how do children learn to say what they mean?
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How do children learn to say what they mean?Hazel Francis aa University of London Institute of EducationPublished online: 07 Jul 2006.
To cite this article: Hazel Francis (1983) How do children learn to say what they mean?, Early Child Development and Care,11:1, 3-18, DOI: 10.1080/0300443830110102
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How do children learn to saywhat they mean?
HAZEL FRANCIS
University of London Institute of Education
This paper outlines work that suggests that research intochildren's learning of linguistic structure has progressed little inthe last decade or so. With reference to a recent paper (Cromer,1981) reasons are given why research in language acquisitionhas not addressed the question, in spite of interesting studies ofcomprehension, child grammars, children's semantic andpragmatic knowledge, and mother-child interaction. Attitudinaland methodological difficulties are identified, and considerationof the latter in relation to a specific example of child speech, leadsto a recommendation for a comparative method using intensiveshort-term sampling of speech in its context of use in order to testhypotheses derived from lighter sampling in longitudinalstudies. It is claimed that the method is the best hope of locatingnew structures in relation to the conditions of their production,and of identifying learning strategies as developed by individualchildren. If successful, such work could be of considerable utilityin the practical contexts of child care.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STRUCTURE
BEHIND RESEARCH into language acquisition lies the assumption thatchildren learn to say what they mean, not simply that they learn totalk, nor that they learn to talk to some purpose, but that they learnthe discriminating use of language to suit their own purposes in thesocial and material world around them. Discrimination implieslearning different ways of formulating utterances, and hence theintelligent mastery of both structure and function. Yet, in spite ofsome two decades of research since 1959, when Chomsky pouredscorn on Skinner's Verbal Behavior and fired enthusiasm for studies ofsyntax in the light of his claims for transformational grammar, there
Early Child Development and Care, © Gordon and Breach1983, Vol. 11.pp. 3-18 Science Publishers, Inc., 19830300-4430/83/1101-0003 $18.50/0 Printed in Great Britain
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is very little understanding of such learning. In this paper I want toconsider why this is so and to suggest a step forward.
THE RESEARCH TASK
Almost twenty years ago, when my youngest child was learning totalk, I tried to monitor the development of his speech in variouscontexts. Following this study, and in the light of existing literature,I wrote ". . . one is forced to consider the possibility that claims forchildren's mastery of their language may well have beenexaggerated and that any innate specification is quite limited.Within these limits the term 'actualisation' used by Lenneberg(1967, p. 374) may mean the same as construction from availableinformation. If so one cannot speak simply of innate linguisticcompetence but must ask whence comes the structure that is neitherinnately specified nor learned after any manner yet described"; and"To comprehend the principles of acquisition we must explore thechild's activity and communication; we must find out how theorganisation of his perceptions and movements relates to thepatterning of the physical word and the events and the language heencounters within it" (Francis, 1970). In a different paper (Francis,1969) I wrote, "A child's experience consists of many, manyepisodes in which the maturing biological organisation of his bodyinteracts with the patterned physical and social world, and eachtime he gleans a little more pattern and adds a little more, thus bothlearning from life and making his own impact".
Why then, ten years or so later, did Cromer (1981) press for"another approach to language acquisition that focuses on thechild's contribution. It is that of viewing language as a structuralsystem to be acquired, and one that children will approach in waysnot unlike the manner in which they approach other conceptualtasks"? Gromer gives illustrations of how research has not addressedthe problem of syntax in the intervening decade. I shall summarisethese, add my own comments, and then go on to suggest that therehas been not only a failure to address the question of languagelearning but an actual avoidance of it. Understanding why may helpmovement forward.
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HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN TO SAYWHATTHEY MEAN?
LACK OF RESEARCH INTO LEARNING
Cromer reviewed four different areas of research which have beenbrought to bear on language acquisition, namely comprehensionstrategies, cognitive pre-requisites for language, semantic aspects ofchild language, and mother-child interaction studies. Together theycomprise psychologists' interests in the relationship betweenlanguage and thinking and linguists' shifts of interest from syntaxthrough semantics to pragmatics.
