in the womb.
This latter study thus refines the discovery that children can tune into
language and form memories of their experience even before birth. The
prenatal experience of the mother can also have an impact on the child’s
language development. A recent study on a large cohort (>34,000) mothers in
Norway reveals that prenatal distress in the mother is associated with
negative language outcomes for the child at three years of age (Ribeiro,
Zachrisson, Gustavson & Schj⊘lberg, 2016). Fortunately, though, this effect
is not very large.
Some conclusions on sound
So far, we can make at least four interesting observations about language
development. First, it starts before the child is born. Second, the foetal brain
is well equipped to process human speech sounds. Third, whatever
specialization or ‘mental equipment’ the child is endowed with, specific
experiences have a large impact on learning and memory, again, before the
child is born. We can see this both in the preference for the mother’s voice
and also in the preference for a particular story. Fourth, DeCasper & Spence’s
study provides a really good demonstration that, when it comes to unlocking
the secrets of child language acquisition, considerable ingenuity is required.
Psychology, in general, faces the fundamental problem of understanding what
goes on inside someone’s head. Even if we cracked open the skull for a close
look at the brain, it would not get us very far in understanding how the mind
works or develops. In child language research, we have the added frustration
that we lack one of the most obvious tools for investigating the mind:
language. In adult psychology, I might ask you directly about your attitudes
or personality. But we cannot use language to ask the foetus or the newborn
or even a toddler to use language themselves, to tell us anything about how
they acquire language. Thinking about language, so-called metalinguistic
skill, does not emerge in any sophisticated way until the child is about five
years old (Gombert, 1992). Ironically, then, language is not a tool we can use
to examine language learning in the young child. This raises the bar very high
for empirical study. But happily, you will discover that there are numerous
examples of both great ingenuity and good science that overcome this
problem.
Word learning: From 0 to 14,000 in five years
Say ‘mama’
One of the great landmarks in a baby’s life happens around the time of their
first birthday: the moment when they produce their first word. Parents are
typically captivated on this occasion and make a great fuss over what is,
indeed, a major achievement. As you might guess, the first word is very often
the name for ‘mother’ or ‘father’ (including mummy, mama, daddy, papa). A
word like mama is relatively easy for the 12-month-old to pronounce. In fact,
it often arises spontaneously in the child’s babbling some time before its
appearance as a word. This may happen because mama is composed of
simple sounds, arranged into repetitive strings of simple syllables (Goldman,
2001). Parents are quick to ascribe meaning to the baby’s vocal productions
and will be very easily convinced that mama means ‘mother’. Although some
version of ‘mother’ is a common first word, it should be pointed out that
children differ. Some children produce their first word a little earlier than 12
months: an acquaintance of mine, Arthur, started saying bye at the age of 10
months. Many other children, meanwhile, do not speak until some time later.
As we see from Arthur, the child’s first word is not inevitably some version
of ‘mother’ or ‘father’. My own son, Alex, produced his first word, juice, at
the age of 15 months. His second word only appeared three months later, at
Christmas time, when he joined us in saying cheers. He was still on the juice,
by the way: there’s no point wasting good champagne on toddlers. The idea
that children differ with respect to language learning is an important one.
Accordingly, we will pick up the theme of individual differences, where
appropriate, as we proceed.
Once the child has cracked the problem of the first word, many other words
follow. At first, new words are acquired at a fairly gentle rate, something like
one per week on average. But then things speed up, once the child has passed
another, somewhat more intriguing milestone: the accumulation of roughly
50 words. For many children, a step-change in the rate of word learning takes
place at this point, with words being added to the total store at the rate of one
or two per day (Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, Kahana-Kalman, Baumwell &
Cyphers, 1998). Between the ages of two and six years, many children then
step on the gas again, with something like 10 new words per day being
learned (Clark, 1993). This huge increase in rate of word learning is often
described as the vocabulary spurt. As we shall see in Chapter 6, there are
individual differences among children in both the rate and pattern of word
learning (Bloom, 2000). But the notion of a vocabulary spurt enjoys
widespread currency as a general feature of child language. Ten words per
day is a lot. Think of the last adult evening class you attended where you
tried to learn a new foreign language (or why not give it a go, if you’ve never
tried). Think how hard you would find it to acquire 10 new words every
single day for four years. And when I say ‘acquire’, I mean learn, remember,
retrieve at will and use with facility and accuracy in a range of settings. Seen
in this light, the child’s word learning prowess in the early years is deeply
impressive, resulting in a vocabulary somewhere between 10,000 (Bloom &
Markson, 1998) and 14,000 (Clark, 1993) by the age of six.
