ABSTRACT
When my son Christian came into the world, all he could “say” was “Waaaaaaah!” By the time he was a year old, he was starting to speak his first recognizable words, one word at a time, of course. His first word was the name of his grandmother’s cat, Harvey, which he pronounced as “Hargy.” By the time he was two, he could string his words together into his own sentences. At first his sentences were very short. They tended to be only two words long, like “No talk!” (his way of telling us to stop reading a story that was scaring him). However, his sentences were soon growing longer and more complex, like “Captain Haddock hitting Tintin” and “Get him off of me!” By the time he was four and half years old and heading off to his first day of school, he turned to me and said “Mum, I don’t think I want to go through with this.” Like children all over the world, Christian had mastered his native tongue in a remarkably short period of time. How did he do that? That is the question that those studying children’s language development continue to ask, and the answer is still far from definitive, although we have come a long way from the days when it was thought that children simply did this by imitating those around them.
