The Articulate Mammal (15 page)

(Lenneberg 1967: 125).

This regularity of onset suggests that language may be set in motion by a biological clock, similar to the one which causes kittens to open their eyes when they are a few days old, chrysalises to change into butterflies after several weeks, and humans to become sexually mature at around 13 years of
age. However, until relatively recently, few people had considered language within the framework of biological maturation. But in 1967 Eric Lenneberg, then a biologist at the Harvard Medical School, published an important book, entitled
The Biological Foundations of Language
. Much of what is said in this chapter is based on his pioneering work.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BIOLOGICALLY TRIGGERED BEHAVIOUR

Behaviour that is triggered off biologically has a number of special characteristics. In the following pages we shall list these features, and see to what extent they are present in language. If it can be shown that speech, like sexual activities and the ability to walk, falls into the category of biologically scheduled behaviour, then we shall be rather clearer about what is meant by the claim that language is ‘innate’.

Exactly how many ‘hallmarks’ of biologically controlled behaviour we should itemize is not clear. Lenneberg lists four. The six listed below were obtained mainly by subdividing Lenneberg’s four:

1 The behaviour emerges before it is necessary.

2 Its appearance is not the result of a conscious decision.

3 Its emergence is not triggered by external events (though the surrounding environment must be sufficiently ‘rich’ for it to develop adequately).

4 Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect.

5 There is a regular sequence of ‘milestones’ as the behaviour develops, and these can usually be correlated with age and other aspects of development.

6 There may be a ‘critical period’ for the acquisition of the behaviour.

Let us discuss these features in turn. Some of them seem fairly obvious. We hardly need to set about testing the first one, that ‘the behaviour emerges before it is necessary’ – a phenomenon sometimes pompously labelled the ‘law of anticipatory maturation’. Language develops long before children need to communicate in order to survive. Their parents still feed them, clothe them and look after them.Without some type of inborn mechanism, language might develop only when parents left children to fend for themselves. It would emerge at different times in different cultures, and this would lead to vastly different levels of language skills. Although children differ enormously in their ability to knit or play the violin, their language proficiency varies to a much lesser extent.

Again, little explanation is needed for the second characteristic of biologically triggered behaviour: ‘Its appearance is not the result of a conscious decision.’
Clearly, a child does not suddenly think to herself, ‘Tomorrow I am going to start to learn to talk.’ Children acquire language without making any conscious decision about it. This is quite unlike a decision to learn to jump a 4-foot height, or hit a tennis ball, when a child sets herself a target, then organizes strenuous practice sessions as she strives towards her goal.

The first part of feature (3) also seems straightforward: ‘The emergence of the behaviour is not triggered by external events.’ Children begin to talk even when their surroundings remain unchanged. Most of them live in the same house, eat the same food, have the same parents, and follow the same routine. No specific event or feature in their surroundings suddenly starts them off talking. An inner biological clock is ticking away, set for the right time.

We know for certain that language cannot emerge before it is programmed to emerge. Nobody has ever made a young baby talk – though it seems that there is nothing much wrong with the vocal cords of a newborn infant, and from 5 or 6 months onwards it can ‘babble’ a number of the sounds needed in speech. Yet children utter few words before the age of 18 months. They have to wait for some biological trigger. The ‘trigger’ appears to be connected with brain growth. Two-word utterances, which are usually regarded as the beginning of ‘true language’, begin just as a massive spurt in brain growth slows down. Children do not manufacture any new brain cells after birth. They are born with millions, perhaps billions. At first the cells are not all interconnected, and the brain is relatively light (about 300g). From birth to around 2 years, many more cells interconnect, and brain weight increases rapidly. By the age of 2, it weighs nearly 1000g (Lenneberg 1967).

However, there is one aspect of biologically scheduled behaviour that is sometimes misunderstood: although no external event
causes
the behaviour, the surrounding environment must be sufficiently ‘rich’ for it to develop adequately. Biologically programmed behaviour does not develop properly in impoverished or unnatural surroundings. We have the apparent paradox that some types of ‘natural’ behaviour require careful ‘nurturing’. Just as Chris and Susie, two gorillas reared away from other gorillas in Sacramento Zoo, were unable to mate satisfactorily, according to an item in the London
Evening Standard
– so an impoverished linguistic environment is likely to retard language acquisition. Children brought up in institutions, for example, tend to be backward in speech development. Lenneberg noted that children raised in an orphanage will begin to talk at the same time as other noninstitutionalized children. But their speech will gradually lag behind the norm, being less intelligible, and showing less variety of construction. A less obvious example of linguistic impoverishment was suggested by Basil Bernstein, then a sociologist at London University’s Institute of Education. He claimed controversially that children from certain types of family may be
language deprived (Bernstein 1972). They may be unable to learn language adequately because they do not have sufficient data at their disposal. He claimed that such families use informal and elliptical speech, in contrast to the more formal and explicit language of households where children learn more quickly. For example, ‘Hop it’ in one family may correspond to ‘Go outside and play, and stop worrying me, I’m busy’ in another. As one man described it:

The words may be limited in number … there is a perpetual exchange of pebbled phrases: ‘Ah well, some folk are like that; she’s nowt but mutton dressed as lamb.’ For most of what is said is not said by words but by tone of voice, by silences, by look, gesture and most keenly by touching.

