Stages of first-language acquisition

On the basis of the innate semiotic faculty, infants learn to communicate before they understand and utter their first words. By the age of five months, they scream to communicate disagreement with their situation. Communication by gestures usually starts at nine months of age, where they may understand and use pointing, shake their head to refuse, express joy or excitement by clapping and wave to greet or say farewell.

With one year of age, infants can execute a few basic speech acts, including requesting and informing, by pointing to an object or a place (Tomasello 2009: 72). At about the same age, the child starts speaking. The basic communication unit is the utterance. An utterance by a parent is understood holistically, i.e., in the beginning the child understands what the speaker intends without analyzing the utterance. Only to the extent that this works increasingly well does the child start analyzing utterances.

At the next stage, the child has already identified words as units recurring with a similar function in the utterances understood. This is when acquisition of vocabulary starts. The child's own utterances consist of one word, which is why this stage is called holophrastic. The word uttered mostly corresponds to what would be the focal component in a complete sentence. The prosody on the word hints at the communicative intention.

The subsequent two-word utterances consist of two words connected by some syntagmatic semantic relation between their designata,¹ like an object related to a place or a quantifier² specifying a mass or a set. The prosody guarantees the unity of the utterance. There is not yet any grammar; the words do not yet belong to grammatical categories, and the relation between them is not a syntactic one.

With about two years of age, the child can handle actively and passively utterances consisting of two or more words in the order required by the grammar. However, he is not applying a general rule; he has learned a set of sequences each of which is based on a particular item, like a phraseologism.³

At three years of age at the earliest does the child abstract constructions formed by rules of grammar and applies them to further words belonging to the categories in question. He does this by applying schematization and analogy – cognitive skills provided by the innate semiotic faculty (Tomasello 2009: 79).

More complex syntactic constructions like complex clauses and interrogative clauses are formed on an item-basis even yet at an age of four years. Only later are general rules for forming such constructions abstracted from a set of such formulas.

In this phase, as children are discovering rules, they often overgeneralize them. Only later certain factors constrain the production; among these are entrenchment of grammatical constructions, preemption of ungrammatical constructions by obvious avoidance on the part of adult speakers and the formation of semantic subclasses of pivot words.

The role of the innate semiotic faculty

Communication presupposes an intention on the part of the sender. The child learns to employ a semiotic system because he understands that it serves to transmit one's intentions and to create shared intentions.

Advocates of formal theories of grammar (Chomsky ) have drawn attention to the following set of facts:

• The child forms a grammatical competence of such a complex system as the language of his environment.
• He must abstract this system from the input that he perceives.
• For this operation he only has very simple and general principles of behavioristic learning theory at his disposal.
• The input that he is exposed to is far from sufficient to lead to the actual result; i.e. the input does not contain all the complex constructions which are nevertheless mastered, and moreover many utterances heard are simply ungrammatical or otherwise deficient.
• And yet the child succeeds in constructing a complete competence of the language system in an amazingly short time, viz. essentially in the five years following his first utterance.

This argument has been known as the poverty of the stimulus. Its proponents have concluded that general processes of a learning theory would not suffice to construct the competence of the language system that the child does, in fact, acquire; so the only possible explanation of the facts is an innate rather specific language faculty which goes by names such as the language acquisition device or universal grammar (Lust 2011, Pietroski & Crain 2012).

However, some crucial claims presupposed by the argument do not stand an empirical test. As a matter of fact, especially in early childhood, most parents carefully teach their child to speak, correct him and provide him with models of all the constructions that the child will afterwards master. And to the extent that parents fail on this task, the child does learn the language imperfectly and with corresponding delay. On the other hand, the child is not faced with pure formal structure and therefore does not apply purely formal principles to analyze it. Instead, he is faced with meaningful constructions consisting of meaningful and functional elements. From the overall holistic meaning of an utterance that he starts from, he can individuate subfunctions and assign them to components of the utterance and to its structural properties.

The role of interaction

Although different areas in the brain are specialized for different functions, there is no single area in the brain which would contain a language module. Instead, the language faculty emerges from the combination of diverse cognitive and communicative capacities.

¹ The designatum of a sign is the concept or individual designated by it.

² A quantifier is a word indicating the size of a set or a mass, like all, some, more.

³ A phraseologism is a lexicalized complex expression, like be fed up with something or out of date.

Lust, Barbara 2011, “Acquisition of language”. Hogan, Patrick C. (ed.), The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press; 56-64.

Pietroski, Paul & Crain, Stephen 2012, “The language faculty”. Margolis, Eric & Samuels, Richard I. & Stich, Stephen P. (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of cognitive science. New York: Oxford University Press; 361-381. [https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=82a464e6e87701797978d60d00771a3ae608a2a0]