3

Language acquisition: robustness

Language acquisition, it is sometimes claimed, is highly sensitive to maturational factors and

surprisingly insensitive to environmental factors (Fodor 1983: 100; see also Crain and LilloMartin 1999; Gleitman 1981; Stromswold 2000). To be sure, language develops in all normal
children exposed to language, even in highly adverse circumstances: in neglected and abused
children, in cognitively impaired children, and in children who have limited access to
information from the external world due to sensory deprivation, i.e. deafness or blindness.
Furthermore, many researchers have been impressed by the fact that children often go through
similar developmental stages. In Stromswolds words:

Within a given language, the course of language acquisition is remarkably uniform . . . Most
children say their rst referential words at 9 to 15 months ... and for the next 68 months,
children typically acquire single words fairly slowly until they have acquired approximately 50
words... Once children have acquired 50 words, their vocabularies often increase rapidly . . . At
around 18 to 24 months, children learning morphologically impoverished languages such as
English begin combining words to form two-word utterances ... Children acquiring such
morphologically impoverished languages gradually begin to use sentences longer than two
words; but for several months their speech often lacks phonetically unstressed functional
category morphemes such as determiners, auxiliary verbs, and verbal and nominal inectional
endings . . . Gradually, omissions become rarer until children are between three and four years
old, at which point the vast majority of English-speaking childrens utterances are completely
grammatical. (Stromswold 2000: 910)

Stromswold also notes some more specic commonalities. For example, English-speaking
children acquire the grammatical morphemes of their language in roughly the same order: rst
the progressing, closely followed by the locative prepositions on and in, then the plural -s,
irregular past-tense forms such as ate, slept and drunk, the possessive -s, the uncontractible
copula

30

Language, mind and brain

(as in Yes, she is), the articles, and regular past-tense inections. Still later come the third-person
-s and uncontractible auxiliary forms, and, nally, the contractible copula and auxiliary (e.g.
Shes tired, Hes coming) (see Brown 1973; de Villiers and de Villiers 1973). Auxiliaries and
various complex constructions such as questions, Stromswold (1995) maintains, are also
acquired in the same order by nearly all children.
The universality and alleged uniformity of language acquisition are some- times taken as
evidence for an innate universal grammar which develops according to a biologically determined
timetable and does not depend on other cognitive subsystems. As we shall see in this chapter,
there are some serious problems with this argument.

1.

Individual dierences

First, we might observe that the remarkable uniformities that Stromswold speaks of are not all
that remarkable. We dont need to postulate a universal grammar to explain why children
produce single-word utterances before two- word combinations, why the latter precede longer
utterances, or why early word combinations are generally telegraphic. What is more, even this
rather uninteresting progression is only a tendency: some childrens earliest utterances are short
phrases and sentences such as Look-a-that! or Whassat? which are only later analyzed into their
component morphemes.
Second, many of the observed similarities can be easily explained by appealing to factors such as
conceptual complexity, salience and frequency. For example, the concepts of plurality and
possession are more accessible to young children than the purely grammatical concept of
agreement; hence, the plural and possessive suxes are learned earlier than the third-person -s;
past- tense forms of irregular verbs are generally acquired earlier than past-tense forms of regular
verbs because irregular verbs tend to be much more frequent (nine of the ten most frequent
English verbs are irregular); uncontractible copula and auxiliary forms are acquired earlier than
contractible forms of the same items because they are phonetically more salient; the progressive
infection and the prepositions in and on are acquired early because they designate relatively
simple concepts and are syllabic (and hence acoustically salient); and so on.
Third, although there are many similarities between children acquiring the same language, there
are also vast individual dierences. Such dierences are perhaps most obvious, and easiest to
quantify, in lexical development. The comprehension vocabularies of normally developing
children of the same age can dier tenfold or more (Bates, Dale and Thal 1995; Benedict 1979;
Goldeld and Reznick 1990), and there are also enormous dierences with regard to what

proportion of their expressive vocabularies children are able to use in production: some
childrens expressive vocabularies are nearly as large