Estimating vocabulary size
10,000 or 14,000 words? The wide discrepancy in these two estimates hints
at a tricky empirical problem: how does one begin to estimate the number of
words in someone’s head? To get some idea of the problem, open a
dictionary at random and scan the words on the page. My guess is that the
words which catch your eye will be the new or unfamiliar words. But I would
also guess that you do, in fact, know a good many words on any given page,
at least to some degree. Given that dictionaries often contain thousands of
pages, on each of which you will know many words, you can begin to
calculate the extent of your vocabulary (see the website listed at the end of
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
into the boilers, and accumulated there. It saponified and formed a
foam which filled the whole boiler and caused the water to be worked
over with the steam as fast as it could be fed in. I have always
wondered why the engine, being vertical, should not have exhibited
any sign of the water working through it at the upper end of the
cylinder. The explanation after all appears simple. The water on
entering the steam chest mostly fell to the bottom and little passed
through the upper ports. The trouble from oil was not felt at all in the
Lancashire boiler. This, I suppose, was due to three causes. The
latter held a far greater body of water, had a much larger extent of
evaporating surface, and far greater steam capacity. I was always
sorry that I did not give the Harrison boiler the better chance it would
have had with a jet condenser.
In this pair of diagrams, which are copied from the catalogue of
Ormerod, Grierson & Co., the low steam pressure, 29 pounds above
the atmosphere, will be observed. This was about the pressure
commonly carried. The pressure in the exhibition boilers, 75 pounds,
was exhibited by Mr. John Hick, of Bolton, as a marked advance on
the existing practice.
In preparing for the governor manufacture I had my first revelation
of the utter emptiness of the Whitworth Works. Iron gear patterns
were required, duplicates of those which had been cut for me at
home by Mr. Pratt. The blanks for these gears were turned as soon
as possible after I reached Manchester, and sent to the Whitworth
Works to be cut. It seemed as though we should never get them.
Finally, after repeated urging, the patterns came. I was sent for to
come into the shop and see them. They were in the hands of the
best fitter we had, who, by the way, was a Swedenborgian preacher
and preached every Sunday. The foreman told me he had given
them to this man to see if it was possible to do anything with them,
and he thought I ought to see them before he set about it. I could
hardly believe my eyes. There was no truth about them. The spaces
and the teeth differed so much that the same tooth would be too
small for some spaces and could not be wedged into others; some
would be too thick or too thin at one end. They were all alike bad,
and presented all kinds of badness. It was finally concluded to make
the best of them, and this careful man worked on them more than
two days to make them passable.
The first governor order that was booked was the only case that
ever beat me. I went to see the engine. It was a condensing beam-
engine of good size, made by Ormerod, Grierson & Co. to maintain
the vacuum in a tube connecting two telegraph offices in
Manchester, and had been built to the plans and specifications of the
telegraph company’s engineer. The engine had literally nothing to
do. A little steam air-pump that two men could have lifted and set on
a bench would have been just suitable for the work. They could not
carry low enough pressure nor run slowly enough. On inspection I
reported that we should have nothing to do with it.
The custom of making whatever customers order and taking no
responsibility was first illustrated to me in this curious way. I saw a
queer-looking boiler being finished in the boiler-shop. In reply to my
question the foreman told me they were making it for a cotton-
spinner, according to a plan of his own. It consisted of two boilers,
one within the other. The owner’s purpose was to carry the ordinary
steam pressure in the outer boiler, and a pressure twice as great in
the inner one, when the inner boiler would have to suffer the stress
of only one half the pressure it was carrying.
I asked the superintendent afterwards why they did not tell that
man that he could not maintain steam at two different temperatures
on the opposite sides of the same sheets. He replied: “Because we
do not find it profitable to quarrel with our customers. That is his
idea. If we had told him there was nothing in it, he would not have
believed us, but would have got his boiler made somewhere else.”
