L
Language acquisition
Introduction
Language acquisition is the term commonly
used to describe the process whereby children
become speakers of their native language (first-
language acquisition) or children or adults become
speakers of a second language (second-language
acquisition).
Early studies of child development such as
that of the German biologist Tiedemann (1787),
Charles Darwin (1877) and Hippolyte Taine
(1877) included observations about the develop-
ment of language. The first detailed study of
child language was, according to Campbell and
Wales (1970), that of the German physiologist
Preyer (1882), who kept a diary of the first three
years of his son’s development (Campbell and
Wales 1970: 243). He also makes notes on many
aspects of development in addition to the linguis-
tic, including motor development and musical
awareness. The first published book to be devoted
to the study of a child’s language alone was C.
and W. Stern’s Die Kindersprache (1907) (not avail-
able in English), and it is from this work that the
notion of stages of language acquisition (see
below) derives (Ingram 1989: 8–9). The diarists’
main aim was to describe the child’s language and
other development, although some explanatory
hypotheses were also drawn. These typically
emphasised the child’s ‘genius’ (Taine 1877), an
inbuilt language faculty which, according to
Taine, enabled the child to adapt to the lan-
guage which others presented it with, and which
would, had no language been available already,
have enabled a child to create one (Taine 1877:
258). At the time the preferred method of data
collection was the parental diary in which a
linguist or psychologist would record their own
child’s development. Ingram (1989: 7) identifies
a period of diary studies (1876–1926).
With the rising popularity of behaviourist
psychology [see also BEHAVIOURIST LINGUISTICS]
after the First World War, longitudinal studies
of individual children – studies charting the
development of one child over a long period –
came to be regarded as insufficient to establish
what ‘normal behaviour’ amounted to. Different
diaries described children at different intervals
and concentrated on different features of the
children’s behaviour, so that it was impossible to
draw clear comparisons between subjects. Instead,
large-sample studies were favoured, studies
of large numbers of children all of the same age,
being observed for the same length of time
engaged in the same kind of behaviour. Several
such studies, concentrating on several age groups,
would provide evidence of what was normal
behaviour at each particular age, and the results
of the studies were carefully quantified. Envir-
onmental factors were carefully controlled, as
behaviourism only took as scientifically valid
statements about the influence of the environment
on the child’s development: hence, all the chil-
dren in a given study would come from similar
socio-economic backgrounds, and each study
would use the same numbers of boys and girls.
Ingram (1989: 11ff.) pinpoints the period of
large-sample studies to 1926–57, the period
beginning with M. Smith’s (1926) study and
ending with Templin’s (1957) study. Studies car-
ried out during this period concentrated mainly on
vocabulary growth, mean sentence length, and
pronunciation. Mean sentence length (Nice
288 Language acquisition
1925) was calculated by counting the number of
words in each sentence a child produced and
averaging them out. The results for these three
areas for what was perceived as normal children
(Smith 1926; McCarthy 1930; Wellman et al.
1931) were compared with those for twins (Day
1932; Davis 1937), gifted children (Fisher 1934),
and lower-class children (Young 1941).
The publication of Templin’s study, the lar-
gest of the period, took place in the year which
also saw the publication of Noam Chomsky’s
Syntactic Structures (1957; see GENERATIVE GRAM-
MAR), which heralded the end of the reliance on
pure empiricism and behaviourist psychology in
linguistic studies [see BEHAVIOURIST LINGUISTICS].
Chomsky’s work and that of his followers high-
lighted the rule-governed nature of language,
and a major focus of attention of many linguists
working on language acquisition since then has
been the acquisition of morphosyntactic rules,
an aspect neglected in earlier large-sample studies.
With this aim, longitudinal language sam-
pling in the period from 1957 onwards controlled
more carefully the selection of subjects, the research
design and the criteria for measurement, aspects
which still inform studies of language acquisition.
In typical studies of this kind (Braine 1963; Miller
and Ervin 1964; Bloom 1970; Brown 1973), at
least three separate, carefully selected children –
ones which are talkative and just beginning to
use multiword utterances – are visited and
recorded at regular intervals by the researcher(s).
Braine (1963) supplemented this methodology
with diaries kept by the children’s parents.
Since the 1980s naturalistic data have been
complemented by experimental data of dif-
ferent types: elicited production, judgements on
syntax, morphology, semantics and phonology,
as well as comprehension tests, which are
designed in ways appropriate to the child’s age.