Language acquisition: robustness

31

as their receptive vocabularies (i.e. they are able to produce almost all the words they
understand), while others may be able to understand more than 200 words, but still not produce
any (Bates, Dale and Thal 1995). Children also dier with regard to the kinds of words they
learn in the initial stages of lexical development. So-called referential children initially focus
primarily on object labels (that is to say, concrete nouns), while expressive children have more
varied vocabularies with more verbs and adjectives and a signicant proportion of social routines
and formulas such as stop it, I want it, dont do it (Nelson 1973, 1981). Finally, there are
dierences in the pattern of growth. While many children do go through the vocabulary spurt
that Stromswold alludes to at some point between 14 and 22 months, a signicant minority
about a quarter
show a more gradual growth pattern with no spurt (Goldeld and Reznick 1990).
Grammatical development is also anything but uniform. Children may begin to combine words
as early as 14 months or as late as 25 months, and show correspondingly large dierences in
MLU (mean length of utterance) and other global measures of grammatical development a year
later (Bates, Dale and Thal 1995). At 42 months, the dierences between the most and least
advanced normal children are equivalent to 306 months (Wells 1985). Some children learn to
inect words before they combine them into larger structures, while others begin to combine
words before they are able to use morphological rules productively (Smoczynska 1985: 618;
Thal et al. 1996). Some children are extremely cautious learners, while others are happy to
generalise on the basis of fairly sparse evidence, which results in large dierences in error rates
(Maratsos 2000). Marked individual dierences have also been found in almost every area of
grammatical development where researchers have looked for them, including word order,
negation, case marking, the order of emergence of grammatical morphemes and, yes, in the
development of English auxiliaries (Jones 1996; Richards 1990; Wells 1979), questions (de
Villiers and de Villiers 1985; Gullo 1981; Kuczaj and Maratsos 1983) and multi-clause sentences
(Huttenlocher et al. 2002; see also Lieven 1997 for a review).

Children also dier in acquisition styles, or the strategies they use to learn to speak (Nelson
1981; Peters 1977; Peters and Menn 1993). Analytic or referential children begin with single
words, which they articulate reasonably clearly and consistently. Holistic or expressive
children, on the other hand, begin with larger units which have characteristic stress and
intonation pat- terns, but which are often mush-mouthed and may consist partly or even entirely
of ller syllables such as [dadada]. Peters (1977) argues that holistic children attempt to
approximate the overall shape of the target utterance while analytic children isolate and
produce single words. These dierent starting points have a profound inuence on the course of
language development, since they determine how the child breaks into grammar. Analytic
children must learn how to put words together to form more complex units. They typically do
this by rst learning how to combine content words, whereby they

32

Language, mind and brain

produce telegraphic utterances such as Put ball sofa. Later on in development they discover that
dierent classes of content words require specic function words and inections (nouns take
determiners, verbs take auxiliaries and tense inections etc.), and learn to supply these. Holistic
children, in contrast, must segment their rote-learned phrases and determine what role each unit
plays in the larger whole. Unlike analytic children, they sometimes produce grammatical
morphemes very early in acquisition, usually embedded in larger unanalyzed or only partially
analyzed units. In other creative utterances, they may use nonsense ller syllables often a
schwa or a nasal consonant as place- holders for grammatical morphemes. As the childs
linguistic system develops, these llers gradually acquire more phonetic substance and an adultlike distribution, and eventually evolve into function words of the target language (Peters 2001;
Peters and Menn 1993; see also Chapter 9). Thus, while both groups of children may eventually
converge on similar grammars, they get there by following very dierent routes.1
There is evidence suggesting that the choice of language-learning strategy is at least partially
dependent on the childs environment (Hampson and Nelson 1993; Lieven 1994, 1997; Pine
1994). The analytic style is typical for rst-born children of middle-class parents, whose
linguistic experience consists mostly of one-on-one interactions with a parent. The expressive
style, on the other hand, is found more often in later-born children and children who grow up in
extended families, who engage more in polyadic interactions with various family members.

