This semester, I’m sitting in on a graduate-level course on child language development. The class, Theories and Current Research Issues in Language Development, aims to evaluate the many theories surrounding how children come to develop language, with a specific emphasis on the application to Augmentative and Alternative Communication. There are five graduate students taking the course for credit, with three people sitting in to learn and participate without earning a grade. Altogether, the nine of us in the room form a nice little discussion circle every Wednesday afternoon while we talk about the mystery that is child language acquisition.
This past week, the professor asked us to partner up and figure out how we, in five minutes, would explain to a general audience how kids learn the meanings of words. My partner and I looked at each other and essentially said “nobody really knows.” Because honestly…that’s the truth.
We have a lot of theories for how children might acquire language, and a lot of proposals for ways that children might be combining approaches. But we don’t know for sure, and at this point we don’t know if we ever will. There are some theories that claim an aspect of human language is innate and children are born learning certain things about how language works. Other theories claim a “constructivist” approach, which says children construct language based entirely on what they experience in their environment. Within that constructivist approach, there are any number of strategies children might be using and no definitive way for us to determine the truth.
Part of this problem is that we need to be able to answer what it means to have language rather than just a system for communication. And without a solid answer to that, we can never truly say how children acquire language. What makes something a language? Can you point to a specific moment in time and say “this is when this child started using language”? Is it when they use words for the first time? The first time they assign meaning to a word? The first time they communicate with intentionality? The first time they put together a complete sentence? When they can finally hold a full conversation?
We spent nearly three classes (a fifth of the semester) talking about how children develop language without even considering what developing language means.
After my many undergraduate-level courses on language development and my experience so far in CSD 550, I have my own opinions on what it means to have language. The components I think are most important are as follows:
- Intentionality: In linguistics, we consider intentionality to refer to when a child communicates a message because they intend to do so, and because they intend to achieve a particular result by communicating that message. I do not believe that language can truly exist in a person’s mind if that person is not using language with intentionality. How you measure intentionality is an entirely different debate, but I think it needs to be present for language to exist.
- Displacement: This is one of the traditionally accepted keystones in language theory, and essentially says that in order for an individual to have language they need to be able to communicate about a concept or object that is not present in that particular place and time.
- Generativity/Productivity: Another hallmark characteristic of language, generativity is the idea that as a user of a language, you can create an infinite number of brand-new utterances, and you can understand an utterance you have never heard previously. Language is made of small building blocks that can be rearranged over and over again, and users of the language can figure out how that works.
- Arbitrariness: Language is made up of a series of small pieces (sounds) that together build bigger pieces (words) and together build even bigger pieces (sentences, etc). But taken alone, an individual sound is meaningless. The meaning of a word is completely arbitrary, and is accepted for no reason other than the fact that everybody just goes with it. There is nothing about the set of sounds /k/ /a/ /t/ that means an animal often kept as a pet.
There are other features often also listed for language, but I think that these are the four main requirements.
So I’d like to open up the question to a true general (but well-educated) audience. PLA, what do you think counts as language? How do you know when a child has developed language?
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