History of theories in language acquisition

[Philip Dale]

As an authentic old fogy, also textbook writer, my thoughts:
I find the history of child language studies fascinating, with its many connections to philosophy, linguistics, biology, sociology, and many other fields, and the history of child development more broadly as well. Students on the whole don't, even though I try to explain that it's like travel, in that it broadens the mind. Both of them help us realize that things aren't always, and won't always be, the way they are here and now; in short, it weakens dogmatism, while reminding us that the big questions are what endures. It's easy to blame this lack of interest on the callowness of youth, but I think that misses an important point. The history of a field is only interesting when you know something about the field, which is not in the opening chapter of a survey textbook. I think it might be more fruitful to have an 'interlude' on history, oh, maybe two-thirds of the way through the book, when students have learned something about theories, and about the phenomena the theories are trying to explain. Then to see how the main current themes emerged, sometimes gradually, sometimes more suddenly, and with reversals along the way. And finally to speculate about where we might be going next. 
I hope someone who has participated in this fascinating discussion will write that kind of history.
Philip Dale  

-----Original Message-----
From: info-childes at googlegroups.com [mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mavis L. Donahue
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 11:13 AM
To: info-childes at googlegroups.com
Subject: History of theories in language acquisition

At the risk of old fogyism, my question is:  are we ignoring our fascinating history?  In the Kuhnian tradition of using textbook analysis as an indicator of paradigm shift, I just completed a content analysis of historical themes in popular introductory textbooks on language development.  (My presentation at the 2013 ASHA convention was titled "Beyond Psammeticus:  Are we neglecting the history of language development research?")  I was startled to find that about 25% of the textbooks had no mention of our field's history.  Typical textbook coverage was only about one page, usually in the introductory chapter, or in a chronology of various theories and theorists.  Ironically, the most frequently mentioned historical events of our field were two accounts separated by 2500 years, and with the same nativist theme:  Herodotus'
description of the Egyptian King Psammeticus' experiment to deprive infants of language input to determine what language they would create; and Chomsky's 1959 scathing review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (1957), which of course triggered the explosion of research on child language development in the 1960s. (I'm intrigued that both stories had strong political drama; perhaps that is why they have stood the test of
time?)  Of concern, connections between early research and the current and recurring theoretical and methodological themes/dilemmas in our field were rarely drawn in these textbooks.

^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^V

Dr. Mavis L. Donahue
Professor Emerita
College of Education, m/c 147
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL  60607
312-996-5650


"To anyone who finds that linguistic study is a worthless finicking with trifles, I would reply that life consists of little things; the important matter is to see them largely."

Otto Jesperson, 1860-1943, linguist and scholar of language acquisition














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