In act-out tests, for example, either the child
moves toys or reacts to the scene presented. The
use of computers has made it possible to analyse
large corpora and, thus, to test hypotheses based
on larger databases than before.
Relation between child and
adult competence
The study of child-language acquisition can pro-
vide not only insights into the child’s progression
towards the adult system but also evidence for or
against theories of adult language. It is therefore
important to examine carefully the relation
between the child and the adult system.
Children do not normally begin to produce
words until they are a year old, a period which
Ingram (1989: 83ff) calls prelinguistic devel-
opment. It is crucial to study this period as part
of a theory of child-language acquisition in order
to establish which links, if any, there are between
this and later stages.
Under normal circumstances every child will
acquire language within a short time. This pro-
cess is inevitable and independent of intelligence
or cognitive development. This has led Chomsky
(1975a, 1981, 1986b) to the assumption that
there is an innate ability to learn a language
which is domain-specific, i.e. specific for learning
a language. This ability guides infants in the
analysis of linguistic input. Notice that, although
cues are available in the input, children have to
be able to discover what constitutes a cue in a
given language. Children achieve linguistic
knowledge that allows them to produce and
interpret an infinite number of sentences, in spite
of having been exposed to a finite set of linguistic
data. These data consist of positive evidence, i.e.
acceptable sentences in their mother tongue;
they are not told, on the other hand, which
interpretations or which sentences are not possi-
ble. This is what is known as the argument of the
poverty of the stimulus.
In the generative framework it is assumed that
we have a mental grammar which establishes
what is possible or not possible in languages,
both in terms of forms and in terms of the
meaning assigned to them. This grammar
incorporates principles which hold across lan-
guages (i.e. universally), and which do not have
to be learnt. These principles determine the
properties that make languages similar. On the
other hand, language-specific properties are
encoded in parameters with a very limited set of
options. An example is the parameter which
rules the phonological realisation of the subject
(null-subject parameter): children exposed to
Chinese will set this parameter to the positive
value (i.e., the subject may not be realised
overtly), while those exposed to English will set it
to the negative value (i.e., the subject must be
realised overtly).

There are different views about how the adult
and the child system compare and about the
extent to which the child’s system needs to be
changed or restructured and basically three
answers can be given:
1. The child’s system is radically different from
the adult one (e.g., Bickerton 1990). Within
this discontinuity view the initial system
has no proper linguistic characteristics: it
consists of strings of words, which might also
in principle be produced by trained chimpan-
zees. That is, principles of universal gram-
mar have not yet emerged and children’s
grammars may fall outside the borders of
possible natural languages.
2. Within a continuity approach, on the
other hand, the child’s system is basically
identical to the adult one and differences are
taken not to relate to the system as such, but
to phonetic or pragmatic underspecification:
for example, time reference is not properly
established and this leads to the occasional
omission of tense markers (Weissenborn
1990; Hyams 1992, 1994, 1996; Poeppel
and Wexler 1993).
3. In a weaker version of the continuity
hypothesis, principles of Universal Grammar
are available for the child at the onset of
the acquisition process and they guarantee
that child grammars will fall within the bor-
ders of a natural language. The child’s
system, however, may deviate from the adult
one: it may represent a subset of the adult
system or be underspecified with respect to it.
Structure-building approaches (e.g.,
Lebeaux 1988; Clahsen 1990; Radford
1990; Guilfoyle and Noonan 1992; Clahsen
et al. 1993/1994, among others) identify
delays in the development of those heads
which carry syntactic information such as
agreement or tense, i.e. functional heads.
A central question for discontinuity and weak
continuity approaches is what brings about the
change to the adult system. Given the assump-
tion of an innate linguistic system, an obvious
answer points to biological maturation as the
cause of the change (Borer and Wexler 1987).
According to the maturational theory of
language acquisition, principles of universal
Language acquisition 289
grammar are genetically programmed to
become operational at different, determined
stages. This bears similarities with human devel-
opment in other aspects. It also accounts plau-
sibly for the similar path of development for
different individuals. On the other hand, if
acquisition was solely based on biological
maturation, one would expect that children
exposed to more than one language from birth
would develop their languages at the same pace,
which is not always the case (Schlyter 1995).
An approach which takes into account prop-
erties of the input, such as the lexical learning
approach (Pinker 1984, 1989; Clahsen 1990)
seems to fare better in this respect. According to
these researchers, grammar acquisition is driven
by the learning of lexical items with their speci-
fications, say, as mass noun or transitive verb
with an agentive subject. For example, the lex-
ical entry for ‘give’ will specify three arguments,
i.e. agent, theme and goal, realised as subject,
direct and indirect object, respectively. This is
an example of how children’s relation to the
input is explored in a rationalist framework.
Empiricist approaches, on the other
hand, try to explain language acquisition with-
out resorting to abstract linguistic knowledge. In
Bates and MacWhinney’s (1989) functionalism
and competition model language acquisition
is based on inductive learning, ‘guided by form-
function correlations’ (Bates and MacWhinney
1989: 26), where the forms are guided by com-
municative functions. The source of knowledge
is assumed to lie in the input (and not in the
mind). Language acquisition is, thus, a percep-
tual and not a cognitive problem (Bates and
MacWhinney 1989: 31).
Connectionist approaches vary greatly,
crucially in whether they assume that brain cir-
cuits are able to support the representation of
symbols and rules or not. Common to all of
them is the notion of learning by association (see,
for example, Elman et al. 1996; Rohde and
Plaut 1999).
The acquisition of English past tense has often
been used to model acquisition. The acquisitional
process is conceived as an association of the pho-
netic properties of verb stems and those of the
past tense, which are then generalised to similar-
sounding words (Rumelhart and McClelland
1986). Connectionist models simulate this
290 Language acquisition
process; they make the overextension errors
children make, e.g., ‘go’ – ‘goed’. The modelling
has mainly dealt with morphology and far less
with syntax; although some word sequencing has
been modelled, it is not clear if these models can
learn complex syntactic phenomena. A limi-
tation of connectionist models is, according to
Bickerton (1996) and Guasti (2002), the impos-
sibility to learn from degenerate input. Deaf
children of hearing parents receive limited lin-
guistic input, in spite of which they acquire a
refined sign language. Similarly, the complex
structure of creole languages has been developed
by children exposed to the more rudimentary
structure of pidgins [see CREOLES AND PIDGINS].
This indicates that there is linguistic knowledge
that cannot be acquired just by analogy.
A further alternative to a rationalist approach
to language acquisition is item-by-item
learning based on imitation of the input
(Tomasello 2000a, 2000b). Tomasello contra-
dicts the strong continuity view that infants have
full linguistic competence at birth by a usage-
based theory of language acquisition. In
order to be able to produce and understand an
infinite number of sentences, human beings have
to be able to segment words and assign them to
discrete syntactic categories, such as noun, verb,
etc. In the rationalist paradigm it is assumed that
these categories are part of a body of innate
knowledge. The empiricist claim, on the con-
trary, is that children compute distributional
information to identify syntactic categories.
Simple learning procedures can lead to acquisi-
tion of syntactic structures. According to this
approach early syntactic creativity can be
accounted for by schemas and a reduced
number of simple operations to modify them,
such as substituting a word into a previous
utterance or schema. MacWhinney’s (2001)
emergentist theory views various learning
mechanisms such as indirect negative evi-
dence, cue construction, monitoring, competition
and conservatism as emergent from the basic
item-based structure. Some syntactic structures
are more difficult to learn than others, which
points to areas of grammatical competition and,
consequently, of processing load. As Lust (2006:
68) points out, empiricist approaches still need to
make more explicit what the cognitive and socio-
cognitive mechanisms are which allow children
to generalise from an individual item to a pattern,
and also how children determine similarities across
constructions in order to form the generalisation,
if no linguistic analysis is involved.
The overall question is, as Lust (2006: 70) puts
it, not so much if there is a linguistically specific
and innate ability for language acquisition, but
what its precise nature is and how it works.
Similarly, the issue is not so much if there is any
learning involved in language acquisition, but
what exactly it is and how it works.
Sound perception and production
Sound perception
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. Experiments have been devised using the
non-nutritive sucking technique in which
an infant is given a device to suck which mea-
sures the rate of sucking; a sound is played to the
infant until the sucking rate stabilises; the sound
is changed; if the infant notices the sound
change, the sucking rate will alter. Such experi-
ments have shown that from the first days of life
(two to four days) infants are able to distinguish
between the native and a foreign language
(Mehler et al. 1988; Moon et al. 1993; Bosch
and Sebastián-Gallés 1997). Mehler et al. (1988)
show that four-day-old infants born in a French-
speaking environment distinguish between Ita-
lian and English utterances, and given that
infants are unlikely to have any lexical knowl-
edge, they must be relying on phonological
information. The studies mentioned above show
that prosodic information is crucial. Mehler et
al. (1996) claim that the different rhythms spe-
cific to different languages guide infants in the
discrimination.
Infants also need to learn the repertoire of
sounds or phonemic categories valid in their
native language. Research from the 1970s on
has shown that at one month, infants are able to
distinguish voiced from unvoiced sound seg-
ments (Eimas et al. 1971), and by seven weeks
they can distinguish intonation contours and
places of articulation (Morse 1972; Clark and
Clark 1977: 376–7). They also show perceptual

constancy: they focus on a vowel or consonant
and disregard incidental variation (Vihman
1996: 71). In the first six months of life infants
can accommodate to any language-specific
selection from the universal set of phonetic cate-
gories. Changes towards the native language can
be observed in the second half of the first year:
at twelve months infants can only handle sounds
which have a meaning, or phonemic value, in
their native language. This loss of sensitivity is
part of a functional reorganisation which allows
infants to learn words, in that it reduces the
search space. It is also a further indication that
human infants are tuned in to human language
from very early on in life.
Sound production
The only sounds a newborn baby makes, apart
from possible sneezes, coughs, etc., are crying
sounds. By three months old, the child will have
added to these cooing sounds, composed of
velar consonants and high vowels, while by six
months, babbling sounds, composed of repe-
ated syllables (bababa, dadada, mamama, etc.) have
usually appeared. Vihman (1996: 118) observes
that ‘regressions’ to apparently ‘earlier’ forms
are observed together with changes in the child’s
capacity for sound production. So, for example,
‘grunts’ occur shortly before the emergence of
reduplicated babbling as well as shortly before
the use of words. Evidence for the influence of
the language of the environment has been
observed at around eight months for prosodic
features and around ten months for vowels and
consonants. These findings suggest that a link
between perceptual and articulatory processes
develops in the second half of the first year
(Vihman 1996: 119).
The changes in the child’s vocalisations during
the first year of its life are connected with gra-
dual physiological changes in the child’s speech
apparatus, which does not begin to resemble its
adult shape until the child is around six months
old. Until then, the child’s vocal tract resembles
that of an adult chimpanzee (Lieberman 1975):
the larynx is higher than in adults, the throat
smaller, the oral cavity flatter and the tongue has
a different shape. However, it should be noted
that the maturation of the speech apparatus may
not be the only reason for the delay of language
Language acquisition 291
production: Guasti (2002: 47) observes that
manual babbling in deaf infants coincides with
the onset of vocal babbling in hearing ones.
Deictic gestures and ‘protowords’ stand at
the start of intentional communication. Proto-
words are relatively stable vocal forms with a
consistent meaning that is specific to an indivi-
dual child. Early words are used at the same
time as gestures, grunts and protowords (Vihman
1996: 147).
Opinions vary about whether there is a con-
nection between the babbling stage and the later
acquisition of the adult sound system. According
to the continuity approach, the babbling sounds
are direct precursors of speech sounds proper,
while according to the discontinuity approach
there is no such direct relation (Clark and Clark
1977: 389). According to Jakobson (1968), there
are two distinct sound production stages: the first
is the babbling stage, during which the child
makes a wide range of sounds which do not
appear in any particular order and which do
not, therefore, seem related to the child’s sub-
sequent development; during the second stage
many of the sounds present in the first stage dis-
appear either temporarily or permanently while
the child is mastering the particular sound con-
trasts which are significant in the language it is
acquiring. The problems with this approach are,
first, that many children continue to babble for
several months after the onset of speech (Menn
1976); second, many of the sound sequences of
later words seem to be preferred during the
babbling stage – as if being rehearsed, perhaps
(Oller et al. 1976); finally, babbling seems often
to carry intonation patterns of later speech, so
that there seems to be continuity at least at the
suprasegmental level (Halliday 1975; Menn
1976). Mowrer (1960) has argued in favour of
the continuity hypothesis that babbling contains
all the sounds found in all human languages, but
that this sound repertoire is narrowed down to
just those sounds present in the language the
child is to acquire. Careful observation, how-
ever, shows that many sounds found in human
languages are not found in babbling and that
some of the sounds that are found in babbling
are those which a child may have problems with
when it starts to speak the adult language.
