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By the end of the second month, infants begin to do a lot of cooing.

Coos are acoustically more varied than cries, as infants exercise some control over their articulatory organs to produce a greater variety of sounds.

Coos tend to be made in the back of the mouth and are similar to back vowels and velar consonants.

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By about 6 to 7 months, babbling begins. Infants first use reduplicated babbling, in which they repeat a consonant–vowel sequence, such as babababa. Similar tendencies have been found in various languages (Oller, 1980; Stark, 1980).

By 11 to 12 months, infants use variegated babbling, in which syllable strings consist of varying consonants and vowels, such as bigodabu.

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Babbling is thought to be a form of play in which various sounds are practiced and mastered before they are used in communicative ways.

It is also about this time that infants begin to impose sentence-like intonational contours on their utterances, and their vowels begin to sound similar to those in their native language (Boysson-Bardies, Halle, Sagart, & Durand, 1989).

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There are several reasons to think that babbling is noncommunicative early on. One is that sounds made during babbling are similar to, but phonologically more sloppy than, the corresponding sounds made later on.

While the ma of the 7-month-old and the 18-month-old may sound similar, when the two utterances are examined spectrographically, the earlier sound is generally ‘‘sloppier’’ and exhibits a greater range of acoustic properties than true speech.

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One-word utterances present a microcosm of the difficulties faced by linguists examining child language. Consider the following situation: Suppose a child says BA when she is in the bath, again says BA when given a mug of milk, and also says BA to the kitchen taps. How are we to interpret this? There are at least four possible explanations.

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The first possibility is that the child is simply naming the objects to prove she knows them, but has overgeneralized the word BA. That is, she has learnt the name BA for ‘bath’ and has wrongly assumed that it can apply to anything which contains liquid.

When children overgeneralize they do so in a quite confusing way. They appear to focus attention on one aspect of an object at a time. One much quoted example concerns a child who used the word QUA to refer to a duck, milk, a coin and a teddy bear’s eye (Vygotsky 1962: 70).

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QUA ‘quack’ was, originally, a duck on a pond. Then the child incorporated the pond into the meaning, and by focusing attention on the liquid element, QUA was generalized to milk. But the duck was not forgotten, since QUA was used to refer to a coin with an eagle on it. Then, with the coin in mind, the child applied QUA to any round coin-like object, such as a teddy bear’s eye.

Vygotsky called this phenomenon a ‘chain complex’ because a chain of items is formed, all linked by the same name.

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Yet even Vygotsky’s ‘chain complex’ interpretation seems over-simple in the view of some researchers. A third, and less obvious, point of view is that of David McNeill, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.

He argued that one-word utterances show a linguistic sophistication which goes far beyond the actual sound spoken. He claimed that the child is not merely involved in naming exercises, but is uttering holophrases, single words which stand for whole sentences.

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For example, BA might mean ‘I am in my bath’ or ‘Mummy’s fallen in the bath’. He justifies his viewpoint by claiming that misuse of words shows evidence of grammatical relationships which the child understands, but cannot yet express.

He concluded that ‘there is a constant emergence of new grammatical relations, even though no utterance is ever longer than one word’ (McNeill 1970: 23).

The idea that single-word utterances may be more than mere labels has also been examined by Lois Bloom, a researcher at Columbia University.

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After a careful analysis of the single words spoken by her daughter, Allison, she suggested that there is no simple answer to the problem of interpretation because the meaning of a one-word utterance varies according to the age of the child.

For example, when Allison said MUMMY at the age of 16 months, she seemed to mean, simply, ‘That’s Mummy’. But at the age of 19 months she appeared to be trying to express some kind of interaction between Mummy and the surrounding environment, as when she pointed to her mother’s cup and said, MUMMY.

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After a careful analysis of the single words spoken by her daughter, Allison, she suggested that there is no simple answer to the problem of interpretation because the meaning of a one-word utterance varies according to the age of the child.

Bloom concluded (perhaps not surprisingly) that single words are grammatically fairly uninteresting. Their importance lies in the light they throw on a child’s conceptual representation of experience.

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Other researchers have tried to analyse what the child is trying to do with one-word utterances (e.g. Wells 1974; Halliday 1975; Griffiths 1986). If a child says GA, is she simply naming an object such as a cat? Is she asking for the cat? Or is she trying to control the actions of her parents by telling them to let the cat in?

The probable ‘translation’ may even depend on the temperament of the child. Some children simply enjoy naming things, others prefer to use words to get the attention of the adults around them.

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An extra reason for caution is that some youngsters may not even realize that they are ‘naming’ things when they first utter words (McShane 1979, 1980). They may simply be taking part in a ritual game. Many middle-class parents sit down with their children and leaf through picture books, naming the objects which appear on each page, such as ‘apple’, ‘ball’, ‘cat’, ‘duck’, and so on.

The child may shriek BA delightedly when she reaches the page with the round blue blob in the middle, but may not for some weeks realize that this sequence of sounds is actually the ‘name’ of a certain type of object, a ball.

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As McShane put it: ‘The child first learns the words and later learns that these words are names’ (1979: 890). The sudden realization that things have names appears to lead to a surge of ‘labelling’ everyday objects such as CAR, MILK, BALL, APPLE, followed by a surge of ‘describing’, with the use of words such as BLUE, GONE, BROKE, HIT.

