Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 325
Performance factors include, for example. Slobin’s (1973, p. 412) Principle A: ‘Pay
attention to the ends of words’, which might explain why it appears to be easier to
acquire suffixes than prefixes. Ingram (1989, pp. 68–9) also proposes a principle
instructing children to pay attention to stressed words and syllables, and suggests that
factors of memory and planning might explain why children who appear to understand
full sentences only produce, for instance, two-word utterances.
If the study of child language acquisition is to provide evidence for or against theories
of adult grammar as well as insights into the child’s progression towards it, the
relationship between the child’s grammar and that of the adult needs careful examination
(Ingram, 1989, p. 70): ‘Specifically, we want to develop a theory which defines the extent
to which the child may change or restructure its language system.’ Ingram (ibid., p. 73)
proposes that the child’s progression is subject to the constructivist assumption that ‘the
form of the child’s grammar at any point of change which we shall call stage n will
consist of everything at stage n plus the new feature(s) of stage n+1’. A principle will
then be proposed to account for the change.
STAGES OF ACQUISITION
The establishment of stages of acquisition is probably the best-known outcome of
research on children’s language. Stages are normally outlined in introductory books in
general linguistics, but they also appear, if only in very broad and relatively unspecific
outline, in non-specialist literature such as booklets designed to inform new parents, most
of whom will soon witness considerable interest being shown in their children’s
developing language by doctors, health visitors, and others concerned to establish
whether a child is developing normally. These stages are, however, normally purely
descriptive: parents and doctors etc. are not usually concerned with linguistic theory.
However, the establishment of normal stages of development is important for speech
therapists, who will be able to compare speech-impaired children with normal children,
and to provide therapy aimed, ideally, to enable the speech-impaired child to reach parity
with its peers (see SPEECH THERAPY).
Ingram (1989, ch. 3) discusses a number of possible meanings of the term ‘stage’, and
describes the sets of stages proposed by Stern (1924), Nice (1925), and Brown (1973). He
points out that (1989, p. 54) ‘these general stages do little more than isolate co-occurring
linguistic behaviors with a focus on the newest or most prominent’. Whilst such
descriptive stages are important for parents and others interested in establishing that
normal development is taking place, they are of limited theoretical importance for
linguists, and Ingram (ibid.) proposes to limit the use of the term stage ‘to those cases
where we are referring to behaviors that are being explained in some way’, namely by
such principles as those referred to above. Obviously, the establishment of descriptive
stages is only a first step towards reaching the explanatory stages.
While most parts of an infant’s body need to grow and develop during its childhood,
the inner ear is fully formed and fully grown at birth, and it is thought that infants in the
womb are able to hear. Certainly, they are able within a few weeks of birth to
discriminate human voices from other sounds, and by about two months they can
distinguish angry from friendly voice qualities. Experiments have been devised using the