Studies of comprehension strategies, like those referred to inClark and Clark (1977), have generally explored the ways childrenperform tasks according to variation in the linguistic form of theinstructions they are given. Although task differences sometimesaffect the way children respond to the same instruction, as, forexample, when the choice of container or surface affects the toddler'sresponse to instructions to place an object in, on or under another, it isclear that children often do not fully understand instructions andperform in part according to their expectations from everydayknowledge. Cromer made the telling points that such strategieswould not be adopted if children truly comprehended the relevantlanguage, and that there is no evidence that their strategies enablethem to do so. They are not strategies for language learning.
Other research reviewed by Cromer is concerned with attempts toexplain language acquisition in terms of cognitive development.Mechanisms such as the capacity of working memory which isconcerned with information processing but which develops duringchildhood, modes of thinking like those described in Piagetiantheory, and classification and embedding processes which cangenerally be demonstrated in perception and cognition, can beshown to be implicated in language use, but are too general to be asufficient explanation of acquisition. Conceptual knowledge has alsobeen thought to be a pre-requisite for noticing and using certainlinguistic terms. Analysis of use of expressions of time, possessionand number have figured prominently in this respect, but the matteris not entirely clear. For example it can be shown that a child mayuse appropriately the numbers one and two, and singular and pluralpronouns, before generally using plural markers or nouns (Francis,
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1975). Thus more than conceptual knowledge is needed to explainthe differences in time of acquisition. Cromer also reported workshowing children's use of linguistic expressions without priorcomprehension, which argues against a cognitive pre-requisitehypothesis. In a different context I have suggested that learning totalk, and so learning to use grammatical expressions, may itself be apre-requisite for reorganising the conceptual system to allow thesyntagmatic/paradigmatic shift in the organisation of semanticknowledge (Francis, 1972). Language acquisition cannot bedissociated from cognitive mechanisms and conceptual knowledge,but these cannot be regarded simply as either necessary or sufficientconditions for all its aspects. Somehow a linguistic system has to bemapped against the cognitive. As Cromer said of the idea thatconceptual knowledge is a pre-requisite for linguistic, the problem isthat it does not explain the acquisition of the linguistic forms bywhich those meanings are encoded. This applied with as much forceto those studies, following Bloom (1970), which described childlanguage in terms of semantic categories and relations and turned toconceptual development as an explanatory mechanism. Heconsidered that the lack of differentiation between concept and wordbetrayed an empiricist view of mind.
As to the development of research in the pragmatics of childlanguage, Cromer found the mother-child interaction studiesequally deficient. He claimed that they have tended to view learninglargely in terms of imitation and modelling, and they have not beenwilling to consider that the child might have some innate ability orpredisposition to learn linguistic structure, although they haveallowed it in the case of social interaction. He also attributed thesedeficiencies to a hidden empiricism.
THE NEED FOR RECONCEPTUALISATION
Summarising his review Gromer drew the conclusions that researchhad paid scant attention to strategies of language learning as distinctfrom strategies of comprehension, and that neither rationalist norempiricist theories had succeeded in tackling the problem of
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structure. He argued for a genuinely interactionist approach,demanding some reconceptualisation. He wanted to see languagetreated as a problem space for the child rather than an inevitabledevelopment given certain pre-requisites, and argued for a dualconcern with what the child can bring to a problem and theinformation he might use from the context in which it arises. Hecommended work such as that of Newport et al. (1977), whichconsidered in some detail the knowledge children bring to theirexchanges with others and what aspects of linguistic structure seemto be affected by adult speech and behaviour. He also foundKarmiloff-Smith's (1979) attention to language itself as presentingproblems for the child to solve to be a useful way of viewing it.
