언어습득의 몇 가지 문제

Abstract

While the study of language development in children has rich historical tradition, especially, the last decade has seen a much more rapid development in subtlety of research methods, depth of theoretical issues, and abundance of new findings. This paper aimed to review five current questions about language development in order to sugg.est some promising directions. First, any effort to try to apply a certain grammar to child language has only taken researchers to endless distributional detail of doubtful generality, and never sufficiently complete. Therefore, 'the goal of creating a type of grammar that is suitable for both adult and child language remains. The two cannot be considered in isolation from each other, for eventually the child's language becomes that of the adult.' Second, both of the findings that reveal the gradual continuity of language development and the tremendous effects of parental speech on children strongly discourage the innateness hypothesis. Third, a lot of characteristics in child speech has proved to have some generality which supports the universality ·hypothesis, but not innateness. The D.l. Slobin's principle, 'new forms express old functions, and new functions are first expressed by old forms', is compatible with cognitive prerequisites for the syntactic development. Fourth, recent studies on the structure and/or acquisition of word meaning have focused attention on the role played by prototypes or best exemplars in the internal structure of natural categories to which words refer. A new paradigm of reference that radically departs from the traditional view of all-or-none categorization is emerging. Fifth, efforts to teach chimpanzees language are remarkably in progress. The chimpanzees have become capable to demonstrate stage I child language, so that the speciesspecific and species-uniform assumption for human language is open to doubt.