16.3449, Review: Textbooks/Lang Acquisition: O'Grady (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3449. Fri Dec 02 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3449, Review: Textbooks/Lang Acquisition: O'Grady (2005)

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What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
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discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
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1)
Date: 30-Nov-2005
From: Joshua Viau < j-viau at northwestern.edu >
Subject: How Children Learn Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 19:28:13
From: Joshua Viau < j-viau at northwestern.edu >
Subject: How Children Learn Language 
 

AUTHOR: O'Grady, William 
TITLE: How Children Learn Language 
SERIES: Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics 
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1147.html 

Reviewed by Joshua Viau, Northwestern University Department of 
Linguistics

SYNOPSIS: 

As part of the ''Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics'' series, this book 
gives a non-technical overview of its subject, language acquisition, 
emphasizing breadth over depth of coverage. Each chapter focuses 
on a specific ''component part'' of language (words, meanings, 
sentences, sounds) and is meant to stand on its own, though the 
chapters do naturally overlap to some degree. Two appendices 
provide information on collecting diary and corpus material and 
describing the sounds of English. The intended audience is ''scholars, 
students, and parents who are not specialists in the field of language 
acquisition research (p. 4).'' Readers are presented with a wide 
variety of experimental findings from the 1950s to the present. Some 
interpretation is given, but very few firm conclusions are drawn. 
O'Grady remains largely neutral in terms of theory. A few hints at his 
particular approach -- that core linguistic phenomena are best 
understood in computational terms rather than being attributed to 
autonomous grammatical principles, i.e. Universal Grammar (UG) -- 
are nevertheless discernible, particularly in the last chapter, ''How do 
they do it?''

CONTENTS:

After a brief introduction, O'Grady begins with a chapter on word 
learning (''The great word hunt'') in which he explores how children go 
about segmenting words from the speech stream: using stress, for 
example, and relying on certain strategies about meaning-bearing 
elements. There's a section on learning inflection that highlights the 
plural marker ''-s'' and the past tense marker ''-ed'' with additional 
discussion of irregular nouns and verbs. As is true throughout the 
book, the focus here is on what children typically do in naturalistic and 
experimental settings and much less so on how or why they do it. 
Another section deals with children's creativity in making new words 
through conversion, derivation, and compounding.

The next chapter on word meaning (''What's the meaning of this?'') is 
divided into halves, with a fair amount of attention devoted to nouns 
and then a collection of very brief sections on learning verbs, 
adjectives, prepositions, and pronouns. Concerning nouns, O'Grady 
gives examples of over- and under-extensions and describes fast 
mapping. An extended discussion then follows about possible 
constraints that limit the possibility space for a given word's meaning. 
These range from cognitive constraints to social, linguistic, 
and ''organizational'' ones. Concerning verb learning, possible 
regularities in the input related to aspect are mentioned, as are 
syntactic bootstrapping and the difficulties involved with learning verbs 
that describe mental states. Concerning adjectives, the section on 
color terms touches on some crosslinguistic research, which is 
refreshing considering that only English has been discussed up to this 
point. However, the section on number words is overly thin and makes 
no mention of important work by Spelke, Carey, and many others. 

An aside about crosslinguistic evidence: it is sometimes unclear in 
subsequent chapters whether generalizations are true only of English 
or of all languages, e.g. Naoko Yoshinaga's work on wh-questions (p. 
104) and other work on the vowel sounds that are acquired earliest 
(p. 152).

Moving on, there's a chapter on syntax (''Words all in a row'') that 
begins with results on children's early pattern-finding abilities and then 
turns to ways of tracking syntactic development such as mean length 
of utterance (MLU). Some of the subsequent discussion, for instance 
on pivot words, (p. 86), will likely frustrate UG-friendly researchers 
due to its emphasis on evidence for ''item-based'' learning and 
induction of phrase structure rules. Mysteriously, the sections 
on ''Missing big pieces'' and ''Missing small pieces'' largely ignore the 
vast literature on null subjects and root infinitives in child language. 
Other topics covered include negation, case in pronouns, 
interrogatives, yes-no questions, and relative clauses.

Semantics is treated next (''What sentences mean''), with equal space 
reserved for early one-word and two-word utterances and later, more 
complex constructions. Concerning the former, readers will find useful 
information about the intermodal preferential looking paradigm and its 
usefulness in probing what children know about meaning. 
Occasionally, the discussion lurches rather than flows, for instance 
when O'Grady concludes that children interpret complete sentences 
by forming ''little rules'' (subject precedes object for the verb ''bump'') 
rather than applying a ''big rule'' (subject precedes object for all active 
verbs) on the basis of one study's results. Later on, passives are a 
main focus, as are control verbs like ''try,'' ''hope,'' ''tell,'' and ''promise,'' 
in addition to pronouns and quantifiers. It's worth mentioning that 
O'Grady's best guesses for how control verbs and pronouns are 
learned as presented in the book seem to dovetail with his own 
economy-based view. For both, something like the Efficiency 
Requirement -- ''Dependencies (lexical requirements) must be 
resolved at the first opportunity'' (see O'Grady 2001, p. 3) -- is 
invoked. The discussion of quantifiers focuses mainly on quantifier 
spreading (Philip 1991) and would benefit from including the more 
recent findings of Gualmini, Lidz, Musolino, and this reviewer, among 
others. 