Clark and Clark (1977: 390–1) believe that
babbling could be a necessary preliminary
292 Language acquisition
exercise to gain control over articulation in the
mouth and vocal tract. They add, however, that
if this was the only function of babbling, ‘there
would be little reason to expect any connection
between the sounds produced in babbling and
those produced later on’. Some discontinuity is
observed in that some phonetic segments are
only mastered when children start using words;
but this type of discontinuity is clearly not
fundamental.
Acquisition of the lexicon
The child’s task of vocabulary learning entails
more than just storing a list of words. The
mental lexicon is an active store in which lexical
items are collected and organised. Many lexicon
models assume that not only words are stored
but also inflectional material. Processing data,
e.g., errors, indicate how lexical items are stored
and processed. Different types of information
have to be stored with a lexical item and con-
stitute the lexical entry. The following count
among the central ones:
1. the semantic representation: if we use
‘cat’ as an example, the semantic represen-
tation will include +concrete, +animate,
subgroup of ‘animal’;
2. the lexical category or word class: noun;
3. syntactic properties, e.g., gender in
languages which mark it;
4. morphological properties and inter-
nal structure, e.g., non-compound, regular
plural;
5. the phonetic-phonological form, e.g.,
/kæt/, number of syllables, word stress.
The child has to identify this information and
store it in a lexical entry. When the child
acquires a word, they must grasp complex
information and establish relations among new
pieces of information and those already existing.
The existing structure of the lexicon has an
influence on the way new lexical items are
stored; on the other hand the acquisition of new
lexical items triggers a reorganisation of the
established links in the lexicon. Under this per-
spective it seems plausible to assume that the
child’s lexicon is not only smaller than the adult
one but also organised in a different way.
The first fifty words
The first words occur at the age of ten to eigh-
teen months. In the course of several months the
child acquires a vocabulary of thirty to fifty
words. At this stage the lexicon grows slowly, at
a rate of two or three words a week.
The form and the function of the first words
differ from those of the adult language. With
respect to form, the first words are usually
phonologically simplified.
According to Clark (1993: 33) some of the first
ten to twenty words children produce only occur
in certain contexts: a child might say car only
when seeing a car from the window but not in
the presence of toy cars or cars in other settings.
However, not all words are context bound, in
fact, most early words are used appropriately in
a variety of contexts. They refer to objects (e.g.,
car), individuals (e.g., teddy) or situations.
After the child has acquired the first fifty
words and towards the end of the second year
of age, new words are added to the existing
vocabulary at a very fast pace (the vocabulary
spurt); several new words occur daily. For
instance, Smith’s (1926) subjects’ average pro-
ductive vocabulary was twenty-two words at
eighteen months, 118 words at twenty-one
months, and 272 words at two years. According
to Clark (1993) the vocabulary size of a two year
old varies between fifty and 500 words in pro-
duction. The vocabulary a child is able to
understand is considerably larger.
Children adhere to what Clark (1993) calls the
principle of conventionality in assuming
that target words are those given by the speakers
around them and in general do not make up
sound strings and assign them their own mean-
ing. Children also appear to assume that each
word form has a meaning different from that of
other words and might avoid uses that overlap in
meaning (e.g., ‘the dog is my pet’).
Some of the early words may be under-
generalised (or underextended), i.e. they
refer to a subset of a class for example to only
one type of dog. In other cases they may be
overgeneralised (or overextended) and
apply to the members of the adult class as well as
to perceptually similar members of different
classes. An example of overgeneralisation would
be the use of the term dog for all walking

animals, dogs, cats and even birds on the
ground. This seems to be a communicative
strategy at a stage when the vocabulary is lim-
ited. Support for this view comes from observed
discrepancies between production and compre-
hension (Clark 1993:33 ff.): a child may be able
to pick out the appropriate object in response to
motorcycle, bike, truck, plane, but refer to them all as
car in production (Rescorla 1980: 230).
Grammatical word classes and boot-
strapping hypotheses
The problem of identifying word classes in child
language as well as the question of how children
identify word classes has been subject of debate
ever since the publication of Brown (1973).
Recurrent ideas are that children start by devel-
oping their grasp of semantic relations and that
syntax can only develop once these are in place.
Pinker’s (1984) semantic boot-strapping
hypothesis is a version of this view: children
determine word classes on a semantic basis.
