Page 198 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes Another more advanced but obvious example of the rule-governed nature of child language are
forms such as mans, foots, gooses, childs, which children produce frequently. Such plurals occur
even when a child understands and responds correctly to the adult forms men, feet, geese, etc. This
is a proof that a child’s own rules of grammar are more important to him than mere imitation.
14.3 Other Areas of Psycho-Linguistics

Psycholinguistics covers a wide range of interests, and other aspects are currently being studied. The
study of speech disturbances, aphasia, pausing and hesitations, language use, etc. are the other aspects
of psycholinguistics. More recent studies are taking into consideration not only the utterance of children
but also of parents. The realisation is growing that future studies must take into account the child’s
whole environment, and particularly the speech of its parents.
Roger Brown and Ursula Bellugi of Harvard University have studied an interesting type of interaction
which takes place between parent and child, to processes which they call ‘imitation and reduction’,
and ‘imitation and expansion’. They have noted that the child imitates its mother; but reduces the
utterance in length and omits inflections, resulting in a ‘telegraphic’ style of speech:
Mother: Daddy is eating food.
Child: Daddy food.
Conversely, a parent tends to imitate the child by repeating and expanding its utterance:
Child: Daddy food.
Mother: Yes, that’s right. Daddy’s eating food.
But more research on parent and child speech is needed before any firm conclusions about universal
acquisition processes can be reached.
Self-Assessment

1. Why the boundary between Psycholinguistics and languages becoming blurred?
14.4 Summary

• As a distinct area of interest, psycholinguistics developed in the early sixties, and in its early
form covered acoustic phonology and language pathology. But now-a-days it has been influenced
deeply by the development of generative theory, and its most important area of investigation
has been language acquisition.
• Now-a-days, certain areas of language and linguistic theory tend to be concentrated on by the
psycholinguist. Much of psycholinguistics has been influenced by generative theory and the
so-called mentalists. The most important area is the investigation of the acquisition of language
by children. In this respect there have been many studies of both a theoretical and a descriptive
kind. The need for descriptive study arises due to the fact that until recently hardly anything
was known about the actual facts of language acquisition in children, in particular about the
order in which grammatical structures were acquired. Even elementary questions as to when
and how the child develops its ability to ask question syntactically, or when it learns the
inflectional system of its language, remained unanswered. However, a great deal of work has
been done recently on the methodological and descriptive problems related to the obtaining
and analysing information of this kind.
• Psycholinguists therefore argue that imitation is not enough; it is not merely by mechanical
repetition that children acquire language. They also acquire it by natural exposure. Both nature
and nurture influence the acquisition of language in children. Children learn first not items but
systems. Every normal child comes to develop this abstract knowledge of his mother tongue,
even of a foreign language, to some extent for himself; and the generative approach argues that
such a process is only explicable if one postulates that certain features of this competence are
present in the brain of the child right from the beginning.

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