Language and thought

The relationship between language and thought poses thorny issues and questions. For years researchers have probed the relationship between language and cognition. The behaviorist view that cognition is too mentalistic to be studied by the scien­tific method is diametrically opposed to such positions as that of Piaget, who claims that cognitive development is at the very center of the human organism and that language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive development. Others choose to emphasize the influence of language on cognitive development. Jerome Bruner (llruner, Olver, and Greenfield 1966), for example, singled out sources of language influenced intellectual development: words shaping concepts, dialogues between parent and child or teacher and child serving to orient and educate, and other sources. It is clear that the research of the past decade has pointed to the fact that I cognitive and linguistic development are inextricably intertwined with dependencies in both directions.

One of the champions of the position that language affects thought was Benjamin Whorf, who with Edward Sapir formed the well-known Sapir-Whorf hypoth­esis of linguistic relativity—namely, that each language imposes on its speaker a particular "world view." (See Chapter Seven for more discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.)

The issue at stake in child language acquisition is to determine how thought affects language, how language affects thought, and how linguists can best describe and account for the interaction of the two. Once again we probe the issue of how best to explain both the forms and the function of a language. And again we do not have complete answers. But we do know that language is a way of life, is at the foundation of our being, and interacts simultaneously with thoughts and feelings.

The role of imitation and practice

It is a common, informal observation that children are "good imitators." We think of children typically as imitators and mimics, and then conclude that imitation is one of the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language. That con­clusion is not inaccurate on a global level. Indeed, research has shown that echoing is a particularly salient strategy in early language learning, and an important aspect of early phonological acquisition. Moreover, imitation is consonant with behaviorist principles of language acquisition-principles relevant, at least, to the earliest stages.

But it is important to ask what type of imitation is implied. Behaviorists assume one type of imitation, but there is a deeper level of imitation that is far more important in the process of language acquisition. The first type is surface-structure imitation, where a person repeats or mimics the surface strings, attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code. It is this level of imitation that enables an adult to repeat random numbers or nonsense syllables, or even to mimic unknown languages. The semantic data, if any, underlying the surface output are neither internalized nor attended to. In foreign language classes, rote pattern drills often evoke surface imitation: a repetition of sounds by the student without the vaguest understanding of what the sounds might possibly mean..The earliest stages of child language acquisition may manifest a good deal of surface imitation, since the baby may not possess the necessary semantic categories to assign "meaning" to utterances. But as children perceive the importance of the semantic level of lan­guage, they attend primarily if not exclusively to that meaningful semantic level— the deep structure of language. They engage in deep-structure imitation. In fact, the imitation of the deep structure of language can literally block their attention to the surface structure so that they become, on the face of it, poor imitators. Consider the following conversation as recorded by McNeill (1966:69);

You can imagine the frustration of both mother and child, for the mother was at­tending to a rather technical, surface grammatical distinction, and yet the child sought to derive some meaning value. Finally the child perceived some sort of sur­face distinction between what she was saying and what her mother was saying and made what she thought was an appropriate change.

A similar case in point occurred one day when the teacher of an elementary-school class asked her pupils to write a few sentences on a piece of paper, to which one rather shy pupil responded, "Ain't got no pencil." Disturbed at this nonstan­dard response the teacher embarked on a barrage of corrective models for the child: "I don't have any pencils, you don't have a pencil, they don't have pencils,..." When the teacher finally ended her monologue of patterns, the intimidated and be­wildered child said, "Ain't nobody got no pencils?" The teacher's purpose was lost on this child because he too was attending to language as a meaningful and commu­nicative tool, and not to the question of whether certain forms were "correct" and others were not. The child, like all children, was attending to the truth value of the utterance.

Research has also shown that children, when explicitly asked to repeat a sen­tence in a test situation, will often repeat the correct underlying deep structure with a change in the surface rendition. For example, sentences like "The ball that is rolling down the hill is black" and "The boy who's in the sandbox is wearing a red shirt" tend to be repeated back by preschool children as "The black ball is rolling down the hill" and "The red boy is in the sandbox" (Brown 1970). Children are excellent imitators. It is simply a matter of understanding exactly what it is that they are imitating.