I think he is largely correct in his criticism of the inadequacy ofresearch into learning the structural aspects of language, and I canunderstand his criticism of the simplicity of the ways language termshave been related to the episode of their use. There does seem to havebeen an unquestioning association of words with perceptions oractions, but I think the shortcoming is not the outcome of consciousempiricism, but rather a matter of default. An intentionalempiricism would have shown a concern with learning, and with theconditions of learning, rather than with descriptions of states ofknowledge. It would not have been dominated by the rationalistview of language and mind that can be found behind the studies ofchild grammars, and to be hidden behind the later speech actapproaches. Clark (1977), reviewing work on utterance structurepoints to the influence of Chomsky (1957) in turning linguists awayfrom distributional analyses and pointing them to the use oftransformational grammar and the hunt for linguistic universalswhen characterising child language. Although strong claims for aninnate language acquisition device were modified in the earlyseventies, and Fillmore's (1968) case grammar was adopted aspossibly a more useful device than Chomsky's transformational,nevertheless there remained a pervasive belief in some innatelinguistic organising ability in the child, at least sufficient to accountfor relations such as subject of predicate, or topic and comment, oragent and action. It was as though some structural competencebecame unquestioned. For example Slobin (1973) wrote, "I take for
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granted that all human children are able to learn language, and ask:Are there common orders of acquisition of different linguisticfeatures across languages?"; and Bloom (1970), starting from thepoint where children could already produce two or three wordutterances,, simply assumed that grammatical relations werealready functional and found no problem in doing so.
This taken-for-grantedness seemed also to pervade those studiesof pragmatics which turned to speech acts as a framework foranalysing children's talking. Bruner (1975), for example, chose touse a speech act analysis of the transition from pre-linguistic tolinguistic communication to allow an emphasis on use rather thanform; but then, without anything more than a claim for rathergeneral innate sensori-motor and cognitive pre-requisites, impliedthat such an approach could explain the development of formalstructures. Although he rejected linguistic innateness he did claiminnate status for "some special features of human action and humanattention that permit language to be decoded by the uses to which itis put." This is not an empiricist view of mind, but it appears to allowan evasion of the problem of syntactic structure. Dore (1975) wrotein a similar vein, though later he recognised the gap betweencommunicative and linguistic abilities (Dore, 1978).
I think, therefore, that it was not so much a hidden empiricisttheory of mind as an unclear rationalist one that impeded research.I should like to suggest that the lack of clarity arose from acombination of avoidance of a serious approach to learning anddifficulty with the methodological problems of empirical research.
APPROACHES TO LEARNING
The avoidance must in part have been a reaction to Chomsky'sattack on behaviourism. His case seemed both unassailable andintellectually demanding. To grasp it fully required a serious studyof linguistics. On the face of it, and by contrast, the psychology oflearning was made to look simple and naive, and Chomsky had nocompunction about treating it with ridicule. Although thesucceeding years saw changes in linguistic theory, these did not
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seriously challenge a rationalist theory of mind as, for example, theymight have done by showing that language was in principle entirelylearnable. Thus there was no compelling reason for those studyingchild language to do so from other than the stance that somehowchildren are innately equipped to cope with structure, andspecifically with linguistic structure. To question the idea of aninnate mechanism for a grammar of natural language entailed goingagainst the Zeitgeist and risking highly emotive criticism for whatmight have seemed like returning to a linguistics that had at one timebeen much influenced by behaviourism. For psychologists there hasbeen a divide between a strongly developing cognitive psychologyand an older psychology of learning with roots in the behaviouristtradition. To the extent that the psychology of learning treated thechild as a passive individual under environmental control thistradition has largely been abandoned, but for various reasons childlanguage has been the domain of the cognitive psychologist and ofthe developmental psycholinguist, with the attendant risk of a'cognitive pre-requisite' approach, rather than of the psychologistinterested in learning. Yet in other domains when the matter to belearned has been regarded as learnable in principle and has beenwell-defined, very interesting research into learning strategies andachievements has been undertaken. Recognition of this was nicelysummarised in Entwistle's (1976) editorial article headed "The verbto learn takes the accusative". Perhaps psychologists have been toounready to examine language to identify structure which might inprinciple be learnable. Nevertheless work by Pinker (1979) suggeststhat the question of learnability is far from settled and Stemmer(1981), has pressed the investigation ofstructure-dependent rules assomething to be learned. Like Cromer I would want to say that thisline should be pursued, though there are limitations to Stemmer'sapproach as it stands, notably in the lack of systematically collectedempirical data and in the problem of accounting for the developmentof relations between words and meanings.
