Theory of Baby-Talk

Reviews the book, The Acquisition of Language by edited by Ursula Bellugi and Roger Brown (see record 1965-04912-001). At a 1961 conference planned by the Social Science Research Council a skirmish was fought in the brewing theoretical battle over the adequacy of S-R learning theory. The battle ground was the field of "First Language Acquisition." A monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development appeared in 1964 to record the event. By that time, later developments in the research described had appeared elsewhere, but the juxtaposition of viewpoints retained in the volume kept it interesting. The 'child's grammar approach' adds up to a search for clues about language acquisition by studying what the child knows at various stages before he competently speaks his language. Perhaps the data collected so far are not well described by S-R theory, but they also do not seem to imply very much about how the learning occurs. We also ought to look for clues in what the child does with the samples of the model language he hears, in his verbal play, and in what he does when a communicative task exceeds his linguistic competence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)