ABSTRACT
In studies of child language, there is an implicit assumption that the child produces an imperfect version of the adult code. The adult code represents the target towards which the child's language is developing. In this perspective, the child moves through a series of 'stages' (Brown, 1973) until he! achieves 'competence' (Chomsky, 1965) in the language of the adult speech community. For example, recent literature on the 'single-word stage' suggests that the child at first deletes certain highly predictable information, then, at some later stage, the child expresses that information in the utterance itself (Bates, 1976; Greenfield and Smith, 1976). Another development noted during this period is the movement away from the sequential expression of a proposition towards the syntactic expression of a proposition (Atkinson, 1979; Bloom, 1973; Keenan and Klein, 1975; Scollon, 1976). The child points out some referent in one utterance and predicates something of that referent in a subsequent utterance. The child uses discourse to convey the proposition, producing what Scollon calls 'vertical constructions'. Over time, the child comes to encode argument and predicate in the space of a single utterance, utilizing syntactic rather than a discourse means. The literature on multiword utterances suggests again that the child moves through a series of stages in which not only utterance length but also syntactic complexity of the child's speech corpus is increased (Bloom, 1970; Brown, 1973; Brown, Cazden and Bellugi, 1969; Slobin, 1973a).
