How Children Learn to Talk

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Have you ever wondered how children learn to talk? Many people, when asked that question, respond that they do it by imitating. This is at least partially true. Without imitation, we couldn't account for the fact that children in Texas usually learn Texan English, children in Paris usually learn Parisian French, and not vice versa. But imitation as an answer doesn't take us very far. For one thing, children routinely say things they've never heard: "Mommy, come quick—Waldo swallowed a frog!" That is a novel statement for a novel situation. When you think about it, it is inconceivable that children could learn in advance by imitation all of the sentences they will ever have to say.

At this point some would amend their position to say that children don't imitate others sentence by sentence. Instead, they imitate the nouns and verbs and sentence structures of others around them; they can fit their own words into these imitated structures to create novel sentences. But the facts of children's speech do not fit this explanation either. Children produce many sorts of grammatical constructions that they have not heard before. A two-year-old says, "Allgone milk" and "Daddy bye-bye" and for a time, rarely utters sentences of more than two words. A three-year-old says, "I seed two gooses" and "I have small foots"—two particular plural forms that nobody else in the family uses.

At any given point in development, a child's speech more closely resembles the speech of other children at the same stage of development than it does the speech of adults in the child's environment—even if there are not other children around. Any explanation of children's speech that depends on strict imitation cannot stand up to these facts.

What do children do as they learn to talk? Children seek from their early days to make sense of the communication around them. As their minds mature, they attempt—through a sort of gradual trial-and-error process—to construct a system of rules that will allow them to produce sentences like those they hear others use. "Rules" is used here in a loose sense. They are not consciously saying to themselves, "Hmm ... whenever I mean more than one, I must put an S on the end of the noun." Yet some sort of unspoken assumption close to this must have been made or else why would the three-year-old say "gooses" and "foots"?

There is much evidence that children's early sentences result from the use of some sort of rules—and not simply from the haphazard imitation of adult sentences.

Imagine that you are in a kitchen with a two-year-old and his mother. The child is seated in his highchair eating. Suddenly he bangs his cup on the highchair tray and says, "Mommy milk, Mommy milk." We assume from the context—his gesture with the cup and so forth—that he means something like, "Mommy, get me some more milk." If we have spent much time around this child, this may seem like one of his typical sentences—typical for one thing in that, for the past few weeks, at least, we have rarely heard him utter sentences with more than two words in them

On reflection, we may be struck by what a good sentence it is for having only two words! If we had to pick two words to convey the idea in "Mommy, get me some more milk," we could not improve on "Mommy milk." A lot of young children's sentences are like this; that is, they are of a uniform shortness, starting out as one-word sentences. Later, as children mature a bit, they begin to use two-word sentences and then move up to three-word sentences and so on.

Most early sentences are like this sample sentence, too, in that children show a knack for picking the most important words to convey their meanings. "Mommy milk" packs a lot of information; "get more" conveys less. Early sentences use informative words and leave out in-between words such as "and," "to," "with," "should," "have," "will," "the," "very," and the like. We assume that the limits to the number of words children can put in their early sentences have to do with biology and maturity. But the nature of their choice of words and the order they put them in reveals some deliberation, some rules.

Another piece of evidence for the operation of rules in early speech is seen when a child is asked to imitate adult sentences. Normally, young children cannot correctly imitate a sentence that is more complicated than one they could produce on their own. The following exchange between a psychologist and his young daughter illustrates this point:

Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father: You mean, you want the other spoon.
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.
Father: Can you say, "The other spoon"?
Child: Other ... one ... spoon.
Father: Say,"other."
Child: Other.
Father: "Spoon."
Child: Spoon.
Father: "Other spoon."
Child: Other ... spoon. Now give me other one spoon?³

Similar difficulty was encountered by a researcher who attempted to lead another child away from an incorrect use of a past tense of the verb "hold":

Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
Child: Yes.
Adult: What did you say?
Child: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say she held them tightly?
Child: No, she holded them loosely.⁴

This child apparently is not going to say "held" until she changes the rule in her head that produces that form. And language rules, like other habits, take some time to change!

Children do not trade in their immature speech for mature speech all at once. They always go through a sequence of stages of language use, moving from simple to complex. Thus, we hear a child at two years of age ask, "Why you singing?" and we note that all of her questions are of the same form. At two years, four months, we hear her ask, "Why you are singing?" and other questions of this more complex form. Just before the age of three, she arrives at the standard form for the English question, "Why are you singing?"⁵

It is obvious that this child is not learning to talk simply by memorizing sentences or sentence types. Rather, she is formulating her own rules to help her understand sentences she hears around her to produce sentences like them. Once she formulates a rule, she uses it confidently until she begins to notice differences between her sentences and the sentences adults use. Then she will gradually add to and amend her rules so that she is able to produce sentences more like adults'. She doesn't junk her old rules altogether; this would be too disruptive. Feature by feature, she makes her rules more and more like the rules adults use to produce mature sentences.⁶

Remarkably, children usually go through the same sequence of rule learning as they mature in speech production. A study by Brown⁷ showed that three separate children started using major grammatical features in roughly the same order: