The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition

Abstract

These two volumes contain 16 chapters together with an editorial introduction. One of the papers in Volume II is also by Slobin and he is coauthor of the chapter on Turkish in Volume I. Volume I is oriented towards the acquisition of specific languages (namely, English, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Kaluli, Polish, Romance [with special reference to French], Samoan, Turkish, American Sign language), whereas the second focuses on theoretical issues. MacWhinney's paper in the second volume adds Hungarian to the list of languages from which the data are drawn. It should be obvious that this is an important collection since nothing of this scope and type exists. It is the culmination of some 15 years of research on language acquisition motivated largely by Slobin's notion of the operating principles which guide language acquisition. The contributors address themselves to a common set of issues and sum up the research that has been done on particular languages. At the same time, however, these volumes draw our attention to how few languages we have adequate acquisitional data for. One useful function of this collection is thus to identify lacunae in the literature and to isolate particular problems that require elucidation from a particular type of data. There are still many aspects of acquisition for which we have no data, even in relatively well-investigated languages like English and French. At the moment, cross-linguistic comparison can be realistically carried out for only a handful of constructions and/or categories, for example, passives, locative prepositions, relative clauses. And even for features that have been extensively studied, there is often little agreement across different studies. The subsystems chosen for cross-linguistic comparison are generally biased towards the typological distinctions made within Indo-European languages. Thus, not surprisingly, there have been no comparative studies of children's acquisition of switch reference systems, as far as I know. The evidence presented from languages like Japanese, Samoan, and Kaluli indicate too how biased our notions are of what children's language is like. Linguistics generally refer to the early stages of child language as telegraphic because much that would have to be present in the presumed adult equivalent has not been expressed. However, in other languages ellipsis is the norm. As Ochs (808) points out, in Samoan the relative nonexpression of major constituents is a sign of competence, since the presence of a subject or object would represent a marked strategy of expression. In English, however, telegraphic speech is indicative of incompetence. In still other cases, like Turkish, child speech is not telegraphic because children acquire most of the inflectional system by 2 years of age or earlier. Although utterances are short