Their semantic knowledge leads them then to
discover the word classes associated with the
semantic categories, even if there is no one-to-
one correspondence between them. The syn-
tactic boot-strapping hypothesis (Gleitman
1990), on the other hand, claims that syntactic
information, for example the argument structure
of a verb, can be used to derive the meaning of a
word. This approach refers to a stage in which
word classes are already acquired, whereas
according to the semantic boot-strapping hypoth-
esis the child uses semantic information in order
to identify word classes. As Rothweiler and
Meibauer (1999: 15) point out, a problem for
the semantic boot-strapping hypothesis is the
fact that words can only be recognised in a sen-
tence as members of different classes, and only
then is it possible for children to see a link
between word classes and semantic categories
(cf. Behrens 1999).
Lexical representation and
inflectional elements
For a long time, studies on the acquisition of
inflectional elements focused on the relation
between morphological markings and syntactic
representation, e.g., in subject–verb agreement.
Language acquisition 293
More recently, attention is also paid to the lex-
ical representation of inflectional elements and
their acquisition. The status of regular and
irregular inflection plays a central role here, as
different approaches predict a different acquisi-
tional course. It has been observed that children
overgeneralise morphological markings, e.g., ‘goed’
for ‘went’. In a connectionist approach (e.g.,
Rumelhart and McClelland 1986), no differ-
ences between regular and irregular morphology
are assumed and both are represented in an
associative network. Accordingly, there will be
no difference in the way regular and irregular
morphology are acquired; the observed over-
generalisations are claimed to follow from fre-
quency of occurrence in the input. A dual-
mechanism approach (Pinker and Prince
1992), on the other hand, assumes that regular
morphology is driven by rules based on symbolic
representations while irregular morphology is
based on idiosyncratic lexical information. Regular
morphology is used when no other information
is available. As children in early acquisitional
stages cannot resort to many stored forms
they overextend regular forms (Rothweiler and
Meibauer 1999: 24).
The development of syntax
The period between twelve and sixteen months,
during which children normally begin to com-
prehend words and produce single-unit utter-
ances, is usually referred to as the one-word
stage. By the time the child’s vocabulary has
grown to around fifty words they enter the so-
called two-word stage. At the beginning of
this stage children typically produce strings like
Eve gone (Eve, one year six months, from Brown
1973), which lack grammatical inflections and
function words; this kind of language is known as
telegraphic speech (Brown and Fraser 1963).
Even if children are presented with full sentences
to imitate, they tend to repeat the sentences in
telegraphic form. However, it is obvious that the
child’s system is more complex than simple
strings of words and that it can be interpreted as
the beginning of phrase structure.
Braine (1963) observed a tendency for some
words in children’s utterances to be placed either
at the beginning or at the end of the utterance.
He calls these words pivots, as opposed to
294 Language acquisition
open-class words. Braine claims that the child
will notice that certain open-class words always
come after a pivot, while other open-class words
always come before a pivot, and that this infor-
mation allows the child to begin to distinguish
different word classes among the open-class
words. However, while the observation about
word-order regularities still holds, the analysis is
no longer considered valid. More recently, Rad-
ford (1990) calls the one-word period the ‘aca-
tegorial stage’, given that it is not always
obvious which category the words produced by
the child should be assigned to. In the two-word
stage, on the other hand, syntactic categories
such as nouns and verbs are used by the child in
a systematic way. Verbs are used to predicate
something of the nouns, as in the following
examples (from Radford 1996: 44): ‘baby talking’
(Hayley, one year eight months), ‘daddy gone’
(Paula, one year six months). At this stage children
do not use finite verbs (examples from Radford
1996: 54):
 the third person marking -s is missing in the
relevant contexts: ‘Paula play with ball’
(Paula, one year six months);
 auxiliaries are missing: ‘baby talking’ (Hayley,
one year eight months), ‘Daddy gone’
(Paula, one year six months)
 infinitival to is missing: ‘want go out’ (Daniel,
one year ten months).
The generalisation in the clause domain is that
children’s utterances at this stage contain pro-
jections of the lexical category ‘verb’ (V) but not
of the categories which carry syntactic informa-
tion (functional categories) associated with it
such as AGR(eement) or T(ense). The lexical
categories, ‘noun’ (N), ‘adjective’ (A) and ‘pre-
position’ (P), are attested as well, but, as in the
verbal domain, no syntactic information associated
with them, for example number for nouns.