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10 HAZEL FRANCIS
METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
I think two considerable methodological difficulties havecontributed to the relative lack of research into language learning.The first is a difficulty often found in investigating significant humanlearning, namely control of what is to be learned. It would be usefulto be able to set a specific learning task, but if this were to be at allsignificant in language development then ethical issues would arise.To inject a dye into an underground stream to trace its movement inrelation to others is one thing, to inject some novel structural featureinto the language of a toddler is quite another. It can be, and hasbeen, done with lexical items whether nonsense syllables (Brown,1957) or as yet unknown words (Carey, 1978); but adding to ormodifying the bounds of a semantic class is trivial compared withmodifying structural rules. Similarly, control of the conditions oflearning raises ethical and practical problems, so true experiment isseverely limited. The longitudinal study, essentially a time seriesexperiment, is probably the best research method available, but itencounters the second difficulty. To monitor performance in order tolocate change requires a clear specification of what is changing andunder what conditions, with adequate observational techniques andreporting. I have discussed elsewhere the problems of validreporting of, and inference about, the structure of remarks (Francis1975, 1979). It may be more helpful here to illustrte the problem andto discuss ways of attempting to come to grips with it in order tosuggest a way forward.
AN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE OF A COMPARATIVE METHOD
The use of inferred meanings to discriminate between identicalsurface forms was raised in relation to semantic content by Bloom(1970), and in relation to functional meanings by Halliday (1975).Neither, however, explored the problems of validity of interpretationto any serious extent. Speech act theory points to the inference ofintentions, i.e. the kind of effects utterances are intended to have onhearers, as well as the intended encoded information. Not only may
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grammatically similar surface structures cover different informationstructures, but identical utterances can be used to different effect. Toillustrate from my own study, I found Put this on when the childseemed to be telling his sister to put another brick on a tower and Gotlights on when he appeared to be commenting that a toy car he wasplaying with had lights on it. Similar surface structures, say of verb,noun or pronoun, and adverb (or action, object, and location,depending on the choice of descriptive framework), served animperative function in one case and a declarative in the other. Hesaid I make a mess, when reporting that he had done so, and I make apolish just before he set about polishing a table, the two structuresfailing to differentiate between reporting an achievement and anintention. With identity rather than similarity he said / beatyou, oncewhen he meant he had won a toy car race, and once when he waschallenging his sister to a race. These examples make it clear thatassigning structure to these remarks entails dependency oninformation which is rarely clearly specified in the literature, myown work included.
At the following point, however, I thought I had a good idea ofwhat was happening at the time, and I was much perplexed by theremark Mine shooting gone. The child and his sister were eatingbiscuits with sporting illustrations stamped on them. There wereboats, and bows and arrows, amongst others; and the childrencommented to each other on their choice. They first attempted tofind similar biscuits. In the exchange the child in question producedthe following:—
There's a boat (as his sister found a biscuit marked with a boatshape)
Where's my boat? (searching the biscuit tin)I got a boat (finding one)Yes, mine's boaty (looking at the marking)
The use of 'boaty' as an adjective is an interesting example of thecreation of a word for which there is not an equivalent single wordadult expression, but which captures quite a specific andappropriate meaning. But more was to come. As the children ate asecond biscuit he used the following:—
Mine's shooting (a biscuit marked with a bow and arrow)
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Gone (as he finished the biscuit)Mine shooting goneAgain the sense seemed clear. The remarks together functioned as
moves in a game he was playing with his sister in which the aimseemed to be to ensure fairness in the matter of biscuit-eating. Hissister, a year older, was producing grammatically more completeand less 'deviant' remarks, but they fulfilled the same kinds offunction. To accurately justify ascription of these functions onewould have to account specifically for the sense of each remark in itscontext, and this would imply inference about its structure. Thedegree of confidence I could claim for any of my interpretationsvaried, and the most obscure remark in the structural sense was thelast. How could it be described?
The first decision was whether to make the attempt or to abandonit. Studies which attempt to describe regularities of child languagecan afford to ignore such remarks, seeing them as 'performanceerrors' or as irrelevancies because they do not seem to fit either thechild's grammar or the adult's. But if language is a problem space forthe child, if learning is based on the creation of his own solutions todifficulties, then such remarks acquire considerable interest notsimply as sources of information about undeveloped knowledge, butalso as hints for describing learning strategies. Therefore, takingnothing for granted about the child's syntactic competence, I shallconsider what he might have been doing.