Perhaps the most curious experience I ever had was that of
getting the governor into cotton-mills. There was a vast field all
around us, and we looked for plenty of orders. This was the
reception I met with every time. After listening to the winning story I
had to tell, the cotton lord would wind up with this question: “Well, sir,
have you got a governor in a large cotton-mill?” After my answer in
the negative I was bowed out. I early got an order from Titus Salt &
Son, of Saltaire, for two large governors but these did not weigh at
all with a cotton-spinner; they made alpaca goods.
 The way the governor was finally got into cotton-mills, where
afterwards its use became general, was the most curious part. A mill
in the city of Manchester was troubled by having its governor fly in
pieces once in a while. After one of these experiences the owners
thought that they might cure the difficulty by getting one of my
governors. That flew in pieces in a week. I went to see the engine.
The cause of all the trouble appeared at a glance. The fly-wheel was
on the second-motion shaft which ran at twice the speed of the main
shaft, and the gearing between them was roaring away enough to
deafen one. The governor was driven by gearing. The vibrations
transmitted to the governor soon tired the arms out. I saw the son of
the principal owner, and explained the cause of the failure of every
governor they had tried, and told him the only remedy, which would
be a complete one, would be to drive the governor by a belt. That, he
replied, was not to be thought of for an instant. I told him he knew
himself that a governor could not endure if driven in any other way,
and that I had hundreds of governors driven by belts, which were
entirely reliable in all cases. “But,” said he, “supposing the belt runs
off the pulley.” “The consequence,” I replied, “cannot be worse than
when the governor flies in pieces.” After wasting considerable time in
talk, he said, “Well, leave it till my father comes home; he is absent
for a few days.” “No,” said I, “if I can’t convince a young man, I shall
not try to convince an old man.” Finally, with every possible
stipulation to make it impossible for the belt to come off, he yielded
his assent, and I had the governor on in short order, lacing the belt
myself, to make sure that it was butt-jointed and laced in the
American fashion.
More than three years afterwards, two days before I was to sail for
home, I met this man on High Street, in Manchester. It was during
the Whitsuntide holidays, and the street was almost deserted. He
came up to me, holding out both hands and grasping mine most
cordially. “Do you know,” said he, “that we have increased our
product 10 per cent., and don’t have half as many broken threads as
we had before, and it’s all that belt.”
 Condenser and Air-pump designed by Mr. Porter. (Cross-section)

The tendency towards the horizontal type of engine, in place of the

beam-engine, began to be quite marked in England about that time.
This was favorable to the use of the Allen engine. The only thing that
seemed wanting to its success was a directly connected jet
condenser. No one believed that an air-pump could be made to run
successfully at the speed of 150 double strokes per minute. Yet this
had to be done, or I could not look for any considerable adoption of
the high-speed engine. This subject occupied my mind continually.
When I returned from Oporto, I had thought out the plan of this
condenser, and at once set about the drawings for it. No alteration
was ever made from the first design of the condenser, which I
intended to show with the engine at the coming Paris Exposition in
1867, and which I finally did succeed in showing there, but under
very different and unexpected relations.
The philosophy of this condenser is sufficiently shown in the
accompanying vertical cross-section. A hollow ram, only equal in
weight to the water which it displaced, ran through a stuffing-box at
the front end of the chamber, and was connected with an extension
of the piston-rod of the engine. So the center line of the engine
extended through this single-acting ram, which had the full motion of
the piston. It ran through the middle of a body of water, the surface of
which fell as the ram was withdrawn, and rose as it returned. A quiet
movement of the water was assured by three means: First, the
motion of the ram was controlled by the crank of the engine, and so
began and ceased insensibly. Second, the motion of the ram, of two
feet, produced a rise or fall of the surface of the water of only about
one inch. Third, the end of the ram was pointed, a construction which
does not appear in this sectional view, permitting it to enter and
leave the water at every point gradually. Both the condenser and the
hot-well were located above the chamber in which the ram worked.
