Language Acquisition and the Child : Developmental and Theoretical Tensions . Keynote

The inquiry into children’s language acquisition has shifted in the past 25 years in ways both profound and, perhaps, not so profound, yielding several themes that dominate current thinking about the enterprise. These themes have to do with the CHILD who is acquiring the language, THEORY about the language the child acquires, and the ESSENTIAL TENSION that is necessary for development of both the child and theory. The BU conference was born, 25 years ago, out of the renaissance in child language research and theory that had begun in the decade before. Boston in the 60s was a place and a time of action and interaction aimed at understanding the age-old question: How do children learn to talk? And now, in the year 2000, the study of language acquisition has an intellectual, social, and institutional history that is epitomized by all of us, assembled here in Boston once more, where we are still asking the question: Indeed, how do children learn to talk? Over the last 25 years, many of us have chipped away at the answer to that question. In my own work, I published a number of studies, with colleagues and students, in which we looked for the answer in the words children learn, how children learn to combine words–verbs, in particular–in phrase structures for the arguments expressed in simple sentences, and how language develops in its complexity to include the forms and functions of negation, questions, and complex sentences that express causality, temporal contingencies, and other relationships (e.g., Bloom, 1991; Bloom, 1993). Several themes that came out of that research now dominate my thinking about the enterprise of studying language acquisition. These themes have to do with the CHILD who is acquiring the language; THEORY about the child, and about acquisition of language by the child; and the ESSENTIAL TENSION that is necessary for development of both the child and theory. I suspect that my own response to these themes may not be entirely compatible with other views represented in this weekend's program. And for that reason, I am particularly pleased, at the beginning of the next 25 years, to have this opportunity to share my perspective on these three themes. FIRST, THE CHILD. I've been increasingly concerned about what has become 'the phantom child' in studies of acquisition. No one, to be sure, denies that there is a child behind the words and sentences that we study, but that child is too often forgotten, too often taken for granted. With advances in technology, we've come to watch words appear on computer monitors, and the child has become increasingly removed from the words and sentences that we study. The words and sentences often assume a life of their own, apart from the child who produced them, and apart from the situations in which the child said them (or signed them). 1Both the ideas and the research in this paper owe much to collaborations with, in particular, Richard Beckwith, Erin Tinker, Karin Lifter, Joanne Bitetti Capatides, and Jeremie Hafitz. The research was supported by Research Grants from the National Science Foundation, 1981-1989, and the Spencer Foundation, 1981-1986, to Lois Bloom. The paper was reformatted for this digital version with slight changes in organization and minor text editing. 2Edward Lee Thorndike Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.