The following is an X-bar representation of
sentence structure [see GENERATIVE GRAMMAR],
where V(erb)P(hrase) is a projection of the lex-
ical category V and F(initeness)P(hrase) a pro-
jection of a functional category, i.e. a projection
carrying syntactic information. ‘Finiteness’ is
used here as a generic label; it is used as an
example of a functional category without further
specifying which one (e.g., AGReement, Tense).
Under the assumption that child utterances
consist only of projections of lexical categories
we expect to find lexical material which can be
accommodated within the domain of a VP
(Radford 1990, among others). In an under-
specification approach (e.g., Clahsen 1990,
1993/1994; Hyams 1996) one or more func-
tional projections are available but not fully
specified as in the steady state.
Within the domain of the clause, question and
negative formation have been carefully studied.
At the earliest stage children form negatives
simply by beginning the utterance with no or not,
in a way that suggests that these words are
external to the sentence. This is followed by a
stage in which don’t and can’t begin to appear,
and both these forms and no and not are placed
in front of the verb instead of at the beginning of
the utterance. The explanation for this acquisi-
tional pattern is that in early utterances negation
is either adjoined to VP or heads the under-
specified functional projection. At a later stage,
as projections for finite elements develop, finite
verbs will occupy the head of the finite projection
leaving the negation behind, as in didn’t and won’t.
Early questions are typically marked just by
rising intonation: ‘Fraser water?’ (from Klima
and Bellugi 1966: 200) is an example of a yes–no
question, ‘Daddy go?’ (‘where does Daddy go?’
from Radford 1990: 123) an example of a wh-
question. Auxiliaries or modals are not attested
at this stage and nor are wh-words. When children

start using wh-words the inventory is limited and
includes mainly where, who, what: ‘where heli-
copter?’ (Stefan, one year five months, from
Radford 1990: 125). These wh- words can be
followed by -s, which can be interpreted as a
cliticised realisation of the copula: ‘where’s heli-
copter?’ (Stefan, one year five months, from
Radford 1990: 125, see also Klima and Bellugi
1966: 201). These questions are initially for-
mulaic. Evidence for this claim comes from
(missing) agreement facts: ‘what’s these?’ (Adam,
two years two months, from Radford 1990: 126).
Some authors (Klima and Bellugi 1966; Rad-
ford 1990) observe that children fail to under-
stand wh- questions which include movement
(from a position in the IP into the Spec(ifier)-C).
An example is the following exchange (Klima
and Bellugi 1966: 202):
Adult: what are you doing?
Child: no
This is taken as an indication that at this stage
the projection which should host the moved ele-
ment has not been developed in the child’s
system, and the sentence cannot be parsed by
the child.
In the nominal domain, nouns and adjectives
occur but not deteminers such as articles and
possessives. Demonstratives occur on their own,
but not together with a noun. This resembles the
picture we observe in the verbal domain, in that
elements carrying syntactic information are
absent from early utterances.
The development of morphology
Children normally begin to acquire grammatical
morphemes at the age of around two years.
Studies of the acquisition of grammatical mor-
phemes go back to Berko (1958), who studied
the acquisition by English-speaking children of
plural -s, possessive -s, present tense -s, past-
tense -ed, progressive -ing, agentive -er, compara-
tive -er and -est, and compounds. Berko worked
with children aged between four and seven years
old, and she showed that five- and six-year-old
children were able to add the appropriate
grammatical suffixes to invented words when
the words’ grammatical class was clear from
the context. Her experimental procedure has
Language acquisition 295
become known as the wug procedure, wug
being one of the invented words used in the
experiment.
This experiment and others like it may be
used to argue for the hypothesis that children
are ‘tuned in’, not only to the sounds of human
language (see above) but also to its syntax, in the
sense that they display ‘a strong tendency … to
analyse the formal aspects of the linguistic input’
(Karmiloff-Smith 1987: 369).
The order in which morphemes are acquired
has been studied for different languages (see for
example Brown 1973 and many others). The
order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes
in English tends to be that -ing appears first, then
the regular plural -s; irregular past-tense forms
are attested before the regular forms. The order
observed is compatible with the assumptions of
the structure-building approach to language
acquisition (Radford 1990; Guilfoyle and Noonan
1992, among others) since the presence of -ing
before third person -s or any past-tense form
would indicate that inflectional material associated
with the functional categories AGReeement and
Tense are attested later.