The problem was to obtain complete displacement by means of
solid water without any admixture of free air, the expansion of which
as the plunger was withdrawn would reduce the efficiency of the air-
pump. To effect this object the air must be prevented from mingling
with the water, and must be delivered into the hot-well first. This was
accomplished by two means: First, placing the condenser as well as
the hot-well above the air-pump chamber, as already stated, and
secondly, inclining the bottom of the condenser, so that the water
would pass through the inlet valves at the side farthest from, and the
air at the side nearest to, the hot-well. Thus the air remained above
the water, and as the latter rose it sent the air before it quite to the
delivery valves. Pains were taken to avoid any place where air could
be trapped, so it was certain that on every stroke the air would be
sent through the delivery valves first, mingled air and water, if there
were any, next, and the solid water last, insuring perfect
displacement.
I have a friend who has often asked me, with a manner showing
his conviction that the question could not be answered, “How can
you know that anything will work until you have tried it?” In this case I
did know that this condenser would work at rapid speed before I tried
it. The event proved it, and any engineer could have seen that it
must have worked. The only question in my mind was as to the
necessity of the springs behind the delivery valves. Experiment was
needed to settle that question, which it did in short order. At the
speed at which the engine ran, the light springs improved the
vacuum a full pound, showing that without them these valves did not
close promptly.
The following important detail must not be overlooked. The rubber
disk valves were backed by cast-iron plates, which effectually
preserved them from being cut or even marked by the brass
gratings. These plates were made with tubes standing in the middle
of them, as shown. These tubes afforded long guides on the stems,
and a projection of them on the under side held the valves in place
without any wear. They also determined the rise of the valves. The
chambers, being long and narrow, accommodated three inlet and
three outlet valves. The jet of water struck the opposite wall with
sufficient force to fill the chamber with spray.
When the plans for this condenser were completed, and the Evan
Leigh engine had been vindicated, I felt that the success of the high-
speed system was assured, and looked forward to a rapidly growing
demand for the engines. We got out an illustrated catalogue of sizes,
in which I would have put the condenser, but the firm decided that it
would be better to wait for that until it should be on the same footing
with the engine, as an accomplished fact.
Suddenly, like thunder from a clear sky, I received notice that
Ormerod, Grierson & Co. were in difficulties, had stopped payment,
placed their books in the hands of a firm of accountants, and called a
meeting of their creditors, and the works were closed. Some of their
enormous contracts had proved losing ones. I had made such
provision in my contract with them that on their failure my license to
them became void. Otherwise it would have been classed among
their assets.
 CHAPTER XII

Introduction to the Whitworth Works. Sketch of Mr. Whitworth. Experience in the

Whitworth Works. Our Agreement which was never Executed. First Engine in
England Transmitting Power by a Belt.

was still debating with myself what course to take,

when I received a note from Mr. W. J. Hoyle, secretary
of the Whitworth Company, inquiring if I were free from
any entanglement with the affairs of Ormerod,
Grierson & Co., to which I was able to make a
satisfactory reply. Mr. Hoyle was then a stranger to
me. It appeared that he was an accomplished steam engineer, and
had been employed as an expert to test one of my engines in
operation, an engine which we had made for a mill-owner in
Bradford. He had been very favorably impressed by the engine, so
much so as to form this scheme. He had been with the Whitworth
Company only a short time, and was struck with the small amount of
work they were doing in their tool department; and after his
observation of the engine at Bradford, learning of the stoppage of
Ormerod, Grierson & Co., it occurred to him that it would be a good
thing for his company to undertake the manufacture of these
engines. After receiving my answer to his preliminary inquiry, having
Mr. Whitworth, as he afterwards told me, where he could not get
away, on a trip from London to Manchester, he laid the plan before
him and talked him into it. I directly after received an invitation to
meet Mr. Whitworth at his office, and here commenced what I verily
believed was one of the most remarkable experiences that any man
ever had.
 William J. Hoyle

In the course of our pretty long interview, which terminated with

the conclusion of a verbal agreement, Mr. Whitworth talked with me
quite freely, and told me several things that surprised me. One was
the frank statement that he divided all other toolmakers in the world
into two classes, one class who copied him without giving him any
credit, and the other class who had the presumption to imagine that
they could improve on him. His feelings towards both these classes
evidently did not tend to make him happy. Another thing, which I
heard without any sign of my amazement, was that he had long
entertained the purpose of giving to the world the perfect steam-
engine. “That is,” he explained, “an engine embodying all those
essential principles to which steam-engine builders must sooner or
later come.” This, he stated, had been necessarily postponed while
he was engaged in developing his system of artillery, but he was
nearing the completion of that work and should then be able to
devote himself to it.
