ABSTRACT
The last five chapters have established that women and men differ linguistically in a wide variety of ways. In this chapter I shall look at the way these different repertoires begin. Work on child language acquisition is relatively recent, and it tends to concentrate on how the (undifferentiated) child acquires his or her language. Language is often interpreted in the narrow sense of grammar, phonology and lexicon, with particular emphasis on the development of syntax. Classic studies in this field are Bloom (1975), Brown (1976), Dale (1976), Fletcher and Garman (1986), Ingram (1989). More recently, with increased awareness of language as social behaviour, researchers have widened the scope of their enquiries. They still aim to discover how a child becomes linguistically competent, but ‘linguistically competent’ has been redefined. As was pointed out in Chapter 6, a knowledge of grammar, phonology and lexicon is not enough – it does not make the child competent. Children need to master not only the formal rules of language, but also rules for the appropriate use of language. Linguistic competence is now taken to include a knowledge of the cultural norms of spoken interaction. An excellent example of work using this new framework is Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1983) study of children’s acquisition of conversational competence.1
