Abstract
This textbook on first language acquisition has all the features expected from a good introductory book. Understanding theories of language acquisition can be challenging for students of psychology because they first have to learn the linguistic terminology that is used to describe the sound system, lexicon and grammar of languages. Brooks and Kempe make this terminology easily accessible by providing glossary boxes and many examples in each chapter as well as a full glossary at the end. The discussion of theoretical issues is always linked to the relevant data from both classic and up-to-date empirical studies. The book covers a wide range of topics, such as social-cognitive prerequisites and biological adaptations for language learning, phonological development, word learning, morpho-syntactic development, pragmatic and narrative development, language impairments, language acquisition in deaf children and the development of literacy. The authors present and discuss a lot of data suggesting links between social-cognitive and linguistic abilities. Each chapter is concise, yet comprehensive. There are many explicit links between chapters, which furthermore show how the acquisition of phonology, lexical items, morpho-syntax and pragmatics can follow similar routes because acquiring these systems relies on similar cognitive abilities and social interaction with caregivers.
In the first chapter, Brooks and Kempe describe the social and cognitive abilities that enable newborns to acquire language and how these abilities have evolved alongside certain biological adaptations. They introduce students to the possibility that language is a by-product of delayed maturation, caused by the development of bipedalism. A prolonged postnatal immaturity has led to neural and behavioural plasticity, which enables the acquisition of a system as complex as language. The chapter also addresses the social dimension of language, considering how it builds on and enables high levels of complex cooperation only seen in human societies. The authors point out that newborns are equipped with social and cognitive skills (e.g. preference for human faces, voices and speech sounds, intention reading and imitation) that allow them to coordinate their behaviour with others.
Chapter 2 starts with an introduction to phonology and a description of how languages vary in the number of sounds, in their phoneme and allophone inventories, and in their prosody and stress systems. Students are encouraged to consider intriguing phenomena, such as the fact that newborns need to be ready to distinguish and produce as many as 800 possible sounds found across the world’s languages. The chapter considers how children learn to distinguish and produce the sounds and prosodic patterns of the language(s) spoken in their community. Laying the ground for integration with subsequent chapters, the authors discuss how language-specific sensitivity to sound patterns also allows infants to discover boundaries between words in the speech stream addressed to them.
In order to understand what these words mean and how they function, infants have to develop a general understanding of communicative intentions and certain concepts, onto which the linguistic units can be mapped. In Chapter 3, Brooks and Kempe emphasize the crucial developmental process of joint attention as the basis for children’s understanding of the symbolic function of linguistic units and communicative gestures. Infants have to understand that their conversational partners use linguistic items and symbolic gestures in order to draw their attention to entities and events.
Chapter 4 discusses how children’s understanding of joint attention and communicative intentions then allows them to learn the meaning of words. The authors discuss how children tend to associate new words with objects or aspects of objects for which they do not have a label yet – based on the assumption that each object only has one name. In real life, this strategy is not very helpful because most children are surrounded by more than just one object for which they do not have a name yet. Furthermore, we often use multiple labels to refer to one and the same referent (e.g. guy, brother, idiot). In these situations, figuring out the speaker’s communicative intentions is probably the only way to find out about the meaning of the novel word.
In Chapter 5, the authors introduce and discuss nativist and usage-based approaches of morpho-syntactic development. The nativist approach suggests that the input that children receive does not allow them to acquire complex, hierarchical and category-based syntactic rules, yet they acquire the grammatical rules of their language. Thus, syntactic categories and rules need to be innate. In contrast, proponents of the usage-based approach argue that the linguistic input of children contains many cues and regularities that allow them to discover categories and syntactic patterns. Brooks and Kempe present experimental and corpus-based data suggesting that children’s early morpho-syntactic knowledge is organized around specific lexical items. Many of these studies show that children are reluctant to use novel verbs in argument structures in which they have not heard them used in their input and they tend to show better comprehension of sentences containing familiar and frequent than novel or infrequent verbs.
In Chapter 6, the authors describe the language that children encounter, reviewing the literature on speech adaptations, cultural variability in input modifications and the relationship between the amount and complexity of child-directed speech and the size of children’s vocabulary and grammatical complexity. In Chapter 7, the authors discuss the development of narrative, pragmatic and conversational skills, and how these skills are shaped by the language addressed to them and by children’s own social-cognitive abilities. They stress that, to become competent conversation partners, children have to understand other people’s perspectives and what is in the common ground. Related topics covered include how children process old versus new information, non-literal uses of language (indirect speech acts, idioms, irony) and the development of narrative skills. Brooks and Kempe emphasize that these skills are acquired over a long time. They also provide an interesting review of issues bearing on possible gender differences in language development.
Chapter 8 discusses the effects that language can have on children’s cognitive development and the effects of learning two or more languages simultaneously. It covers the relationships between language and memory and between language and Theory of Mind. Students are likely to find particularly interesting a discussion of research with deaf children who are not exposed to sign language early on who show delayed development of false-belief understanding. Linguistic relativity and bilingual acquisition are both discussed in this chapter and the authors provide concrete illustrations of relevant debates and data (e.g. colour terminology and perception) that will engage students’ attention.
In Chapter 9, the authors summarize research on the development of literacy and how this interacts with the acquisition of spoken language. They cover variations in writing systems and orthographic transparency, and consider their implications for learning to read and write (comparing, for example, languages as different in these respects as Finnish and English). These points are integrated skilfully with a discussion of dyslexia, which tends to be less prevalent in communities with transparent orthographies. Chapter 10 considers Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Similarly to children with dyslexia, children with SLI show poor phonological awareness and poor word recognition in spoken language. The authors describe the characteristics of SLI and discuss theories and evidence about its causes and correlates.
Chapter 11 focuses on deaf children’s language development. The chapter considers issues relating to early exposure to sign language, manual babbling, lip reading and cochlear implants. The implications of deafness for the acquisition of literacy, development of Theory of Mind, executive function and numerical cognition are all reviewed. Students are likely to be interested in a useful discussion of the emergence of children’s own sign language, so-called home-sign systems, and how these simple systems develop into complex sign languages (Senghas, Kita, & Ozyurek, 2004). Studies on deaf children’s language development suggest that the earlier children are exposed to language, the better (Mayberry, 2007); the Critical Period Hypothesis suggests that the plasticity of immature learners’ brains enables complex systems like language to be acquired. In Chapter 12, language development and brain development are discussed further.
This is a very comprehensible and concise textbook. The chapters cover a wide variety of topics with explicit links between them. Each chapter starts with the main questions for the topic covered in that section and ends with a very useful summary of the main points. Brooks and Kempe also suggest further readings for each topic. Throughout the book, key terminology and methodology are highlighted and explained in glossary and methodology boxes. Lots of examples and summaries of empirical data from classic and up-to-date studies help the reader to understand linguistic terminology and concepts. There is always a clear link between data and theory. The only possible minus point is that the book is theoretically biased. To obtain a more balanced view of language acquisition theories, especially on the acquisition of morpho-syntax, the authors also refer the reader to a recent book by Ambridge and Lieven (2011). Overall, Brooks and Kempe’s text is an impressive and very welcome resource for lecturers and students of first language acquisition.