I cannot perhaps do better than stop here and give my
impressions of Mr. Whitworth. He was in all respects a phenomenal
man. As an engineer, or rather a toolmaker, he addressed himself to
all fundamental constructive requirements and problems, and
comprehended everything in his range and grasp of thought,
continually seeking new fields to conquer. Long after the period here
referred to he closed his long and wonderful career by giving to the
world the hollow engine shaft and the system of hydraulic forging. At
that time he was confidently anticipating the adoption by all nations
of his system of artillery. He had made an immense advance, from
spherical shot, incapable of accurate aim and having a high
trajectory, to elongated shot, swiftly rotating in its flight and having a
comparatively flat trajectory, and which could hit the mark and
penetrate with destructive effect at distances of several miles. These
fundamental features of modern artillery thus originated with Mr.
Whitworth. All his other features have been superseded, but his
elongated pointed rotating projectile will remain until nations shall
learn war no more; a time which in the gradual development of
humanity cannot be far away. Before I left England, however, he had
abandoned his artillery plans in most bitter disappointment. He had
met the English official mind. By the authorities of the war and navy
departments it had been unanimously decided that what England
wanted was, not accuracy of aim and penetration at long range, but
smashing effects at close quarters. The record of that is to be found
in the proceedings of the House of Commons in 1868, only thirty-
nine years ago. Think of that!
Mr. Whitworth was not only the most original engineering genius
that ever lived. He was also a monumental egotist. His fundamental
idea was always prominent, that he had taught the world not only all
that it knew mechanically, but all it ever could know. His fury against
tool-builders who improved on his plans was most ludicrous. He
drew no distinction between principles and details. He must not be
departed from even in a single line. No one in his works dared to
think. This disposition had a striking illustration only a short time—
less than a year—before I went there. He had no children. His
nearest relatives were two nephews, W. W. and J. E. Hulse. The
latter was a tool-manufacturer in Salford. W. W. Hulse was Mr.
Whitworth’s superintendent, and had been associated with him for
twenty-four years, for a long time as his partner, the firm being
Joseph Whitworth & Company. Lately the business had been taken
over by a corporation formed under the style of the Whitworth
Company, and Mr. Hulse became the general superintendent.
Mr. Whitworth was taken sick, and for a while was not expected to
live, and no one thought, even if he did get better, that he would ever
be able to visit his works again. Mr. Hulse had been chafing under
his restraint, and during Mr. Whitworth’s absence proceeded to make
a few obvious improvements in their tools, such, for example, as
supporting the table of their shaper, so that it would not yield under
the cut. To the surprise of every one, Mr. Whitworth got well, and
after more than six months’ absence, he appeared again at the
works. Walking through, he noted the changes that had been made,
sent for Mr. Hulse, discharged him on the spot, and ordered
everything restored to its original form.
To return now to my own experience. Since Mr. Whitworth had
been absorbed in his artillery development he had given only a
cursory oversight to the tool manufacture. Mr. Hulse had been
succeeded as superintendent by a man named Widdowson, whose
only qualification for his position was entire subserviency to Mr.
Whitworth.
 Sir Joseph Whitworth

My drawings and patterns were purchased by the Whitworth

Company, and I was installed with one draftsman in a separate
office, and prepared to put the work in hand at once for a 12×24-inch
engine for the Paris Exposition, where Ormerod, Grierson & Co. had
secured the space, and the drawings for which I had completed. If I
remember rightly, the patterns were finished also. While I was getting
things in order, Mr. Widdowson came into my office, and in a very
important manner said to me: “You must understand, sir, that we
work here to the decimal system and all drawings must be
conformed to it.” I received this order meekly, and we went to work to
make our drawings all over, for the single purpose of changing their
dimensions from binary to decimal divisions of the inch. There was of
course quite a body of detail drawings, and to make these over, with
the pains required to make these changes to an unaccustomed
system, and make and mount the tracings, took us nearly three
weeks. When finished I took the roll of tracings to Mr. Widdowson’s
office. He was not in, and I left them for him. An hour or so later he
came puffing and blowing into my office with the drawings. He was a
heavy man, and climbing upstairs exhausted him. When he got his
breath, he broke out: “We can’t do anything with these. Haven’t got a
decimal gauge in the shop.” “You gave me express orders to make
my drawings to the decimal system.” “Damn it, I meant in halves and
quarters and all that, and write them decimals.” So all that work and
time were thrown away, and we had to make a new set of tracings
from the drawings I had brought, in order to figure the dimensions in
decimals. He told me afterwards that when Mr. Whitworth
commenced the manufacture of cylindrical gauges he made them to
the decimal divisions of the inch, imagining that was a better mode of
division than that by continual bisection, and supposing that he had
influence enough to effect the change. But nobody would buy his
gauges. He had to call them in and make what people wanted. “And
now,” said Mr. Widdowson, “there is not a decimal gauge in the
world.” He knew, too, for up to that time they made them all. So Mr.