The first move might be to specify how the observer thought theremark functioned. It was uttered as if it marked the completion ofan episode of behaviour, which indeed seemed to be the case, forattention turned away from eating biscuits to other activities. Theintended effect on the hearer appeared to be also to signal readinessfor a new venture. To achieve this it was necessary to report thecompletion of the current episode and to start a new activity. In factthe child did both. He showed no frustration that his sister did notcontinue to speak of biscuit-eating and his next remark waseffectively a suggestion that he should clear away the tray of cupsand biscuits. So, if Mine shooting gone was an end of episode remark, itshould next be considered in relation to the whole relevant episode.
The total combination of utterances and context information
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suggests that the report was effectively I've eaten my biscuit with theshooting pattern on it. The past tense of gone was suitably selected.However, no simple parental expansion ofMine shooting gone could befound to represent this meaning. The nearest might be Mine, whichhad a shooting pattern, has gone, unless the option is taken of splittinginto two what was intoned as a complete utterance. One could tryMine was a shooting one. It's gone. Either way the result is a complextwo-clause or two-sentence expression. Let us for the moment holdon to the options, problematic though they are, and see whether acomplex structural description can be justified on other grounds.
A next move might be to examine the child's speech history forclues about the construction. Had he used anything like it before?My sampling of his speech was restricted to a ten-minute or sosession each day and this was only the tenth day. However, therewere some clues. First, within that day's session there was evidenceof mine being used appropriately with is, and of shooting being usedlike boaty to describe the biscuits in a discriminating manner. Shootingcould conceivably be a descriptive reference or an identification ofthe object (biscuit) itself. If the former, then the child might havesaid Mine's shooting gone, whereas if the latter he ought to have saidMy shooting gone. Although the former is in line with Mine's boaty it ishardly an improvement on what he did say, but the latter is morepromising. It is in line with Where's my boat? Yet this is not entirelysatisfactory because he had apparently discriminated between theboat marking and the biscuit itself (boaty one). So why not betweenthe shooting pattern and the biscuit? 11 was the biscit that had gone.
Could any light be thrown on the problem from the previous ninedays' sampling of his speech? Since there were no examples of'shooting' biscits particularly relevant samples were expressions ofmine, my, and gone. There were examples of Mine gone in two othercontexts — the removal of a pile of pieces of modelling-clay and themovement of a group of chessmen. In both cases the remarks seemedhighly appropriate and structurally in line with many otherinstances of the non-use of an auxiliary verb. Mine also appeared inother remarks in both initial and later word positions inconventionally satisfactory ways. Examples were Mine go on the table,Mine coming, That's mine, and You lost mine. My, however, did not
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appear in first position. There were examples such as Gone in mymouth, and Pull my train, but no examples such as My train gone. Afurther observation was that apart from the sole instance of Car-cargothere was no other example of a noun before the verb until the daypreceding the biscuit episode, when the child played with variationsof man and train with go and going. Now perhaps this was a samplingdeficiency, but perhaps it indicated something to be learned. If so,the child was not likely to start a remark with My shooting, but wouldbe very likely to start with Mine.
In summary, in the light of such prior knowledge as can beinferred from the evidence, he might not have been able to start hisremark with My shooting one or My biscuit, and if he intended to usegone he might not have been able to precede it with a noun. So whatcould be do? He could only have said Mine gone. But wait, the 'game'included the mutual eating of two biscuits each. The insertion ofshooting looks like a valiant attempt to specify that his second biscitwas finished, i.e. that the whole episode was over, and so I return tomy original speculation that to do justice to his meaning a complexstructural description was required. In order to say what he meantin a discriminating way the child packed the necessary elementsfrom his repertoire in a creative but unconventional solution. That it'worked' for his hearer possibly encouraged him to try packagingmore before the verb on a future occasion. The very next day he saidMy fire-engine coming in an episode of play with toy vehicles, andthereafter used other instances of full noun phrases before verbs.This suggested a development of some considerable structuralsignificance.
