nicole kotras masters thesis

Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, started a new era,
namely, the "voluntarist" (Oskaar, 1983). This was the name given to the second
trend. Wundt and his followers considered language acquisition mostly as a product
of imitation, and the first attempts at language as manifestations of emotion. Wundt,
who closely observed the sound development of his own children, considered child
language as a product of the child's environment in which the child participates
almost entirely passively. According to Wundt (1911), a child is said to imitate most
easily those sounds which he perceives most clearly.
The lively discussion which took place at the turn of the century between the
"intellectualists" and the "voluntarist", showed that the well-known opposing opinions
on the origin of language from Greek philosophy - the nature-nurture debate - had
also been carried over to child language research (Oskaar, 1983).
In 1907, a climax of child language research was reached by work completed
by two psychologists, Stern and Stern. Their impetus lay in the syntheses of the two
theoretical trends mentioned above. They considered the realisation of child
language to be the result of a convergence it was stated that,
only in the continuous cooperation of the inner, compelling aptitudes for
speaking and the external factors of environmental language which offer
these aptitudes, contact points and the material for their realization, can the
child's language acquisition take place (Stern & Stern, 1928, p.129).
Their research was based upon detailed observation of two of their children
until after the first four years, and it was supplemented from data from a third child
and from relevant German and international literature. Stern and Stern (1928)
divided the general trend of child language development into a preliminary stage and
four further stages. They state that the main tasks in the acquisition of spoken
language can be regarded as fulfilled by the fourth or fifth year of life. The stages
proposed by Stern and Stern (1928) are as follows:
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