Whitworth could make a mistake, and I found that this was not the
worst one that he had made.
 While time was being wasted in this manner, the subject of
manufacturing the governors came up. Mr. Whitworth concluded that
he would first try one on his own shop engine, so one was bought
from Ormerod, Grierson & Co. I had a message from Mr. Widdowson
to come to the shop and see my governor. It was acting in a manner
that I had seen before, the counterpoise rising and dropping to its
seat twice every time the belt lap came around. “Total failure, you
see,” said Mr. Widdowson, “and I got a new belt for it, too.” I saw a
chance to make an interesting observation, and asked him if he
would get an old belt and try that. This he did, lapping the ends as
before about 18 inches, according to the universal English custom,
which I had long before found it necessary carefully to avoid. As I
knew would be the case, the action was not improved at all. I then
cut off the lap, butted the ends of the belt, and laced them in the
American style, and lo! the trouble vanished. The governor stood
motionless, only floating up and down slightly with the more
important changes of load. Mr. Whitworth was greatly pleased, and
at once set about their manufacture, in a full line of sizes.
He made the change, to which I have referred already, from the
urn shape to the semi-spherical form of the counterpoise. In this
connection he laid the law down to me in this dogmatic fashion: “Let
no man show me a mechanical form for which he cannot give me a
mechanical reason.” But Jove sometimes nods. They were to exhibit
in Paris a large slotting-machine. The form of the upright did not suit
Mr. Whitworth exactly. He had the pattern set up in the erecting-
shop, and a board tacked on the side, cut to an outline that he
directed. He came to look at it every day for a week, and ordered
some change or other. Finally it was gotten to his mind, the pattern
was altered accordingly, and a new casting made. This was set up in
the shop, and I happened to be present when he came to see it.
“Looks like a horse that has been taught to hold his head up,” said
he. “Mechanical reason,” thought I, fresh from my lesson. When
finished the slotting-machine was tried in the shop, and found to
yield in the back. The tool sprang away from its work and rounded
the corner. Mr. Whitworth had whittled the pattern away and ruined it.
Instead of being sent to Paris, it was broken up.
 My experiment with the governor proved the defect in the English
system of lacing belts. Every machine in the land, of whatever kind,
tool or loom or spinning or drawing frame, or whatever it was, driven
by a belt, halted in its motion every time the lap in the belt passed
over a pulley, sufficiently to drop my governor, when the same
motion was given to it, and no one had ever observed this
irregularity.
I thought they would never be ready to set about work on the
engine. First, Mr. Widdowson ordered that every casting and forging,
large and small, must be in the shop before one of them was put in
hand. After this was done I found a number of men at work making
sheet-iron templets of everything. I saw one man filing the threads in
the edges of a templet for a ³⁄₈-inch bolt. When these were all
finished and stamped, an operation that took quite a week, a great
fuss was made about commencing work on everything
simultaneously.
I went into the shop to see what was going on. The first thing to
attract my attention was the steam-chest, then made separate from
the cylinder. A workman—their best fitter, as I afterwards learned—
was engaged in planing out the cavities in which the exhaust valves
worked. I saw no center line, and asked him where it was. He had
never heard of such a thing. “What do you measure from?” “From
the side of the casting.” I called his attention to the center line on the
drawing, from which all the measurements were taken, and told him
all about it. He seemed very intelligent, and under my direction set
the chest up on a plane table and made a center line around it and
another across it, and set out everything from these lines, and I left
him going on finely. An hour later I looked in again. He was about his
job in the old way. To my question he explained that his foreman had
come around and told him I had no business in the shop, that he
gave him his directions, and he must finish his job just as he began
it.
