First Language Acquisition

Citation

Clark, E. V. (2024). First Language Acquisition (4th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is a chronological account of how children acquire their first language, from the infant attending to adult faces, gaze and hands to the school-age child telling stories and persuading. It has sixteen chapters in four parts, about 690 pages in all, with a glossary, a short section of resources for research, and a long reference list. The publisher's description stresses that children learn language in conversation with adult speakers, and that the book draws on diary records and on experimental studies. The fourth edition adds new sections on how children build common ground with adults and other children, on individual differences, on how children collaborate with adults in constructing utterances, and on how they qualify beliefs.

Chapter 1: Acquiring language

The opening chapter, 22 pages long, introduces the topic and leads into the four parts.

Part I, Getting started: Chapters 2–6

Chapter 2, "In conversation with children," concerns the interactional setting of acquisition. Its tables and boxes deal with features of speech to children (pitch, speech rate, disfluencies, the relation of social class to child-directed speech), daily routines in the first two years, indices of infant attention and readiness for interaction, and the frequency of two-party and three-party interactions at different ages. Chapter 3, "Starting on language: Perception," covers how infants detect differences between sounds, how they break into the speech stream, and how young children recognize their own versions of words. Chapter 4, "Early words," presents the first words children produce, early overextensions based on shape, movement, size, sound and texture, and cross-cutting categories in Korean and English. Chapter 5, "Sounds in words: Production," links babbling to first words and follows the combining of words under a single intonation contour. Chapter 6, "Words and meanings," treats how children assign meanings, including candidate constraints on meaning assignment, taking different perspectives on the same referent, causative errors and late errors with verbs such as make, let, give and put.

Part II, Constructions and meanings: Chapters 7–11

Chapter 7, "First combinations, first constructions," follows sequences of single words, gesture-plus-word combinations, two-word utterances in several languages, word order (with Turkish data) and the emergence of constructions. Chapter 8, "Modulating word meanings," treats grammatical morphemes, including stages in the acquisition of past tense -ed and the order of acquisition of fourteen English morphemes, and the use of determiners. Chapter 9, "Adding complexity within clauses," covers question forms, negation, causative verbs, locative alternations and passives. Chapter 10, "Combining clauses: More complex constructions," covers coordination, connectives, relative clauses, complements, and temporal, causal and conditional clauses. Chapter 11, "Constructing words," addresses how children analyze word parts and how existing words pre-empt new ones in the lexicon.

Part III, Using language: Chapters 12–14

Chapter 12, "Honing conversational skills," examines how children take part in conversation, including how often they respond to a parent's utterances and the length of pauses when speakers switch turns. Chapter 13, "Doing more with language," goes beyond conversation to storytelling, the use of the definite article, scalar implicatures, the persistent "Why?", adopting a different role, and attempts at persuasion. Chapter 14, "Two languages at a time," deals with translation equivalents, language mixing and the acquisition of dialects.

Part IV, Process in acquisition: Chapters 15–16

Chapter 15, "Specialization for language," turns to the brain's speech areas and to maturational stages. Chapter 16, "Continuity and change," draws the account together, with a box on the number of words experienced during learning.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–6: Interaction, perception and words

• Child-directed speech: the speech adults address to young children, described in terms of pitch, rate and other properties.
• Segmenting the speech stream: how infants begin to pick words out of continuous speech.
• Overextension: using an early word for a wider range of referents, on the basis of shape, movement, size, sound or texture.

Chapters 7–11: Constructions and word formation

• Early constructions: the path from single words and gesture-plus-word combinations to productive patterns.
• Grammatical morphemes: the order in which English children acquire forms such as past tense -ed.
• Pre-emption in the lexicon: how existing words block innovative coinages.

Chapters 12–16: Use, bilingualism and process

• Common ground: the shared knowledge children build with adults and other children, a new emphasis in this edition.
• Language mixing: children's use of two languages in the same utterance.
• Maturational stages: the developmental sequence discussed in the chapter on specialization for language.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Comprehensive and chronological. The four parts follow development from early interaction through words, grammar and conversation, and the publisher stresses coverage of phonetics and phonology, lexicon, grammar and meaning as well as discourse. Willem Levelt, quoted in the front matter, describes it as comprehensive and evenly balanced.
• Data in tables and boxes. The long lists of tables, boxes and figures show the evidence at work: word-production norms by month, causative errors, stages of past-tense acquisition and example conversations. The publisher lists as a key feature detailed examples of child usage that connect theory to data.
• Cross-linguistic material. Tables include data from Russian, Korean, Turkish, French and Dutch alongside English, and the publisher's description refers to research on many languages.
• Support for projects. The book has a glossary and a section of resources for research, and the publisher notes links to databases and analysis programs and a list of resources for student projects.

Limitations

• Length. At about 690 pages, including roughly 125 pages of references, the book is more than a one-term course can cover without selection.
• Brief treatment of the biological side. Brain and maturation are the subject of a single chapter, so readers wanting neuroscience should add another source.
• A conversational emphasis. The book builds its account around children's interaction with adult speakers; readers who want a survey organized around competing theoretical positions may prefer a text structured that way.

Where It Fits in the Course

Clark is the full-length, acquisition-only text in the psycholinguistics and acquisition course. O'Grady's How Children Learn Language is a concise, non-technical account that suits a first encounter and can serve as a short preparation. Warren's Introducing Psycholinguistics, Traxler's Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Sedivy's Language in Mind and Harley's The Psychology of Language range across how people produce and understand language and how they acquire it; Clark is devoted to development alone and can be paired with one of them.

Read Clark when the question is how and when children master each part of a language, and use one of the broader books for adult processing, bilingualism in adults and language breakdown.

How to Use This Book

The book is for students who have had an introductory linguistics or psycholinguistics course and want a thorough account of child language, and for researchers who need a reference on a particular phenomenon. Some background in developmental psychology helps but is not required.

A practical plan: read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 first, since the book's emphasis on conversation is set out there. Then read Part I and Part II in order if the course is on development as a whole; a shorter course can take Chapters 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 as a core and add Chapter 9 or 10 for syntax. Chapters 12–14 suit courses on pragmatics, bilingualism or discourse. Use the tables and boxes as a source of data to analyse, consult the glossary for terminology, and begin student research projects from the resources section and the reference list.