Occasionally, the same child may develop dierent strategies when acquiring dierent
languages. Elizabeth Batess daughter Julia, for example, adopted a fairly analytic style in
English, which she learned mostly in dyadic contexts, and a more expressive style in Italian,
learned primarily in the context of large family gatherings (Bates et al. 1988).
It should be stressed that the existence of individual dierences is not necessarily incompatible
with a nativist view of language development. Dierences in the rate of acquisition could be a
result of dierent rates of maturation of the language faculty; and many developmental
asynchronies could be attributed to individual modules maturing at dierent times. Nativist
theories can also accommodate dierences in acquisition style, as long as they allow for
individual dierences in the genetic endowment for language, although this is problematic to the
extent that acquisitions styles are linked to specic environ- mental inuences and/or nonlinguistic cognitive and aective factors. Two points, however, should be clear from the above
discussion. First, we cannot argue for innateness on the basis of the alleged uniformity of
language acquisition, because language acquisition is not uniform. Secondly, large individual
dierences suggest that there is considerable exibility in the way that the genetic program
unfolds that is to say, the genetic program appears to be relatively open.

Language acquisition: robustness

2.

33

The role of input

Language can develop in very inauspicious circumstances: in blind children, who have limited
access to contextual information that helps sighted children guess the meanings of the adult
utterances they hear; in cognitively impaired children, who may be unable to make use of much
of this information; and in neglected children, who have limited access to linguistic data from
which to construct their mental grammars. Since all normal children develop language except in
situations of extreme deprivation, the argument goes; language acquisition must be driven by
internal processes, and does not depend on input except as a trigger. In this section, we will
critically examine the above argument.
It is undeniable that there are vast dierences in how much input children get, and the quality of
that input. In a study of childmother interaction, Huttenlocher et al. (1991) found that the most
talkative mothers in their sample spoke up to 10 times as much per unit of time as the least

talkative mothers. Since parents also dier in the amount of time they spend with their children,
the actual dierences in the sheer quantity of language children hear are probably even greater
(see also Hart and Risley 1995, 1999). The usual nativist take on such ndings is that they show
that only a minimal amount of input is necessary to trigger language development, since all
normal children, including those of taciturn or neglectful parents do develop language.
Once again, however, the conclusion is premature. First, the amount of input does matter, since
children who hear less language develop language more slowly (Hart and Risley 1995, 1999;
Huttenlocher 1998). A recent study of the linguistic abilities of children from socio-economically
deprived back- grounds found that half had moderate-to-severe language delays (Locke and
Ginsborg submitted; Locke et al. 2002). Since the children scored at age- appropriate levels on a
test of cognitive development, their poor performance on linguistic tasks cannot be attributed to
unfamiliarity with the testing situation or a general cognitive delay. The authors argue that the
language delay found in these children is a direct consequence of the simple fact that their
parents do not speak to them as much as middle-class parents do. Not surprisingly, even more
severe language delays are found in neglected children, children of depressed and substanceabusing mothers, and institutionalized children but, signicantly, not in abused children (Culp
et al. 1991): the latter presumably do get a good deal of language input, even if it does not occur
in a loving environment.
Quality matters, too. Certain maternal speech styles are associated with faster language growth
(Hampson and Nelson 1993; Murray et al. 1990). The children of more directive mothers learn
language more slowly (Della Corte et al. 1983; Tomasello and Todd 1983), while children whose
utterances are frequently recast by their parents tend to make faster progress (Baker and Nelson
1984; Farrar 1990). There are robust correlations between childrens ability to produce and
understand multi-clausal sentences on the one hand and the

34

Language, mind and brain

frequency of such sentences in the speech of their parents and, and, more importantly, their
teachers on the other hand (Huttenlocher et al. 2002). The latter is theoretically more signicant,
since, unlike the former, it cannot be attributed to genetic factors. Many studies of twins have
found that they are often substantially delayed relative to other children (see Mogford 1993),
presumably because they get less personalized input than singletons. But perhaps the most

