The Mother Tongue Read Online Free Page A

arguing that some structural facets of language—the ground rules of speech,
    speech, if you like—must be innate. That isn't to suggest that you would have learned English spontaneously had you been brought up among wolves. But perhaps you are born with an in-stinctive sense of how language works, as a general thing. There are a number of reasons to suppose so. For one thing, we appear to have an innate appreciation of language. By the end of the first month of life infants show a clear preference for speechlike sounds over all others. It doesn't matter what language it is. To a baby no language is easier or more difficult than any other. They are all mastered at about the same pace, however irregular and wildly inflected they may be. In short, children seem to be programmed to learn language, just as they seem to be programmed to learn to walk. The process has been called basic child grammar. Indeed, children in the first five years of life have such a remarkable facility for language that they can effortlessly learn two structurally quite different languages simultaneously—if, for instance, their mother is Chinese and their father American—without displaying the slightest signs of stress or confusion.
    Moreover, all children everywhere learn languages in much the same way: starting with simple labels ("Me"), advancing to subject-verb structures ("Me want"), before progressing to subject-verb-emphatics ("Me want now"), and so on. They even babble in the same way. A study at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Baltimore
    [reported in Scientific American in January 1984] found that chil-dren from such diverse backgrounds as Arabic, English, Chinese, Spanish, and Norwegian all began babbling in a systematic way, making the same sounds at about the same time (four to six months before the start of saying their first words).
    The semantic and grammatical idiosyncrasies that distinguish one language from another—inflections of tense, the use of gender, and so on—are the things that are generally learned last, after the THE DAWN OF LANGUAGE
    child already has a functioning command of the language. Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost al-ways learn to say no before yes and in before on and all children
    -everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fas-cinated with the idea of " gone" and "all gone."
    The traditional explanation is that all of this is learned at your mother's knee. Yet careful examination suggests that that is un-likely. Most adults tend (even when they are not aware of it) to speak to infants in a simplified, gitchy-goo kind of way. This is not a sensible or efficient way to teach a child the difference between, say, present tense and past tense, and yet the child learns it.
    Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying "buyed," "eated," and "good - because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.
    Where vocabulary is concerned, children are very reliant on their mothers (or whoever else has the role of primary carer). If she says a word, then the child generally listens and tries to repeat it.
    But where grammar is concerned, children go their own way.
    According to one study [by Kenneth Wexler and colleagues at the University of California at Irvine, cited by The Economist, April 28, 1984], two thirds of utterances made by mothers to their infants are either imperatives or questions, and only one third are state-ments, yet the utterances of children are overwhelmingly state-ments. Clearly they don't require the same repetitive teaching because they are already a step ahead where syntax is concerned.
    Some of the most interesting theories about language develop-ment in recent years have been put forward by Derek Bickerton, an English-born professor at the University