Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

The linguistics encyclopedia 324
chart performance. Rather, the aim will be to arrive at statements concerning the state of
the child’s underlying linguistic competence at each stage of its development.
Wasow (1983) draws a distinction between research which aims primarily to chart
performance, and research aimed primarily at using data in support of hypotheses
concerning the nature of language, that is, research based on a prior linguistic theory. He
calls the former research in child language, and the latter research in language
acquisition. Linguists working in the Chomskian tradition have tended to be interested
primarily in language acquisition, while psychologists have tended to be interested
primarily in child language.
Ingram (1989, ch. 4), however, proposes a unified field of child language acquisition
which studies children’s language and examines it against the background of welldefined
theories of grammar, using methods which can establish when a child’s linguistic
behaviour is rule-based. Such a discipline will be able to provide a theory of acquisition
as well as a testing ground for theories of grammar (ibid, p. 64):
The theory of acquisition will have two distinct components. One will be
the set of principles that lead to the construction of the grammar, i.e.,
those that concern the child’s grammar or linguistic competence. These
principles will deal with how the child constructs a rule of grammar and
changes it over time. The focus is on the nature of the child’s rule system;
it is concerned with competence factors. The second component looks at
the psychological processes the child uses in learning the language. These
are what we shall call performance factors…. In comprehension,
performance factors deal with how the child establishes meaning in the
language input, as well as the cognitive restrictions that temporarily retard
development. In production, these factors describe the reasons why the
child’s spoken language may not reflect its linguistic competence. They
also describe mechanisms the child may use to achieve the expression of
their comprehension.
As examples of competence factors, Ingram mentions three principles—generalization,
lexical and uniqueness—which will enter into the explanation of morphological
acquisition. According to Dresher’s (1981) generalization principle, learners will prefer
a rule which requires few features to one which requires many. They will therefore prefer
a rule which allows them to form the plural foots to one which compels them to form the
plural feet, since the latter rule must contain, in addition to the instruction for forming the
plural, the instruction that some plural forms are irregular. This principle explains why
children often use regular inflections on irregular words, even though doing so conflicts
with what they hear adults doing.
To explain why they often do this after a period during which they have used irregular
plurals correctly, Ingram (1985) proposes a lexical principle, according to which
singular and plural forms are first learnt as separate words, while the realization that there
is a plural morpheme, -s in English is only arrived at later.
Finally, we need to posit a uniqueness principle (Wexler and Culicover, 1980) to
account for the fact that the child finally selects only the plural form that it hears used
around it, feet, rather than supposing that there are two possible plurals, foots and feet.