So I have a hypothesis about this remark, and several about itsrelationship to the child's ability to use various structures.Unfortunately my data are thin. Ten minutes sampling per day wasnot enough to give me much confidence in my inferences. I think itwould have been very worthwhile to have intensively sampled forsome two weeks, paying more attention than I had done to thespeech of his sister and particularly to the relationship of speech withcontext. Ideally I should have obtained a complete record. Inpractice it was impossible single-handed, but I could have recordedmuch more than I did and could have been alerted to possible
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significant events occurring outside the sampling. I would have beenmore confident about the child's repertoire for saying what heseemed to mean, and about the conditions under which he venturednew productions. I could have given more convincing reasons forpreferring one structural description to another, and for suggestingpossible learning strategies. Two which did suggest themselves fromamongst my data will illustrate possibilities.
One seemed to be to let the impetus of ongoing activity assist thestructuring of remarks. For example, when There's a lorry, Lorry going,and Round a corner were all in the child's repertoire he managed toutter, as he pushed his toy lorry enthusiastically along, There's a lorrygoing round a corner. Another seemed to be to inveigle his sister intoexchanges of remarks which formed arrays of instances of thediscriminating use of structures. An instance occurred in talkingabout possession of toys when the possessive pronouns andadjectives mine, my,yours and your were used discriminatingly in verysimply constructed and contrastive remarks. Hints of suchstrategies, and of others, implying that children acquire learningstrategies which they put to specific learning tasks, can be found inthe existing literature, but, as Cromer pointed out, they have beenneglected in favour of descriptions of conversational strategies andstudies of the effects of maternal speech based on inadequateconceptualisation of learning processes.
A NEW DIRECTION?
The comparative and interpretive methodology I am advocatinghere, based on intensive sampling over a relatively short period andnested in lighter sampling for longer, stems from a consideration ofthe dual difficulties of experimentally investigating a naturallearning phenomenon and of obtaining structural descriptions ofremarks which are valid in relation to both the investigator's and thechild's frames of reference. It attempts to locate learning in theconditions under which it happens. It fits Cromer's appeal for areconceptualisation in that the child is viewed as constructing hisown solutions to the problem of mastering the linguistic competence
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that underlies effective communiction, and also in that his solutionsare seen to derive from an interaction between the knowledge hebrings to a problem and the information he can draw on to solve it.This information lies in the behaviour of his speech partner and thechallenges and constraints of the activity in which he is engaged. Afurther advantage of the method is that the relationship betweenword and reference would necessarily be probed rather than skirted.The methodology is committed to neither extreme of the rationalistand empiricist views of mind, and leaves open what view might beadopted in the light of a substantial body of research. That I happento have doubted the rationalist, and argued that rule-governedsyntax has its roots in convention at least as much as in any innateforms (Francis, 1970, 1975), is neither here nor there; though Iwould clearly have a considerable interest in the outcome of furtherresearch.
On reviewing the case I fear the reader may feel that too muchrests on a 'deviant' remark. It should be obvious, however, that thesame questions could have been asked if the child had said My biscuitgone. The interest would have stemmed from what would havelooked like a new structure for the child. The checking and cross-checking I have argued for Mine shooting gone should, in principle, beargued for all utterances. In practice one would select those remarkswhich were relevant for the learning of a particular well-definedstructure. Experimenal studies such as those of Karmiloff-Smith(1979) may help to identify structures of interest, and it may bepossible to devise some supporting learning experiments, but ingeneral it is spontaneous production of contrastive utterances withina developmental history which is likely to tell us most, provided thatwe manage the problem of interpretation well enough. Sometimeschildren tell us when our understanding does not seem to matchtheir intention, or when they want to change what they have said,but failing such forthright evidence our best recourse tocomprehension, and so to being able to identify their discriminatinguse of language, is to monitor the structural variations they seem touse and what they achieve thereby. That other interesting questionsare bound to emerge, such as the extent to which adults influencechildren's developing perceptions of the world through their best
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efforts to understand what they try to say, efforts which must beguided by their own experience of language and socialisaton, onlyadds to the excitement of the research and to its potential utility forpractical problems in the field of child care.
References
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