Speech development (II)
A characteristic of children speech is that the first sentences they speak are always composed principally of nouns and verbs, and that the words that most abound--like articles and prepositions--are dropped from children sentences. It seems that the child's mind has the ability to choose what are the most essential parts of a sentence, like adults do when writing a telegram.
Other universal characteristic of children communications at this early age is the content of them: children around all the world limit their speaking to a very restricted subject matter. They talk about people, food, toys, pets, and body parts. It seems that their interest lies in whether these things appear or disappear, what are their usual locations, and the elementary actions in which they may be involved.
In the years that pass until the child reaches school age, he can become very fluent, even if he cannot state a single grammar rule. This process, by which the child progress from simple sentences to more elaborate ones, is of greatest interest to theoreticians. There is a mechanical aspect involved in speech production that is of interest in itself: the memorization of the words of a language. As much fascinating as this problem can be, taking in account that an adult's vocabulary can reach one hundred thousand words, there is one still more intriguing--grammar acquisition.
If the human mind can make room for the storage of several hundred thousand words (just think of a person that speaks two or more languages), it is inconceivable that it can store the infinite correct sentences of a language. Another process must be involved, by which the child extracts from what he listens a set of grammar rules that will enable him to create an infinite number of sentences. It is here that the major theoretical discussion is centered, and the two positions in dispute are the same that appear in other subjects related to human development: nature and nurture, or heredity and environment.
B. F. Skinner, founder of radical behaviorism, sustained that "verbal behavior" was learned according to the general rules of negative and positive reinforcement, which he believed to be of application to all learning in all animal species. On the contrary, N. Chomsky postulated the existence of a 'mental organ'--a language acquisition device--that could take sample linguistic material and extract the rules on which it was based. This organ would be of genetic origin, as also the knowledge of the type of rules that are possible.
The important studies by J. Piaget on the language and the thought of children did not shed light on this controversy, as he never took a position on the problem. The results of empirical work on speech development, however massive they can be, do not clearly support any point of view. The great quantity of information gathered about human languages, many of them obscure languages spoken by little people, remains still unexplained.
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