Closely related to the notion of imitation is a somewhat broader question, the nature of practice in child language. Do children practice their language? If so, how? What is the role of the frequency of hearing and producing items in the acqui­sition of those items? It is common to observe children and conclude that they "practice" language constantly, especially in the early stages of single-word and two-word utterances. A behavioristic model of first language acquisition would claim that practice—repetition and association—is the key to the formation of habits by operant conditioning.

One unique form of practice by a child is recorded by Ruth Weir (1962). She found that her children produced rather long monologues in bed at night before going to sleep. Here is one example: "What color. .. What color blanket. .. What Color mop... What color glass... Mommy's home sick... Mommy's home sick... Where's Mommy home sick . .. Where's Mikey sick ... Mikey sick." Such mono­logues are not uncommon among children, whose inclination it is to "play" with language just as they do with all objects and events around them. Weir's data show far more structural patterning than has commonly been found in other data. Never­theless, children's practice seems to be a key to language acquisition.

Practice is usually thought of as referring to speaking only. But one can also think in terms of comprehension practice, which is often considered under the rubric of the frequency of linguistic input to the child. Is the acquisition of particular words or structures directly attributable to their frequency in the child's linguistic environment? There is evidence that certain highly frequent forms are acquired first: what questions, irregular past-tense forms, certain common household items and persons. Brown and Hanlon (1970), for example, found that the frequency of occur­rence of a linguistic item in the speech of mothers was an overwhelmingly strong predictor of the order of emergence of those items in their children's speech. There are some conflicting data, however. Telegraphic speech is one case in point. Some of the most frequently occurring words in the language are omitted in such two- and three-word utterances. And McNeill (1968:416) found that a Japa­nese child produced the Japanese postposition ga far more frequently and more correctly than another contrasting postposition wa, even though her mother was recorded as using wa twice as often as ga. McNeill attributed this finding to the fact that ga as a subject marker is of more importance, grammatically, to the child, and she therefore acquired the use of that item since it was more meaningful on a deep-structure level. Another feasible explanation, however, for that finding might lie in the easier pronunciation of ga.

The jury is still out on the frequency issue. Nativists who claim that "the rela­tive frequency of stimuli is of little importance in language acquisition" (Wardhaugh 1971:12) might, in the face of evidence thus far, be more cautious in their claims. It would appear that frequency of meaningful occurrence may well be a more pre­cise refinement of the notion of frequency.

IN THE CLASSROOM: GOUIN AND THE SERIES METHOD

In the first of our series of vignettes on classroom applications of theory, we turn the clock back over a hundred years to look in on Francois Gouin. In some ways, the history of "modern" foreign language teaching may be said to have begun with the insights and writings of this French teacher of Latin. His­tory doesn't normally think of Gouin as a founder or forefather of language teaching methodology because at the time his influence was overshadowed by that of Charles Berlitz, the popular German founder of the Direct Method. Nevertheless, some attention to Gouin's unusually perceptive observations about language teaching helps us to set the stage for the development of lan­guage teaching methodologies for the century following the publication of his book, The Art of Learning and Studying Foreign Languages, in 1880.

Gouin had to go through a very painful set of experiences in order to de­rive his insights. Having decided in his midlife to learn German, he took up residency in Hamburg for one year. But rather than attempting to converse with the natives he engaged in a rather bizarre sequence of attempts to "mas­ter" the language. Upon arrival in Hamburg he felt he should memorize a German grammar book and a table of the 248 irregular German verbs! He did this in a matter of only 10 days and then hurried to "the academy" (the uni­versity) to test his new knowledge. "But alas!," he wrote, "I could not under­stand a single word, not a single word!" Gouin was undaunted. He returned to the isolation of his room, this time to memorize the German roots and to rememorize the grammar book and irregular verbs. Again he emerged with ex­pectations of success. "But alas!"—the result was the same as before. In the course of the year in Germany Gouin memorized books, translated Goethe and Schiller, and even memorized 30,000 words in a German dictionary—all in the isolation of his room, only to be crushed by his failure to understand German afterwards. Only once did he try to "make conversation" as a method, but this caused people to laugh at him and he was too embarrassed to continue