2.1 First language acquisition

The processes of basic transformation of bodily-produced feelings into linguistically structured, and hence intra- and interpersonally comprehensible utterances, dominate the early socialization of the infant in the pre-linguistic stages. This includes the incidental acquisition of linguistically mediated concepts, categories, and schemata which exert an increasing influence on mental development. In these processes that contribute to the formation of the mind, the child is not just a passive recipient of language, but an active participant. Even before the infant has acquired any language, he or she has developed bodily sensations and emotions which will influence his or her behavior. Throughout the life-span of the individual psyche, mind and body influence one another so that the Cartesian body-mind dualism breaks down. Socialization is only made possible by some form of bodily, affective, and preconscious differentiation from others, for instance, parents and other significant individuals, such as older siblings, playmates, or relatives. “The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behavior” (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 348, cited in Gallagher 2008: 287). Zlatev (2008: 301; emphasis in the original) claims that through physical interaction with others, “the infant develops mimetic schemas, which constitute body-based, pre-linguistic, consciously accessible representations that serve as the child’s first concepts.”

This is an important claim for cognitive linguists who increasingly work with the concept of embodiment. Zlatev (2008: 301) goes on to suggest that “mimetic schemas possess a basic intersubjectivity which can serve as the foundation for developing a conventional normative semiotic system, i.e. language.” Hence, the use of language cannot be separated from the mind and subjectivity of the user who fills language with his or her subjective feelings, intentions, desires, memories, and fantasies. Kramsch (2009a: 18) comments: “One could say that becoming a subject means becoming aware of the gap between the words that people utter and the many meanings these words could have.” In intersubjective interaction, the gap has to be mentally filled by the subject on the spot which positions his or her self in a certain manner (cf. Section 4.5).

Both mimetic schemata and the child’s increasing ability to differentiate between self and other trigger a developmental cascade in several dimensions. The infant acquires motor skills (mastering of bodily movements, such as lifting the head, sitting up, conscious grasping, and, at a later stage, standing and walking), cognitive skills (formation of categories and concepts such as father, mother, people, teddy bear, etc., and using these to regulate thought and activities), linguistic skills (understanding communication directed at him or her, and producing his or her first own utterances), emotional competences (expressing and regulating his or her own feelings), and social competences (ability to make contact with others, to interact and cooperate with others) (cf. Winkel, Petermann, and Petermann 2006: 237). Most of this acquisition process is based on incidental and implicit perceptual learning, repeating, and copying the actions of others. One aspect of the acquisition of motor skills consists of the infant increasingly insisting on initiating his or her own activities, for example, when he or she begins to master the skill of walking. At this stage, at about nine months of age, the infant clearly has some awareness of the social dimension of his or her existence. He or she tries to communicate not only in non-linguistic ways, but also expresses interpersonal functions in simple utterances, such as pleasure or displeasure, greeting people, demanding attention, or getting people to do things. Usually, each utterance stands for a specific function; however, the infant’s protolanguage is characterized by the absence of grammar. The infant also begins to develop knowledge about the functional properties of objects which allows prediction about how the object will respond and behave in the future, as Madole and Oakes (2005: 279-280) explain: “If an infant notices that her rubber ducky has squeaked when it was squeezed the last five times she took a bath, then she can predict that her rubber ducky should squeak when squeezed in the future. However, before such predictions can be made, infants must be able to recognize the correlation between an object’s appearance and its function.” This example illustrates that children begin to develop knowledge of categories and plausibility structures through direct personal experiences. Children at this stage are also engaged in building complex blends between the concepts of which they are trying to make sense (cf. Section 4.7).