convincing evidence for the relevance of input tailored to the childs needs comes from studies of
spoken language development in hearing children of deaf parents. While such children are rarely
completely cut o from spoken language, they clearly get less of it than children born to hearing
parents. Even more importantly, they often get little personalized input from adults, which has a
profound inuence on their language development.
Consider, for example, Jim, a boy studied by Sachs et al. (1981). Jims parents had very little oral
language and communicated with each other in sign, but they did not sign to him. He was
exposed to English primarily through television, which he watched frequently, but he also
occasionally played with hearing children. Sachs et al. began to study Jims linguistic
development when he was aged 3;9, just as he was beginning speech therapy. It was immediately
clear that Jims language was not just delayed, but qualitatively dierent from that of normally
developing children. Although he had a reasonably good vocabulary (only slightly smaller than
an average child of his age), his comprehension was quite poor, and he also had severe
articulation problems. Perhaps as a result of these, he only produced very short utterances: his
mean length of utterance (MLU) at the beginning of the study was 2.2, which would be
appropriate for a child just over two. Unlike ordinary children learning English, Jim made many
word order errors, and often produced decidedly un-English sentences such as those in (1).

(1)

a. Not window two window.

b.

My mommy my house a@sc play ball.

(?) I play ball at home with my mommy.

c.

House a@sc chimney my house a@sc my chimney.

(?) My house has got a chimney.

d.

This is how a@sc plane.

He also had particular diculty with inectional morphology and function words, which he
omitted 63 per cent of the time about twice as often as normally developing children with a
comparable MLU.2
There are two important lessons to be learned from Jims case. First, mere exposure to language
does not automatically lead to acquisition, since he was unable to learn English from the
television.3 It seems that, in addition to simply hearing a lot of language in context, children also
need at least occasional interaction with a competent language user who does the sorts of things
that parents do: repeat and rephrase utterances that the child did not under-

Language acquisition: robustness

35

stand, and provide some sort of feedback on the childs production. This could be in the form of
expansion of the childs incomplete utterances, puzzlement at incomprehensible utterances, or
simply a continuation of the topic introduced by the child or compliance with a request, both of
which would indicate that the childs communicative intentions have been understood. Secondly,
Jims language shows that restricted input aects morph syntactic development as well as lexical
development in fact, in his case the former was clearly much more seriously aected than the
latter. It is worth pointing out that Jims case is not an isolated: Todd and Aitchison (1980) report
similar deviant constructions in the speech of another hearing child of deaf parents. So both the
quality and the sheer quantity of input do matter. On the other hand, they do not seem to matter
as much as one might expect, since children who get only a tenth of the input addressed to the
most privileged children do not take ten times longer to achieve the same level of competence.
How can we explain this apparent discrepancy?
It is important to bear in mind that most children get vast amounts of input. Cameron-Faulkner et
al. (in press) estimate that a typical toddler hears between 5,000 and 7,000 utterances per day.
This means that between the ages of 1, when language acquisition may be said to begin in
earnest, and 4, when most children achieve productivity in the basic structures of their language,
they will have heard something of the order of 6,570,000 utterances, including about a million
WH questions, a million Y/N questions, 660,000 instances of the full transitive construction (a
subject followed by a verb followed by an object), about 40,000 relative clauses, and almost
7,000 passives.4 So halving the amount of input may have little eect on language learning
simply because most children get more input then they actually need: half of 6.6 million is still a
very large number.
The second point to bear in mind is that while reducing the amount of language experience may
have little eect on the linguistic development of some children, it does aect others namely,
children with low IQs, small short- term phonological memory capacity, and sensory decits
who appear to be far more vulnerable to the eects of suboptimal input (Snow 1995). Thus,
quality and amount of input may help to explain an apparent paradox. There are reports in the
literature of children who developed language normally in spite of very low IQ, small short-term
phonological memory capacity, or other impairments, which have led some researchers to

conclude that language development does not depend on such cognitive abilities. On the other
hand, speech therapy clinics are full of disabled children with severe language problems, which
suggest that there are close links between linguistic and non- linguistic development. We can
reconcile these conicting facts by recognizing that non-linguistic cognition does matter but
good input can compensate for cognitive impairments (within limits); and, conversely, good
language learners may be able to compensate for suboptimal input. However, when several
inauspicious circumstances conspire, language will suer.

