elop.
This latter view is turning out to be something of an exaggeration. The fact that parents make it easier for children to learn language does not explain why they are so quick to acquire it: intelligent chimps exposed to intensive sign language rarely get beyond 200 words and two-word sequences. Furthermore, language seems to be due to something more than a desire to communicate. There is at least one strange child on record who acquired fluent language, but did not use it to communicate. He spoke only monologues to himself, and refused to interact with others.
The whole controversy is far from being solved, though psycholinguists hope that the increasing amount of work being done on the acquisition of languages ??other than English may shed more light on the topic. It seems likely that children use an inbuilt linguistic ability to solve general intelligence problems, and also their natural puzzle-solving abilities to solve linguistic problems. With this kind of intertwining, the various strands may be inextricably interwoven.
In spite of the numerous controversies surrounding child language, psycholinguists are at least in agreement on one major point. Children are not simply imitating what they hear going on around them as if they were parrots. The learning processes involved are far more complex. From the moment they begin to talk, children seem to be aware that language is rule-governed, and they are engaged in an active search for the rules which underlie the language to which they are exposed. Child language is never at any time a haphazard conglomeration of random words, or a sub-standard version of adult speech. Instead, every child at every stage possesses a grammar with rules of its own even though the system will be simpler than that of an adult. For example, when children first use negatives, they normally use a simple rule: «Put no or not in front of the sentence.» This results in consistent negative sentences which the child could not possibly have heard from an adult:
No play that.
No Fraser drink all tea.
This rule is generally superseded by another which says: «Insert the negative after the first NP.» This also produces a consistent set of sentences which the child is unlikely to have heard from an adult:
Doggie no bite. no mummy.
A rather more obvious example of the rule-governed nature of child language are forms such as mans, foots, gooses, which children produce frequently. Such plurals occur even when a child understands and responds correctly to the adult forms men, feet, geese. This is clear proof that children's own rules of grammar are more important to them than mere imitation.do not, however, formulate a new rule overnight, and suddenly replace the old one with this new one. Instead, there is considerable fluctuation between the old and the new. The new construction appears at first in a limited number of places. A child might first use the word what in a phrase with a single verb,
What mummy doing?
What daddy doing?
What Billy doing? only gradually extend it to other verbs, as in
W...