The acquisition of the core grammar is fin-
ished very early, within the first three or four
years of age. The process of acquisition of other
domains of language (e.g., expanding the voca-
bulary; subtleties of use of tenses and moods in
the languages which have them; rules of dis-
course) takes several years or goes on through an
individual’s life.
The assumption of a critical period
The biological notion of maturation leads to the
assumption of a critical period for language
acquisition, originally proposed by Lenneberg
(1967) for first-language acquisition. Based on
hemispheric lateralisation as an explanation
Lenneberg characterised the period between the
ages of six and thirteen as the critical period
within which the acquisition of the first language
should be activated.
Evidence for a critical period is found in cases
of children deprived of exposure to language at
a young age, such as Genie (Curtiss 1977), who
was confined in a room until the age of thirteen,
with little or no language experience during that
time. She was later able to develop lexical
296 Language acquisition
knowledge but retained complex structural defi-
cits. Cases such as this one may be confounded
by other types of deprivation involved.
Further evidence for a critical period comes
from learners of a second language (L2).
Second-language acquisition
It is striking that while everyone succeeds in
becoming a competent speaker of their first lan-
guage, this level of competence is usually not
achieved by a second-language speaker. What a
critical period for L2 acquisition means is subject
of much debate. Research since around 2000
has been comparing child and adult learners of a
second language, asking if children are better
than adults (see e.g., Hylstenstam and Abra-
hamsson 2003). Results so far indicate that
syntax becomes more difficult to master with
increasing age, but mastery of morphology
remains out of reach for many. Lardiere (2000)
reports the case of Patty, a speaker of Chinese,
who after nearly twenty years living in an English-
speaking environment frequently omitted mor-
phology, for example, markers for past tense,
whereas Patty’s use of obligatory subjects and
the distribution of verbs with respect to negation
suggests a more advanced knowledge of syntax
(Lardiere 2000).
Although there is anecdotal evidence of
second-language learners who pass for natives in
conversation, when analysed with linguistic
tools, these learners differ from native speakers.
Some researchers argue that these differences
in achievement in first- and second-language
acquisition indicate that the specific ability to
learn a language is not available beyond pub-
erty; otherwise adult learners would reach
native-like proficiency in the second language
(Bley-Vroman 1989; Schachter 1990). The dif-
ferent developmental paths observed in first- and
second-language acquisition is taken to be a fur-
ther argument for the non-availability of the
innate knowledge that universal grammar (UG)
represents (Meisel 1991). Others (e.g., White
1989; Schwartz and Sprouse 1994) argue that UG
remains available after puberty and throughout
an individual’s life. The latter claim is based on
the observation that interlanguages, i.e. L2
grammars at different developmental stages,
have the structure of natural languages, as
opposed to being just formulas or strings
organised only by pragmatic needs.
The role of the first language (L1) in the
acquisition of the second has been discussed for
decades, ever since Lado’s (1957) claim that
what is similar in L1 and L2 will be easily
acquired and what is different will cause diffi-
culties. Although this claim was soon disproved,
it is clear that the L1 plays an important role in
learning an L2. The debate focuses on its precise
role. Do learners face the L2 as children acquir-
ing the L1? In this case one expects to see little
influence of the learners’ L1 (Klein and Perdue
1992; Epstein et al. 1996). Do learners use lex-
ical material from the L2 while relying on the
structure and specifications of their L1? In this
case strong transfer effects should be evident
(Schwartz and Sprouse 1994). It has been observed,
for example, that speakers of languages which
do not have articles, such as Chinese or Korean,
omit them when they start learning a language
that has them, such as English or German. But
longitudinal studies have also shown that these
speakers are able to learn to use articles, in other
words, the transfer effects can be overcome
(Robertson 2000; Parodi et al. 2004).
As mentioned above, not all aspects of a second
language are equally easy to master. Morphol-
ogy in an L2 seems to pose particular difficulties
for adult learners and subtleties of syntax may
remain elusive even for very proficient learners.
This account of how children learn the lan-
guage of their speech community and how this
process compares to second-language acquisition
has, of necessity, been limited in many ways, and
the reader is encouraged to consult Goodluck
(1991), Guasti (2002), Lust (2006), Ellis (1994)
and White (2003) for a very thorough account of
all of the issues and data involved.
T. P.
Suggestions for further reading
Ellis, R. (2008) The Study of Second Language
Acquisition, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
First edition 1994.
Goodluck, H. (1991) Language Acquisition, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Guasti, M.T. (2002) Language Acquisition: The
Growth of Grammar, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.