LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Mike (age five years, discussing the game of base-
ball): Mom, did you know that baseball games need a
vampire?
Mom: A vampire?
Mike: Yes, the vampire stands in back of the catcher and
catches any of the balls that the catcher misses.
Joshua (age three, picking up the book Sleeping
Beauty): Let’s read Sleeping Buddha.
Child (age four): Nobody doesn’t likes me.
Parent: You mean, ‘‘Nobody likes me.’’
Child: OK. Nobody doesn’t likes you.These excerpts are not mere anecdotes from three-
and four-year-olds’ everyday conversations. Rather,
they are glimpses into the inner workings of the
human mind. Language is a uniquely human behav-
ior and is one of the most complicated behaviors in
which humans engage as a species. Neither birds nor
have language, and though people have spent count-
less hours trying to train chimps and gorillas, even
they have not mastered the system. Yet, by the time
children can walk, they have spoken their first words
and can comprehend about fifty words. By the time
children can run, they speak in full sentences and use
language to control their environment and their par-
ents. The average three-year-old has the computa-
tional power and symbolic sophistication to do what
our most advanced computers cannot do—to use
human language to communicate with others, and to
represent things in the past, the present, and the fu-
ture. The average four-year-old has mastered the
complex system we call language and is fully conver-
sant with adults and peers.
Languages as an Orchestral Work in
Progress
For centuries, philosophers and psychologists
have tried to understand how it is that children learn
their first language. Are humans simply endowed with
language? Are humans carefully taught? To address
these questions one must first ask, ‘‘What is lan-
guage?’’ One way of thinking about the problem is to
assume that language is like an orchestra. It is com-
posed of many parts that intricately work together to
provide a unified sound. Just as there are sections in
the orchestra (the strings, the brass, the wind instru-
ments, and the percussion), there are components of
language in sounds, meanings, words, grammar, and
rules for how one uses each of these parts in culturally
appropriate ways. Language acquisition, then, is
really the development of many pieces of a language
system that must evolve and work in tandem to per-
form the ‘‘score’’ of human talk.The First Year: Sounds and Meanings
The journey into language begins with the sound
component of the orchestra. The first piece that par-
ents notice occurs at around three or four months
when children begin to gurgle and coo. Cooing con-
sists of series of vowel sounds that babies tend to make
and that—at least American parents—respond to.
Just a couple of months later, at about seven months,
these same infants start to babble. The first consonant
sounds (e.g., ‘‘ba,’’ ‘‘ga’’) enter into the language, and
the product sounds much more like speech. In this
period, children seem to carry on conversations with
consonant-vowel sounds that only they can under-
stand (e.g., ‘‘ba ga ga ga ba ba?’’).
The beginning of language, then, starts with a
strong appearance from the ‘‘sound’’ component of
the language orchestra. The exact role of the sound
component in the development of later language,
however, has been hotly debated. Is babbling, for ex-
ample, a form of prespeech? Is it merely an avenue
for young children to practice using their vocal
chords and to imitate sounds that they hear with
mouth movements that they can make? Scientists still
are not sure. Yet it is interesting that even deaf chil-
dren babble with sounds and that this babbling does
not wane until about the point when canonical bab-
bling comes in. Deaf children of deaf parents babble
with their hands and show the same progression to-
ward canonical babbling as do hearing children.
Even though sounds are the most dominant com-
ponents of early language, the second half of the first
year also represents enormous progress in how chil-
dren learn to express new meanings—even before
they have mastered language. Notably, by eight
months of age children are quite adept at using eye
gaze and grunts to indicate what they are looking at
and to request an action from a parent. This pre-
linguistic stage is heightened further when the child
learns to point. Pointing is a specifically human ges-
ture that dramatically increases the child’s ability to
communicate. At around ten months, the forefinger
is used to make what some have called ‘‘proto-
declaratives’’ and ‘‘proto-imperatives’’—otherwise
known as statements and commands. As any parent
will attest, these commands are quite direct and clear,
even though the child is still technically ‘‘prelinguis-
tic.’’The Second Year: From First Words to the
Fifty-Word Watershed to Grammar
Pointing opens the way toward language. Yet
most parents find that true language emerges with
the first words at around thirteen months. There is a228 LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT