Tomasello, Michael, and Elizabeth Bates, ed. (2001) Language Development: The Essential Readings. Blackwell Publishers, viii+375pp, paperback ISBN 0-631-21744-4, $16.99.
Dr. Tabea Becker, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur, Universität Dortmund, Germany
CONTENTS AND PURPOSE DESCRIPTION Tomasello's and Bates's book is a compilation of nineteen papers on language acquisition. It is designed mainly for students, though I would say, for a rather advanced level. Most of these papers have been published elsewhere before. In this edition, however, they have been adapted, updated or shortened for better accessibility. From these papers I have selected several which are briefly summarized here.
The book is divided into 4 major parts, each beginning with a short and concise introduction. Part I contains five papers and is titled "Introduction to Speech Perception".
The first paper by Peter W. Jusczyk is on "Finding and Remembering Words: Some Beginnings by English-Learning Infants". By reviewing several studies Jusczyk gathers evidence that infants are fairly able to segment words from fluent speech by about 7,5 months. He presents two strategies infants seem to apply and gives further evidence that to do so they retain information about frequently used words.
Janet F. Werker and Renée N. Desjardins discuss phoneme perception in the first year of life. They conclude that infants move from a universal to a language-specific phoneme perception.
A Study on "Language Discrimination by Human Newborns and by Cotton-Top Tamarin Monkeys" is presented by Franck Ramus et al. It reveals striking similarities as well as interesting differences on speech perception between newborns and monkeys (both species can discriminate between Dutch and Japanese). A finding which contributes to the discussion about the innateness of specialized capacities for language comprehension and production.
Rebecca L. Gomez and LouAnn Gerken have studied artificial language learning in infants. With this type of research they want to demonstrate with what kind of abilities infants are equipped for parsing linguistic input. Studies show that these abilities appear to identify word-like constituents in fluent speech, constraints on grammatical word order and some ability to abstract.
Part II is an introduction to word learning. The first paper by Helen I. Shwe and Ellen M. Markmann deals with "Children's Appreciation of the Mental Impact of Their Communicative Signals". In a study they tested whether 30 month old children are aware that their communicative signals have an impact on the mental state of their listeners, by observing their reaction to receiving or not receiving a desired object. Both conditions were tested first in a situation with positive understanding between child and interlocutor and second with negative understanding. The children used significantly more verbal devices to correct the negative understanding then to correct the action.
M. C. Caselli et al. compare the lexical development in English and Italian. Their aim is to investigate cross-linguistic differences in the onset and growth of nouns and verbs and universal vs. language-specific patterns in the development of function words. While they found no evidence supporting the idea that verbs or predicative terms are acquired earlier in languages favoring verbs due to input conditions such as Italian, there seem to be marked similarities in the acquisition of function words and closed class words.
Part III of this volume "Grammatical Development" is introduced by a paper of one of the editors, Michael Tomasello, on "The Item-based Nature of Children's Early Syntactic Development", in which he discusses arguments for the emergence of linguistic structures from social-interactive processes. From this interactive perspective he describes the process of grammaticalization drawing on findings from several observational studies. In this he attacks the "continuity assumption" (see also Tomasello 2000) and holds that children's early linguistic competence is item based, lacking syntactic categories or parameters.
An article by N. Akhtar explores the acquisition of basic word order. Akhtar presents a study where children were confronted with pseudo words describing novel actions in novel (non-SVO) grammatical structures. The results "support the hypothesis that acquisition of a general understanding of the syntactic significance of word order is a gradual process" and therefor do not fit with strong parameter setting models of acquisition.
A further interesting paper treats the "Acquisition of Plural Marking in English and German Revisited: Schemata Versus Rules" by K.-M. Köpcke. He reanalyzes data from experiments with nonsense words (e.g. the famous study by Berko (1958)) which he interprets as evidence for a schema-learning model based on relative cue-strength. Here he addresses one of the central issues that feature in the controversial debate of schema versus rule governed acquisition (for a counter perspective see Marcus et al. 1995 or more accessible for students Pinker 1999).
Dan I. Slobin outlines in his paper "Form/Function Relations: How Do Children Find Out What They Are?" the notion of typological bootstrapping. He states that each language has over time developed its own typological character. The child picks up various pieces of the coherent system each language represents and interrelates them with inherent typological factors. In the course of acquiring a certain language form-function relations thus become systematically patterned.
The final section of this book is titled "Brains, Genes, and Computation in Language Development".
It begins with an article by Jeffrey L. Elman on "Connectionism and Language Acquisition". Since various articles in this volume are affiliated to the connectionist paradigm, a student is introduced somewhat late to this theoretical approach. Though very informative, it is too short for a general introduction one would hope for.
Despite its complex topic, B. Clancy and B. Finlay's paper on "Neural Correlates of Early Language Learning" is very readable. The first part successively describes the different stages of development and maturation the human brain undergoes from the first prenatal weeks to the early postnatal period. The second part compares these developments and events to the stages of language acquisition. The authors interpret their comparison not as neuronal predisposition for language but rather as a general "readiness for learning", thereby qualifying the changes which take place as experience driven.
The volume's last article is a contribution of A. Karmiloff-Smith's, titled "Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders". This title very well summarizes her main point, in that she links several language deficiencies occurring (or not occurring) in patients with SLI or Williams syndrome to general developmental disorders which are only indirectly connected with genetic disorders.
CRITICAL EVALUATION Most papers are very readable with usually a short summary at the end and well suited for advanced students. Altogether the papers are method-oriented, describing the latest studies and test-designs, never just theory based. This not only provides a good insight to research at its core but helps very much to underline and illustrate the arguments which are made. Most papers are well balanced between giving an intelligible and scientifically correct description of their test designs and avoiding confusing or superfluous tables and statistical details.
Although the authors claim to have avoided jargon there are still enough technical terms left making a glossary desirable. Especially since it is advertised to and indeed, does cover a wide range of disciplines, also one of its major strengths.
Nevertheless, all the papers in this book represent a similar theoretical approach, namely the connectionist and interactive approach, a bias readily admitted. But despite this admittance a more general introduction to this biased perspective is missing. Nor do we find references or a placement regarding other theoretical approaches.
A further point of criticism I find to be the concentration on the very early phases of language development. No paper deals with older children, which might leave a big gap from the first two word sentences to adult syntax and vocabulary.
Therefor, to cover the full scope of current acquisition theories within the context of a class on language development further readings are necessary. Though it is on one hand quite convincing to look at language acquisition from one stringent perspective, on the other hand one of the most complex phenomena in the field of linguistics should not be treated without a wide scope of viewpoints. Combined with other readings this book can be warmly recommended for advanced students as well as any other scholar interested in latest research on child language acquisition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Berko, J. (1958) The child's learning of English morphology. Word 14, 150-177. Marcus, G. et al. (1995) German inflection: the exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology 29, 189-256. Pinker, S. (1999) Words and Rules. Tomasello, M. (2000) Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition 74, 209-253.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH After doing my PhD dissertation at the Technical University of Darmstadt, I'm now teaching at the University of Dortmund. I first began my education at the University of California, Los Angeles, though not yet in linguistics. I completed my M. A. at the Technical University Darmstadt in 1996. My subjects were German and English linguistics and Art History. My main research interests are language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, language processing, bilingualism and narrative.
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