I made no reply but went to Mr. Hoyle’s office, and asked him if he
knew what they were doing in the shop. He smiled and said, “I
suppose they are finally making an engine for you.” “No, they are
not.” “What are they doing?” “Making scrap iron.” “What do you
mean?” I told him the situation. He took his hat and went out, saying,
“I must see this myself.”
A couple of hours later he sent for me, and told me this. “I have
been all around the works and seen all that is doing. It is all of the
same piece. I have had a long interview with Mr. Widdowson, and
am sorry to tell you that we can’t make your engine; we don’t know
how. It seems to be entirely out of our line. The intelligence does not
exist in these works to make a steam-engine. Nobody knows how to
set about anything. I have stopped the work, and want to know what
you think had better be done about it?” I asked him to let me think
the matter over till the next morning. I then went to him and
suggested to him to let me find a skilled locomotive-erecter who was
also a trained draftsman, and to organize a separate department for
the engine and governor manufacture, and put this man at the head
of it, to direct it without interference. This was gladly agreed to. I
found a young man, Mr. John Watts, who proved to be the very man
for the place. In a week we were running under Mr. Watts’ direction,
and the engine was saved. But what a time the poor man had!
Everything seemed to be done wrong. It is hardly to be believed. He
could not get a rod turned round, or a hole bored round.
In their toolmaking they relied entirely on grinding with “Turkey
dust.” I once saw a gang of a dozen laborers working a long
grinding-bar, in the bore, 10 inches diameter by 8 feet long, in the
tailstock of an enormous lathe. I peered through this hole when the
bar was withdrawn. It looked like a ploughed field. Scattered over it
here and there were projections which had been ground off by these
laborers. On the other hand, the planing done in these works was
magnificent. I never saw anything to equal it. But circular work beat
them entirely. I found that the lathe hands never thought of such a
thing as getting any truth by the sliding cut. After that they went for
the surface with coarse files, and relied for such approximate truth as
they did get upon grinding with the everlasting Turkey dust.
Mr. Whitworth invented the duplex lathe tool, but I observed that
they never used it. I asked Mr. Widdowson why this was. “Because,”
said he, “the duplex tool will not turn round.” After a while I found out
why. When our engine was finished, Mr. Widdowson set it upon two
lathe beds and ran it. Lucky that he did. The bottom of the engine
bed was planed, and it could be leveled nicely on the flat surfaces of
their lathe beds. The fly-wheel ran nearly a quarter of an inch out of
truth. He set up some tool-boxes on one of the lathe beds, and
turned the rim off in place, both sides and face being out. That, of
course, made it run perfectly true. I asked the lathe hand how he
could turn out such a job. He replied, “Come and see my lathe.” I
found the spindle quite an eighth of an inch loose in the main
bearing, the wear of twenty or thirty years. He told me all of the
lathes in the works were in a similar condition. That explained many
things. The mystery of those gear patterns was solved. Every spindle
in the gear-cutting machine was wabbling loose in its holes. I can’t
call them bearings. Now it appeared why they could not use the
duplex tools. With a tool cutting on one side, they relied on the
pressure of the cut to keep the lathe spindle in contact with the
opposite side of its main bearing, and a poor reliance that was, but
with a tool cutting on each side, fancy the situation. Then boring a
true hole was obviously impossible. The workmen became
indifferent; they had no reamers, relied entirely on grinding. I asked,
Why do you not renew these worn-out bushings? but could never get
an answer to the question. Some power evidently forbade it, and the
fact is that no man about the place dared to think of such a thing as
intimating to Mr. Whitworth that one of his lathe bearings required
any fixing up, or that it was or could be anything short of perfect. He
(Mr. Whitworth) had designed it as a perfect thing; ergo, it was
perfect, and no man dared say otherwise.
Our engine work was finally, as a last resort, done by Mr. Watts on
new lathes, made for customers and used for a month or two before
they were sent out. Not only in England, but on the Continent and in
America, the Whitworth Works were regarded as the perfect
machine-shop. I remember a visit I had at the Paris Exposition from
Mr. Elwell, of the firm of Varrell, Elwell & Poulot, proprietors of the
largest mechanical establishment in Paris. After expressing his
unbounded admiration of the running of the engine, he said, “I
warrant your fly-wheel runs true.” After observing it critically, he
exclaimed, “Ah, they do those things at Whitworth’s!”