36

Language, mind and brain

This suggests that language may develop dierently in dierent circumstances. To investigate
this possibility, we will consider one special population
blind children in more detail.

3.

Language development in blind children

The linguistic development of blind children can be potentially very informative in the context of
the debate on the role of innate factors in language acquisition. If language acquisition involved
merely setting the parameters in an innate program, we would not expect to nd many
dierences between sighted and blind children: after all, both groups hear language, and both are
equipped with the same universal grammar, so both should follow the same course of
development. On the other hand, if language acquisition were heavily dependent on experience,
we might expect that blindness will have a profound eect on the course of development, since
much information that is normally available to the child information about the visual properties
of objects and events in the environment, about what their interlocutors are doing, what they are
looking at, their gestures and facial expressions is inaccessible to blind learners.
How, then, does language develop in blind children? The short answer is that it depends on the
child. According to one study, about 40 per cent have speech abnormalities of some kind (Elstner

1983). But most blind children have no speech abnormalities, just a small delay; and some
develop completely normally (Gleitman 1981; Prez-Pereira and Conti-Ramsden 1999).
An additional factor which may account for these large dierences is the fact that many blind
children also suer from other handicaps. Deviant language development seems to be the rule
when the child has other disabilities
in addition to blindness or is growing up in an unfavorable social milieu. According to Graham
(1968, cited in Elstner 1983), almost half of all blind children who are multiply handicapped are
completely without language. The incidence of language disorders in the group studied by
Elstner, which included a number of children who had other problems, was 76 per cent.
Furthermore, while most of the abnormalities in sighted children are phonetic or phonological,
the blind childrens problems tended to be lexical-semantic and morph syntactic; and there were
more morph syntactic abnormalities in the speech of completely blind children than in children
with partial vision.
The conclusion, then, is that blindness by itself does not cause language diculties, although it
often results in a small delay. However, when combined with other problems, such as low IQ or
an impoverished home environment, it can lead to serious language problems.
But why are impairments which do not necessarily cause problems in other children so disastrous
in the blind, and why should blind children be more likely to produce deviant language? The
answer, I suggest, comes down to the

Language acquisition: robustness

37

fact that blind children develop language somewhat dierently from seeing children. Because
many aspects of contextual information are not accessible to them, blind children must make
very good use of whatever information they have got, and cognitive impairment may preclude
them from doing so. Furthermore, blind children have to be more proactive in obtaining
information about meaning. There are two ways in which learners can determine what a new
linguistic expression means: they can either observe competent speakers use it and note as much
as possible about the context, or they can experiment that is to say, produce it and see what
happens. Since blind children cannot observe as much as sighted children, they must experiment
more. The result is that they often produce utterances which they clearly do not under- stand.

This meaningless language or verbalism of the blind is sometimes regarded as an indication of

deviant development, or even cognitive impairment. However, it seems more illuminating to
view it as a very good way of obtaining clues about what linguistic expressions might mean.5
There is considerable evidence that blind children make more use of imitation, repetition and
verbal routines than seeing children, and tend to adopt a holistic learning strategy (Dunlea 1989;
Mulford 1988; Prez-Pereira 1994; Urwin 1984). This suggests that they rely more heavily on
distributional information, presumably in order to compensate for the lack of visual information
(Prez-Pereira and Castro 1997). This language learning strategy, of course, makes greater
demands on the childs phonological memory. Thus, a short phonological memory span, or poor
auditory processing skills, will aect blind children more than seeing children, and may be
another reason for the large individual dierences in the linguistic accomplishments of blind
children.
A particularly striking example of how a blind childs heavy reliance on verbal routines may
result in the production of very unusual structures is given by Wilson and Peters (1988). Between
the ages of 3;2 and 3;6, the child they studied, Seth, produced a number of questions such as
those given in (2) below (Wilson and Peters 1988: 2513).

(2)

a. What are we gonna go at [=to] Auntie and? [answer: Auntie and Priya]

b.

What did I get lost at the, Dad? [answer: at the store]

c.

