Linguistic mythology and the first year of life. An edited version of the sixth Jansson Memorial Lecture.

Abstract

It is perhaps natural that the first year of life should be the most neglected and misunderstood by students of language development in children. Our traditional models of language are based upon such notions as syllable, vowel, consonant, word, clause, and sentence, and few of these concepts seem applicable to the utterance of the child during its first year. There is therefore a ready tendency to dismiss most of this period as a “prelinguistic” stage of development, of little relevance for the understanding of the processes of language acquisition when they “really” begin - which is usually assumed to be towards the end of the first year. And even when people do decide to take infant vocalization into account, they find themselves faced with considerable difficulties as to how they can set about studying it, in view of the absence until recently of appropriate techniques of analysis - especially for recording a child's behaviour and for transcribing its utterances. For such reasons, it is not surprising...