The fact was Mr. Whitworth had cursed the British nation with the
solid conical lathe-spindle bearing, a perfect bearing for ordinary-
sized lathes and a most captivating thing—when new. These
hardened steel cones, in hardened steel seats, ran in the most
charming manner. But they wore more loose in the main bearing
every day they ran, and there were no means for taking up the wear.
It came on insensibly, and no one paid any attention to it. The cream
of the joke was that people were so fascinated with this bearing that
at that time no other could be sold in England, except for very large
lathes. All toolmakers had to make it. I remember afterwards that Mr.
Freeland, our best American toolmaker, who, as I have already
mentioned, went to England and worked for some years as a
journeyman in the Whitworth Works for the purpose of learning
everything there that he could, did not bring back to America the
conical bearing.
The firm of Smith & Coventry were the first to fit their lathes with
the means for taking up this wear, which took place only in the main
bearing, where both the force of the cut and the weight of the piece
were received. They made the conical seat for the back end of the
spindle adjustable in the headstock and secured it by a thin nut on
each end. This then could be moved backward sufficiently to let the
forward cone up to its seat. This made it possible to use the solid
bearing, but it involved this error, that after this adjustment the axis of
the spindle did not coincide with the line connecting the lathe
centers; but the two lines formed an angle with each other, which
grew more decided every time the wear was taken up. This,
however, was infinitely better than not to take up the wear at all.
At that time the Whitworth Works were divided into four
departments. These were screwing machinery, gauges, guns and
machine tools. The first three of these were locked. I never entered
either of them. The latter also, like most works in England, was
closed to outsiders. No customer could see his work in progress.
This department was without a head or a drawing-office. It seemed
to be running it on its traditions. I once said to Mr. Hoyle, “There
must at some time have been here mechanical intelligence of the
highest order, but where is it?” They had occasionally an order for
something out of their ancient styles, and their attempts to fill such
orders were always ruinous. The following is a fair illustration. They
had an order for a radial drill to be back-geared and strong enough
to bore an 8-inch hole. Mr. Widdowson had the pattern for the upright
fitted with the necessary brackets, and thought it was such a good
thing that he would make two. The first one finished was tried in the
shop, and all the gears in the arm were stripped. He woke up to the
fact that he had forgotten to strengthen the transmitting parts, and
moreover that the construction would not admit anything stronger.
There was nothing to be done but to decline the order, chip off the
brackets, and make these into single-speed drills. This I saw being
done.
Mr. Widdowson told me the following amusing story. The London
Times had heard of the wonderful performance of Mr. Hoe’s multiple-
cylinder press, and concluded to have one of them of the largest
size, ten cylinders. But, of course, Mr. Hoe did not know how to
make his own presses. His work would do well enough for ignorant
Americans, but not for an English Journal. The press must be made
in England in the world-renowned Whitworth Works.
Mr. Hoe sent over one of his experts to give them the information
they might need, but they would not let him in the shop. Mr. Hulse
told him they had the drawings and specifications and that was all
they needed. When the press was finished they set it up in the shop
and attempted to run it. The instant it started every tape ran off its
pulleys, and an investigation showed that not a spindle or shaft was
parallel with any other. They had no idea of the method that must be
employed to ensure this universal alignment. After enormous labor
they got these so that they were encouraged to make another trial,
when after a few revolutions every spindle stuck fast in its bearings.
Mr. Whitworth, absorbed in his artillery and spending most of his
time in London, of course had no knowledge of how things were
going on in his shop, of the utter want of ordinary intelligence.
I formed a scheme for an application of Mr. Whitworth’s system of
end measurement to the production of an ideally perfect dividing-
wheel. In this system Mr. Whitworth employed what he termed “the
gravity piece.” This was a small steel plate about ¹⁄₈ of an inch in
thickness, the opposite sides of which were parallel and had the
most perfectly true and smooth surfaces that could be produced by
scraping. The ends of the piece to be tested were perfectly squared,
by a method which I will not stop here to describe, and were finished
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

textbookfull.com