What are you cooking pan? [answer: pancakes]

Such utterances are peculiar by any standards; but they are particularly problematic for
Principles and Parameters theory, since they apparently violate universal constraints on
movement. Sentence (2a) violates the coordinate structure constraint, which states that items
cannot be moved out of a coordinate structure (or a more general constraint, subjacency, which
states that constituents cannot be moved across more than one bounding node: in this case,
NP and S). (2b) and (2c) are violations of the maximal projection

38

Language, mind and brain

property of movement rules (the requirement that only maximal projections can be moved to the
specier position). In (2b), only the noun has been moved, not the entire noun phrase, and in
(2c), only the second part of the compound noun.
This anomalous usage had its origins in an information-eliciting game that Seths father used to
play with him, in which the father produced an armative sentence with a blank and Seth had
to ll in the blank, like that:

(3)

a. [Getting ready for breakfast] F: Put your . . .

S: Bib on.
b. [After breakfast]
F: What did you eat? Eggs and . . .
S: Mbacon. (Wilson and Peters 1988: 2623)

It seems that in the anomalous utterances in (2), Seth put such a sentence with a blank in an
interrogative structure.
These anomalous constructions in Seths speech were not, of course, a direct result of blindness,
but rather a consequence of his unusual linguistic experience. They do, however, oer
particularly compelling evidence that unusual experience can result in unusual language
production.
4.

The robustness of language

We have seen that there are considerable individual dierences in the way that children learn to
use language. Some children rst produce single words (mostly nouns) and later learn to
combine them to form more complex expressions; others begin with short phrases or sentences
and extract words from them; and still others probably the majority use both strategies. Some
children are rapid piecemeal learners and use a variety of grammatical constructions in very early
stages of development, before they have fully analyzed them; others look for more general
patterns and consequently may appear to be less advanced. Some children jump to conclusions
on the basis of relatively little data a risky strategy which results in high error rates; others are
more cautious and consequently make relatively few errors.

We have also seen that it is not true that language acquisition is insensitive to environmental and
non-linguistic cognitive factors. Environmental deprivation, sensory impairments and, as we
shall see, cognitive decits all have an eect on language development. However, unless several
dierent factors con- spire, children are usually able to overcome these adverse circumstances
and develop normal language. As we will see in the next two chapters, children with very low
IQs and children who have suered damage to the areas of the brain which normally specialize
in linguistic processing may also develop relatively

Language acquisition: robustness

39

normal language, although the actual course of development may be quite dierent from that
found in normal children. And, of course, if a child is exposed to two, three or even four
languages, she will learn all of them, pro- vided she gets enough input in every language.
The most striking feature of human language acquisition, then, is its robust- ness. The language
learning system is able to adapt exibly to a wide range of very dierent circumstances. Clearly,
this exibility is not innite; but within limits, the language learning system applies whatever
mental resources are available to the (sometimes impoverished) input data to construct a
functional (though perhaps imperfect) system. This kind of exibility is incompatible with an
acquisition sequence whose exact course is predetermined genetically. A rigid genetic program
cannot make allowances for such diverse contingencies of language development as exposure to
more than one language, extremely limited exposure to language, early brain damage, or lack of
sup- porting input from other modalities. The exibility of language development, then, and the
existence of a great deal of individual variation suggest that languages are learned not acquired.

Notes

1.

This is a somewhat idealized picture. Most children use a mixture of both strategies.

2.
It should be stressed that Jims problems are not be attributable to a linguistic
impairment, since he made excellent progress after intervention. His MLU rose to 2.9 in just a
month, and by age 6;11, he was performing above age level on most measures of linguistic
ability.
3.
Note, too, that at the time that Sachs et al. began observing Jim, he had not acquired sign
language, in spite of the fact that he could observe his parents signing on a regular basis. He did,
however, make considerable progress in sign later.
4.
These estimates are based on frequency data given in Cameron-Faulkner et al. (in press)
for questions and transitives, Gordon and Chafetz (1990) for passives, and Diessel and Tomasello
(2000) for relatives.
5.
I am not suggesting that blind children consciously adopt this strategy. On most
occasions, their goal is simply to get adult attention but they end up getting a variety of clues
about the meaning of their utterances.