A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

20 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
In summary, research has found that learning to speak in the human species
is a regular process marked by uniform milestones or stages, which are
intertwined with the course of cognitive growth and motor development. The
main stages are given below:
12 weeks Cooing stage marked by vocalizations and pitch
modulations
20 weeks Consonantal sounds emerge
6 months Cooing changes into babbling; holophrases
emerge
12 months Holophrases are typically replicated (mu-mu, duda,
etc.); a pivot grammar surfaces as children
start using words to refer to thmgs in general
ways
24 months The pivot grammar expands; function words
appear; a narrowing of meaning emerges
36 months The child possesses a vocabulary of around
1,000 words and starts to create adult-like
sentences
What is missing from such an account is the creative nature of childhood
language. My grandson was barely 15 months of age when I observed him
starting to use language creatively on a regular basis. For example, one day he
pointed to our household cat (which had orange hair) with the word “juice”-
a word he had been using to refer to the orange juice he drank at breakfast.
What he had done, in effect, was to transfer the meaning he had associated
with the word juice to the designation of another referent (“cat” or “cat’s
color”). Since no one had ever made such a reference, it was something that
he came up with himself. He had bridged a knowledge gap creatively. Examples
such as this abound, revealing the presence of a “creative impulse” in children
in the ways they use language.
In 1967, the linguist Eric Lenneberg claimed that the acquisition of language
came to an end at the end of childhood. He called childhood, therefore, the
critical period for language acquisition. Lenneberg came to this conclusion
after reviewing an extensive corpus of aphasiology data-data on individuals