Sandwiched between the semantics chapter and the book's 
conclusion, readers find a chapter on children's acquisition of prosody 
and the sound system (''Talking the talk''). Considering that earlier 
material -- including a discussion of the ''wug test'' for plurals (p. 20) -- 
depends on some knowledge of the English segmental inventory, and 
also considering that other chapters follow a loose developmental 
trajectory from children's first words to the grammar explosion and 
beyond, perhaps this chapter would have been better placed at the 
book's beginning. Regardless, its discussion of pre- and post-natal 
speech perception and babbling is well-done and will no doubt 
surprise and fascinate many parents and non-linguists. 

The conclusion (''How do they do it?'') is perhaps the most successful 
chapter in that O'Grady finally shifts here from description to 
explanation, thereby fulfilling the promise implicit in the book's title. It 
may be a little jarring to some readers who have been intrigued by 
earlier discussions of frequency effects that the conclusion begins with 
a great deal of evidence against the ideas that children imitate adults, 
that adults teach children to talk, or that motherese is necessary for 
language learning. O'Grady steps through various arguments, points 
out helpful things parents can do, mentions evidence from twin studies 
and language disorders that language is ''all in the head,'' and focuses 
on the ''acquisition device,'' broadly construed. He then outlines and 
gives supporting evidence for two dominant and conflicting views 
about this device: that it's language-specific or, alternatively, domain-
general. The debate is left unresolved. The last section of the chapter 
concentrates on language learning problems in general, including how 
children deal with exceptions to generalizations.

Appendix 1 is on keeping a diary and making tape recordings. I 
suspect that many readers will find it unnecessary to transcribe their 
own recordings of child speech or calculate their child's MLU at 
different stages of development, but they will have a good idea of how 
to do so (if they'd like to) after reading the appendix.

Appendix 2 consists of a detailed diagram of the vocal tract 
accompanied by consonant and vowel descriptions for most varieties 
of North American English. The phonetic transcriptions for diphthongs 
are missing in some cases (e.g. the diphthong in ''boy'') or non-
standard in others (e.g. [e] for the diphthong in ''they''), but this 
shouldn't prove too distracting or misleading. 

CRITICAL EVALUATION:

Language acquisition specialists will rediscover the occasional 
forgotten gem of research while perusing O'Grady's ''How Children 
Learn Language,'' as the author has read widely. However, it's difficult 
to imagine which segments of the non-specialist target audience 
would be pleased or well-served by this book alone. Scholars outside 
the field of psycholinguistics might find it too breezy, not sufficiently 
thorough in its coverage. It's true that there are notable gaps, some of 
which are mentioned above, though in fairness this is an unavoidable 
problem for surveys of massive bodies of research, especially surveys 
as short as this (206 pages, excluding notes and references). Parents 
would likely prefer Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek's (1999) ''How Babies 
Talk'', which includes numerous exercises for parents under the 
rubric ''Try this'' and a detailed summary of each chapter clearly 
stating what has been learned. In addition, parents might be turned off 
by the sheer number of endnotes salted throughout O'Grady's book. 
These are cumbersome to navigate, as the reader must constantly flip 
to the back of the book to see what work is being cited in the ''Notes'' 
section and then take the additional step of looking up each work's full 
citation in the ''References'' section. I wouldn't blame any parent for 
giving up after a chapter of such back-and-forth, but then the parent 
would risk missing out on endnotes that are more than mere citations, 
such as when O'Grady informs the reader that a quote has been 
translated from African-American English to Standard American 
English (p. 177). Finally, college-level students will perhaps want a 
book with snappier prose like Pinker's (1994) ''The Language Instinct'', 
and, more importantly, their professors may wish the book had a more 
authoritative tone. 

While the student reader of ''How Children Learn Language'' will come 
away with a sense of wonder about children's impressive abilities in 
this area and a reasonably good sense of how to test a language-
related research question empirically, she won't find guidance within 
its pages on how to interpret the findings of a given experiment or how 
to construct a good argument. Furthermore, she won't develop a 
sense of what the stakes are in language acquisition, i.e. which 
research questions matter most and which are being actively 
investigated today in different theoretical frameworks. These problems 
aside, the book is full of data that could easily be adapted for lesson 
plans or problem sets. I see it as one of many possible texts on an 
undergraduate reading list for an introductory course in linguistics or 
psychology.

REFERENCES:

Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. 1999. How 
Babies Talk. NY: Dutton. 

O'Grady, William. 2001. ''An emergentist approach to syntax.'' 
Unpublished ms. available online at 
http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/ogrady.

Pinker, Stephen. 1994. The Language Instinct. NY: William Morrow. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER: 

Joshua Viau is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at 
Northwestern University. His dissertation focuses on how children 
learn the argument structure of their first language, with an emphasis 
on verbs that describe possession transfer and/or goal-directed 
motion. He has also worked extensively on quantification in child 
language.





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