The First Sentences of Child and Chimpanzee

Abstract

In 1968–1969 several lines of thought about language development came together in an exciting way. Ursula Bellugi and I, in the 1964 paper called “Three Processes in the Acquisition of Syntax” (1964a), had described one sort of common adult response to the telegraphic sentences of very young children, the kind of response called an “expansion.” An expansion is essentially a reading of the child’s semantic intention. Thus, when Eve said, “Mommy lunch,” her mother said, “That’s right, Mommy is having her lunch.” Dr. Bellugi and I did not commit ourselves as to the accuracy or “veridicality” of these readings. We were not sure whether children really intended, by their telegraphic sentences, what adults thought they intended, and we could not really see how to find out. Our focus was on the expansion as a potential tutorial mechanism. Whether or not children started out intending what adults attributed to them, it seemed to us that expansions would cause them to do so in the end. In 1968, I. M. Schlesinger, working at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Lois Bloom, working at Columbia University, independently came to the conclusion that children really did intend certain aspects of the meanings attributed to them by adult expansions (see Bloom 1970; Schlesinger 1971). They did not intend the meanings expressed in the expansions by grammatical morphemes, by inflections, articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs. There was nothing in the child’s performance to suggest that they had these things in mind. What they did intend were certain fundamental semantic relations such as agent-action, agent-object, action-object, possessor-possessed, and so on. There was, in the child’s speech, something to suggest that they intended these relations. This same “something,” the aspect of child speech that justified the attribution to them of certain relational meanings, turns out to be missing from the linguistic performance of an important comparison case: the home-raised chimpanzee named Washoe.

Some of the research described in this paper was supported by PHS Grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development.