History of theories in language acquisition

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Ben, Roberta, Isabelle, and others,

     Some of the reviews of the history of child language research seem to ignore big chunks of relevant structuralist work.  During the period from about 1870 to 1950, talented linguists and psychologists such as the Sterns, Ament, Szuman, Preyer, Gvozdev, Leopold, Kenyeres, Ponori, and others created highly detailed baby biographies.  These biographies were stimulated by two major theoretical trends.  The first was Darwinian thinking about core issues in ontogeny, phylogeny, gesture, and communication, which later merged with Piagetian analyses.  The second was the growth of structural linguistic analysis from the Junggrammatiker movement on to Saussure and structuralism.  There was great attention to detection of similarities between child language, language change, and second language learning. Under the influence of Gestalt psychology as well as historical linguistics, there was a great emphasis on analogical processes and constructions.  
    It is true that the advent of generative grammar led to the introduction of new ideas and theories that shifted the focus away from analogy and constructions to rules and symbols.  But it would be a mistake to dismiss the insights from this earlier period.  Brown (1973) pays a lot of attention to Chomsky's formulations, but the actual work he conducted could have easily been framed within a structuralist framework.  The Bar-Adon and Leopold reader from 1971 presents snippets from this earlier work, but really one has to read the complete biographies and work through the linguistic detail of studies such as Leopold or Ponori to understand how much the structuralist position had already illuminated the process of language learning.
    Beginning the history of child language with Chomsky also ignores serious descriptive attempts within the behaviorist framework to describe phoneme inventories (Winitz), vocabulary (McCarthy), evolution (Mowrer), and situated learning (Skinner).  Although few of these behaviorist descriptions have survived later examination, I would say that the bulk of the structuralist descriptions remain largely intact.
    It would be nice to have a good review of this "missing century".   

-- Brian MacWhinney
    

On Dec 14, 2013, at 11:37 PM, Isa Barriere <barriere.isa at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Ben,
> 
> 1. My very very dear friend Jeffrey Wollock reviews many theories both on typical and atypical development from Aristotle to the 17th century in "The Noblest Animate motion' published by Johns Benjamins and he has since written a couple of articles that are probably in press on the 18th century.  The book is based on his PhD that he did at Oxford and one of his examiners was John Marshall. 
> There is another book by a female author Nancy???? on the 16th century but it is not as thorough as Jeffrey's.I have it on my shelf in my office: please let me know if you need the full reference. 
> 
> 
> 2.  In Barriere, I & Lorch, M. P. (2004) Premature thoughts on writing disorders. Neurocase. Vol. 10 (2): 91-108, we discussed a little bit the relation between ontogeny, phylogeny, order of acquisition and dissociation in acquired disorders.
> 
> 3.  Paula Hallal and Marjorie Lorch have authored a number of papers based on 19th century archives in London, including the 1st case of 'childhood aphasia', based on Paula's PhD dissertation devoted to that history: check the webpage of Marjorie Lorch/ Birkbeck College. 
> 
> 4.  You may also find a few references to language development in the thick book on 'the history of child neurologists': again please let me know if you need the exact reference.  Sorry can't remember the authors on top of my head.
> 
> 5.  There has been a few detailed papers on Knox who was one of the first child neurologist in the US and who spent much time designing test including cross-cultural and cross-linguistic tests for children and grown ups in Staten Island (with Seguin who was a student of Bourneville who was a student of Charcot).  Again the author (john something) escapes me but he is a membebr of the International Society of the History of Neurosciences. 
> 
> I hope this helps,
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Isabelle
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Ewa Haman <meh at psych.uw.edu.pl> wrote:
> Dear Ben,
> maybe this will be of some interest for you, although I guess the books are not going to be accessible since both are in Polish:
> Bokus, B., & Shugar, G. W. (2004). Psychologia języka dziecka. Osignięcia, nowe perspektywy. [Psychology of child language. Achievements and new perspectives] Gdańsk: Gdańskie 
> Shugar, G. W., & Smoczyńska, M. (1980). Badania nad rozwojem języka dziecka. [Research on child language development]. Warszawa: PWN
> 
> Both books are collections of seminal papers (translated into Polish), but they also comprise extensive chapters on history of research on child language by the editors.
> 
> Regards,
> Ewa Haman
> 
> 
> W dniu czwartek, 12 grudnia 2013 15:43:01 UTC+1 użytkownik Ambridge, Ben napisał:
> Dear all
> 
> Could anyone point me in the direction of any articles/books/chapters that give a historical overview of theories in child language acquisition - i.e., ones that focus on the rise and/or fall of particular theories (rather than - say - landmark studies). I'm primarily interested in typical first language acquisition, but it would be great to also have a couple of historical reviews of theories in atypical development, L2 acquisition and bilingualism. I'll send round a summary of suggestions.
> 
> Thanks
> Ben
> 
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