The same man describes the cultural shock of school, where he was faced with ‘an unending rush of words, multitudinous, fresh, and ordered in different ways’ (Brian Jackson in the
Daily Telegraph
colour supplement). Children seem to need this ‘unending rush of words’, and those who are deprived of it may lag behind in their development. Luckily the problem is usually only temporary. Language-impoverished children tend to catch up quickly once their verbal environment is enriched: the biological factor takes over as soon as the environment enables it to do so.

In fact, relatively few children are truly deprived, according to more recent research. In many cases, the supposedly ‘language impoverished’ children were just puzzled for a time when they were exposed to a dialect or accent unlike their own.

Let us now turn to the fourth characteristic of biologically triggered behaviour, ‘Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect.’ In activities such as typing or playing tennis, a person’s achievement is often directly related to the amount of teaching they receive and the hours of practice they put in. Even people who are not ‘naturally’ superb athletes can sometimes win tennis tournaments through sheer hard work and good coaching. But the same is not true of language, where direct teaching seems to be a failure. Let us consider the evidence for this.

When one says that ‘direct teaching is a failure’, people smile and say, ‘Of course – whoever tries to
teach
a child to speak?’ Yet many parents, often without realizing it, try to persuade their children to imitate them. They do this in two ways: first, by means of overt correction, second, by means of unconscious ‘expansions’.

Overt correction is not necessarily successful. One psychologist attempted over a period of several weeks to persuade his daughter to say OTHER + noun instead of OTHER ONE + noun. The interchanges went somewhat as follows:

(Braine 1971: 161)

Another researcher tried vainly to coax a child into saying the past tense form HELD:

(Cazden 1972: 92)

So forcing children to imitate is likely to be a dismal failure. Children cannot be trained like parrots. And repeated nagging corrections may even hinder a child’s progress. The mother of 17-month-old Paul had high expectations, and repeatedly corrected his attempts at speech. He lacked confidence, and his progress was slow. But the mother of 14-month-old Jane was an accepting person who responded uncritically to everything Jane said. Jane made exceptionally fast progress, and knew eighty words by the age of 15 months (Nelson 1973: 105).

Yet the matter is not quite as simple as at first sight. The now famous ‘other one spoon’ and ‘holded the baby rabbits’ dialogues show that corrections are unhelpful if the child’s attention is at the time focused strongly on matters other than the language. Later work has shown that kindly made corrections from a sensitive caregiver can enable a child to learn language faster. This will be discussed in
Chapter 7
.

Equally unsuccessful is the second type of coaching often unconsciously adopted by parents – the use of ‘expansions’. When talking to a child an adult
continuously ‘expands’ the youngster’s utterances. If the child says, THERE GO ONE, a mother is likely to expand this to ‘Yes, there goes one.’ MOMMY EGGNOG becomes ‘Mommy had her eggnog’, and THROW DADDY is expanded to ‘Throw it to Daddy.’ Children are exposed to an enormous number of these expansions. They account for perhaps a third of parental responses. Two researchers note:

The mothers of Adam and Eve responded to the speech of their children with expansions about 30 per cent of the time. We did it ourselves when we talked with the children. Indeed, we found it very difficult to withhold expansions. A reduced or incomplete English sentence seems to constrain the Englishspeaking adult to expand it into the nearest properly formed complete sentence.

(Brown and Bellugi 1964: 144)

At first researchers were uncertain about the role of expansions. Then Courtney Cazden carried out an ingenious experiment using two groups of children, all under 3½ (Cazden 1972). She exposed one group to intensive and deliberate expansions, and the other group to well-formed sentences which were
not
expansions. For example, if a child said, DOG BARK, an expanding adult would say, ‘Yes, the dog is barking.’ An adult who replied with a nonexpanded sentence might say ‘Yes, he’s trying to frighten the cat’ or ‘Yes, but he won’t bite’, or ‘Yes, tell him to be quiet.’ After 3 months the rate of progress of each group was measured. Amazingly, the expansion group were
less advanced
than the other group, both in average length of utterance and grammatical complexity.

Several explanations of this unexpected result have been put forward. Perhaps adults misinterpret the child’s intended meaning when they expand. Erroneous expansions could hinder his learning. Several ‘wrong’ expansions have been noted. For example:

Alternatively, a certain degree of novelty may be needed in order to capture children’s attention, since they may not listen to apparent repetitions of their own utterances. Or it may be that expansions over-restrict the data children hear. Their speech may be impoverished because of an insufficiently rich verbal environment. As we noted earlier, a child
needs
copious and varied samples of speech.

The last two explanations seem to be supported by a Russian experiment (Slobin 1966a: 144). One group of infants was shown a doll, and three
phrases were repeatedly uttered, ‘Here is a doll … Take the doll … Give me the doll.’ Another group of infants was shown the doll, but instead,
thirty
different phrases were uttered, such as ‘Rock the doll … Look for the doll.’ The total number of words heard by both groups was the same, only the composition differed. Then the experimenters showed the children a selection of toys, and asked them to pick out the dolls. To their surprise, the children in the second group, the ones who had heard a richer variety of speech, were considerably better at this task.