New Considerations of the Infantile Acquisition of Language and Symbolic Thought

In his recent survey of research in language and psychology, Arthur Blumenthal2 observes, “The acquisition of language by children has been the most frequently investigated subject.” He points to the many different kinds of data collected and to the various ideas about how it should be organized. Of all these ideas, it is generally acknowledged that those of Noam Chomsky are the most ingenious, successful, and influential. Nevertheless, David McNeill15 remarks, “The immediate prospects of explaining the acquisition of langauge are bleak.” Likewise, Lois Bloom,1 who has tried to understand infantile grammar in Chomsky's terms, concludes, “The crucial question of how this learning [of early grammar] occurred remains unanswered.” The present discussion will explore this question and suggest a model to answer it.

Considerable work has already been done to define the problem through the facts of infantile behavior. All observers agree, first of all, that at about eighteen months of age a discrete change takes place in the infant as he moves from one-word utterances, usually naming behavior, to two-or-more-word grammatical usages. The time it takes for this transition is usually not more than a week or two in the normal child. Furthermore, Eric Lenneberg14 claims that his investigations of nontechnological peoples have not “cast the slightest doubt on perfect chronological commensurability of language development throughout the world.” That is, in all cultures infants learn to speak grammatically at the same age and the same phase of development. Piaget's work16, 17, 18 on the development of the child's