I have always had a "way with words." Perhaps this is why I find the subject of linguistics to be so fascinating. I've always had strong syntactical and orthographical awareness. As a student, I would breeze through writing assignments and spelling tests; later in my career, I entered into several spelling bees and was mildly successful, advancing as far as the third round of the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee, in my seventh grade year. Note: In my day, they didn't televise it on ESPN. Verbal exercise was not quite yet at the level of chainsaw competitions.
In my studies of linguistics, I of course came upon the concept (or should I say mystery?) of language acquisition. What is it that allows humans to gain grammatical and lexical understanding of a language so early in development? Is there a language "instinct," as Chomsky and his disciples have maintained? Or is it a general learning ability gone into hyperspeed? Are we "wired for language," as Pinker might suggest? Or is it a coincidence, a trick of evolutionary and sociocultural history?
I do not intend to answer any of these questions in this paper. They are beyond the scope of my understanding, although I have gained at least a figurative knowledge of some of the basic controversies involved. Rather, my intent is to trace the winding path of my own language development, and to compare it to general findings . I will focus on these questions: When did I acquire "sentence sense?" When did I intuit the difference between nouns and verbs? What in my upbringing and environment allowed me to grasp speech, writing, and reading at a rapid pace? How did my parents' actions affect my language development?
The information described below comes from several sources: a detailed baby book kept by my mother, conversations with my mother and father, and drawings and scribblings recovered from boxes buried deep within musty closets. I cannot draw upon my own memories, since they are fuzzy at best concerning the years before kindergarten. Furthermore, I realize the limitations of this "research." I do not have videotaped evidence to fully tease out situational context and nonverbal meaning. The record I do have, furthermore, is incomplete at best, as it represents the impressionistic observations of a very unscientific mother who was not interested in gathering data so much as recording "precious moments." With these limitations in mind, however, I believe I can offer a glimpse into language development, as well as two parent's method for creating what Harste et. al. call "quality literacy encounters."
I begin by offering a brief synopsis of the recorded
language events, up until around the kindergarten age.
Unfortunately, the dream was just that--a dream;
I did not possess a strong vocabulary at birth. Instead, I had the
full repertoire of babbles and coos, crying and gesturing, diaper-wetting
and thumb-sucking common to all infants. At about eight months, my
mother noted in the baby book that I understood "Jimmy (my name, in the
diminutive; I would not shake until I was about ten), Dad, I'm going to
get you, so big, love mommy." In the interview, I asked her how she
could tell I "understood," and what she meant by the term. In her
mind, it was the way I would respond: perking up, eyes widening, smiling,
babbling, cooing, ad nauseam. Mothers dig that sort of thing.
By eleven months, I had mastered several phonemes, the first usually garnered in English-speaking households: da-da and ba-ba. Somewhere along the way, these were enthusiastically translated as "daddy" and "bye-bye," but I'd bet that their first purpose was merely linguistic entertainment on my part. In about a month, however, my mother would record "Daddy"--my first real word. (It was my first audible word. I'm certain I muttered several utterances under my breath each time I got my diaper changed.)
My linguistic horizons expanded over the next few months; I began to attach words to items, uttering such profound truths as
kitty
doggy
na-na (banana; "I want a banana," depending on
context)
car
truck
stinky
diaper
auntie
All of the words, characteristic of this time of language development, were nouns (or a quasi-noun; "stinky" likely referred to a diaper). I was able to string some of these words together into my first "sentence": "In car, kitty, doggy." Alas, it lacked a verb.
Eventually, my syntax met up with my semantics, and verbs started appearing alongside nouns in primitive sentences:
I go in car
We go to church
I scared doggy
I must have been an intimidating infant, or it must have been a very small dog.
I let my mother's words summarize the next year
of language development:
"He began talking really early. By 2 years he was speaking a lot of sentences and articulating clearly... and sing[ing]. They had a good assortment of kid's records and he learned to sing early and kept a good tune. He love to sit and look at books and listen to them read [sic].
My parents read to me fanatically, and our
home was a storehouse of "literacy events" as Harste describes them.
Books, records, and tapes littered the floor. (See a list of books below.)
Family reading time and sing-along time were commonplace. Prayers
preceded every meal. And, phenomenally, we owned no television.
I learned the alphabet and numbers long before kindergarten, and no thanks
to the Children's Television Workshop.
The religious nature of most family literacy events was central. As my mother recorded in my baby book (using the first-person perspective, as if I were writing), "One day I was asked, 'what is your name?' My answer was 'Jesus!'"
And, in another place: "Before he was two he could look through the Bible story book and name off all the pictures by himself. He called people with beards 'Jesus!'"
My first recorded spontaneous prayer went, "Bless Mark and Jenny." I don't know who Mark and Jenny are, but when I was two, I was a-prayin' for them, and hard.
By three years, I was further developing sentence sense and verb tenses. Some examples:
"I go to farm. I scared baby lambs."
"Mrs. Rogoza has baby chickens."
My mother would comment:
"Very good language at three years... distingueshes between light and dark shades, reads alphabet letters etc... talks very well for his age."
By July of 1984, five years and four months after my birth, my mother would record that I had "started to read." Her most vivid memory is that of a "helicopter book." She didn't believe me when I said I had read it, so she asked me to tell her about the helicopter. I began listing parts (the tail, the rotor, the propellor, etc.) and she caved. I could read.
Comparing my language development to that of my sister before me, and my brother and sister after me, my mother has decided that my language development was "faster than usual." Perhaps I was a little more "wired" for language than some. Or, perhaps it was a natural curiosity for learning in general. One thing is certain: my parents provided an extremely literate environment, and took special care to promote and nurture my linguistic development. The hours they spent reading to me must have had a powerful effect on my emergence as a reader, writer, and overall user of language.
The Bible Story Vol. 1
Fibber's Fables
Bible in Pictures for Little Children
Marvin K. Mooney*
Foot Book
Christian Mother Goose
Green Eggs and Ham*
Babar the King
Berenstein's B Book
Lassie: The Busy Morning
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back*
A Firefly Named Torchy
The Lorax*
Droodles Book of Proverbs
Maxi and Mini in Muffkinland
The Sneetches and Other Stories*
The Dr. Seuss Sleep Book*
Muffkins on Parade
Hurlburt's Story of the Bible
Egermeier Bible Story Book
Character Sketches
* After religious stories, Dr. Seuss merits second
place on my early literacy list. To this day I have a penchant for
rhyming couplets.