This in turn, he suggested, leads to the beginning of structured speech. His suggestion is supported by others: ‘This burgeoning store of comprehended words triggers or reinforces the activation of analytical gmechanisms’ (Locke 1997: 276).

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However, occasionally, the ‘single word’ stage may even be missed out. There are reports of a working-class black community in Pennsylvania where it is considered odd to talk to babies, and parents make no attempt to interpret children’s early babbles as labels.

These children often begin to communicate by picking up whole phrases, which they use with a wide range of intonations and meanings. One toddler, Teegie, used ‘You shut up’ to mean ‘No’, ‘Leave me alone’, ‘Give me that’, and ‘Take it, I don’t want it’ (Heath 1983). But these children learned language perfectly well via this route. A young child is ‘faced with having to discover what talking is all about’ (Griffiths 1986: 281), and there seems to be no one way in which this realization comes about.

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There are basically two ways of analysing two-word utterances. We may choose either the ‘Let’s pretend they’re talking Martian’ technique or the ‘Let’s guess what they’re trying to say’ method.

In the first, linguists approach the child’s speech as if it were an unknown exotic language. Having freed their minds of preconceived notions connected with their knowledge of English, they write a grammar based entirely on the word patterns they discern in the child’s speech.

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In the second method, linguists try to provide an interpretation of what the child is saying by using their knowledge of the language and by observing the situation in which the words were uttered.

In their earliest attempts at analysing two-word utterances, linguists followed the ‘Let’s pretend they’re talking Martian’ technique. Martin Braine (1963), of the University of California at Santa Barbara, listed all the two-word utterances produced by three 2-year-olds, Steven, Gregory and Andrew. The results were superficially puzzling.

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They had two distinct classes of word in their speech. One class contained a small number of words such as ALLGONE, MORE, THIS, NO.

There were a number of inexplicable sequences such as MORE TAXI, ALLGONE SHOE, NO BED, BUNNY DO, IT DOGGIE. Braine noted that the combinations did not seem to be random. Certain words always occurred in a fixed place, and other words never occurred alone. Andrew, Steven and Gregory all seemed to have adopted a simple though genuine pattern when they put two words together.

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The other class contained many more words which occurred less frequently, but in any position and sometimes alone. These words often coincided with adult nouns such as MILK, SHOE, BUNNY and so on. They are sometimes called open class words, since an ‘open’ class is a set of words which can be added to indefinitely.

These words occurred frequently, never alone, and in a fixed position. They were labelled pivots, because the utterance appeared to pivot round them.

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Roger Brown noted that ‘a rather small set of operations and relations describe all the meanings expressed ... whatever the language they are learning’ (Brown 1973: 198).

In brief, the evidence suggests that children express relationships between words in a consistent way, whether they use word order or devices such as word endings. This raises a further question: do children from different parts of the world express the same relationships?

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How do children set about acquiring these early utterances? Do they discover how to express one concept at a time? Or do they deal with several simultaneously?

Braine (1976) found that children coped with several concepts at the same time, but used each one in a very restricted set of circumstances.

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For example, just prior to his second birthday, his own son, Jonathan, could express possession, (MUMMY SHOE), recurrence (MORE JUICE) and attribution (BIG DOG), but only with a narrow range of words. In the case of possession, the only possessors were MOMMY and DADDY. Jonathan had apparently acquired a formula for dealing with possession, but a formula of very limited scope, MOMMY or DADDY + object, as in MOMMY SHOE ‘Mummy’s shoe’, DADDY PIPE ‘Daddy’s pipe.’

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Do all children acquiring language behave like Jonathan? Braine ( 1976) examined the early utterances of a number of other children, and concluded that each one had adopted a ‘limited scope formulae’ approach at the two-word stage, though the actual formulae varied from child to child.

Numerous children seem to go about learning language in a roughly similar fashion, even though there is considerable individual variation in the precise track they follow.

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‘Wugs’ you should say, if you understand the rules which underlie English plurals. And that is the reply given almost unanimously by a group of children who were shown this picture.

The researcher wanted to prove that they hadn’t just memorized each plural as they heard it, but had an internalized ‘rule’ which could apply even to words they had never heard (Berko 1958).

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And it wasn’t just wugs the children coped with correctly, so no one could argue that they misunderstood the word as ‘bugs’. Another picture showed a man standing on the ceiling, with the words: ‘This is a man who knows how to bing. He is binging. He did the same thing yesterday. Yesterday he – ?’ ‘Binged’ said nearly all the children tested.

Admittedly, they had higher results for words they already knew. More children got the plural of GLASS right than the plural of a nonsense word TASS (TASS and GLASS rhyme in American English, having the same gvowel as the word MASS)

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An even more striking example of the child’s ability to generalize patterns is the development of irregular verbs such as COME and CAME, GO and WENT, BREAK and BROKE. Children start by acquiring the correct irregular forms for the past tense, CAME, WENT, BROKE.

But not at all. As soon as children learn the regular past tense for words such as HELPED, PLAYED, WALKED and WASHED, they give up using the correct irregular form, and start using the overgeneralized forms COMED, GOED, BREAKED.

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Two opposing conclusions could be drawn from this: either language learning is straightforward, graspable even by a well-programmed computer; or word endings are a small and not very difficult part of language.

But not at all. As soon as children learn the regular past tense for words such as HELPED, PLAYED, WALKED and WASHED, they give up using the correct irregular form, and start using the overgeneralized forms COMED, gGOED, BREAKED.

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