These pre-linguistic developments are followed by a great stream of word learning, of mastering both expressive speech and denotative labeling (cf. Messer 1994). The first stage of this complex developmental process of language acquisition has already started long before the baby utters his or her first word. It covers the period from birth, when the baby produces his or her first sound, the birth cry, to approximately twelve months. By the age of four days, babies can already differentiate their native language from another language on the basis of language-specific rhythm and prosody, even if they are not familiar with the speaker’s voice, or his/her accent (cf. Guasti 2002: 24). However, between six and twelve months of age, this ability to discriminate foreign sounds declines as infants have to focus on the sounds of the language they hear most. It has been shown that “infants listen longer to infant-directed speech sequences that reflect natural prosodic units” (Vihman 2009: 16) of the main language the child is exposed to.

The first weeks and months are characterized by implicit perceptual acquisition of the sounds of the L1. In the first eight weeks of life, infants do not produce a wide range of sounds; the principal sounds are cries. However, crying is used by infants as a means of communication, and parents usually develop astonishingly exact skills at determining different types of cry, for example, for hunger, pain, seeking attention, or other. This initial phase is followed at about the age of three months by cooing, i.e., the production of vowel sounds such as oooo which vary in tone and volume and which are normally associated with pleasure (cf. Catell 2007: 3-4). In these first two stages of vocalization, the infant produces random sounds which are generally believed to reflect sounds of any human language, not just the specific language of the child’s speech community.

At about six months of age, the cooing stage develops into a phase characterized by babbling, consisting of syllable sequences such as bababa. It has been suggested that the immaturity of the infant’s speech apparatus, which is not yet capable of producing speech-like sounds, may be responsible for the delay in speech production. However, deaf infants engage in “manual babbling” at the same stage of development. This observation may suggest that it is “the maturation of the neural substrate supporting language that is responsible for babbling” (Guasti 2002: 47). This leads Guasti to conclude that, “Humans are born with special sensitivity not to sounds, per se, but to the particular units, structures, and regularities found in natural languages, regardless of the modality of expression” (Guasti 2002: 47).

Babbling accounts for a large part of the infant’s early vocalization up to the stage when infants produce their first words, at approximately the age of twelve months. The babbling stage can be differentiated into the first stage of repeated sequences of babbling (known as canonical babbling) and the later stage of producing more varied sequences of sound (known as variegated babbling) (cf. Foster-Cohen 1999: 22). Babbling seems to be a universal feature of infants at this stage of development because: “The onset of babbling and the types of sounds produced seem to be universal and are similar regardless of culture or of whether the child can hear or not. This suggests that babbling is the result of maturational processes rather than learning” (Lund 2003: 41).

In the activity of babbling, infants subconsciously test their articulatory capacities; they also discover and practice the sounds and sound combinations of the language they are most exposed to, eventually leading to the production of phonemes and words. Children need adequate scaffolding by parents or other adults in terms of developing their utterances (if they can be called that) in the direction of appropriate sounds, morphemes, or even protowords of their first language. There is, however, much difference in the provision and quality of scaffolding by adults, largely influenced by their sociocultural background, as, for example, Heath (1983; 2009) has analyzed. Whereas American middle class parents spend a lot of time providing structured phonetic scaffolding for their young children, African-American working class parents seem to have a different approach: As children make cooing or babbling sounds, adults refer to them as “noise,” and no attempt is made to interpret these sounds as words or communicative attempts on the part of the baby. Adults believe they should not have to depend on their babies to tell them what they need or when they are uncomfortable; adults know, children only “come to know.” (Heath 2009: 354). This is a very crude and generalizing statement with regard to rather monolithically construed social (and racial) differences in the background of parents of young children. There certainly have to be exceptions in both directions in socio-pedagogical studies like Heath’s. However, if such differences do exist as a consequence of these different attitudes and behaviors with regard to the first cooing and babbling sounds of children, the onset of word formation and speech can vary. In fact, there is evidence that infants understand many words before they are actually able to produce any. Before the end of their first year of life, most babies understand a few frequently repeated words; for example, they wave their hands when someone says “bye-bye” (cf. Bee 2000: 231). Thus, infants’ lingualization, i.e., the process of acquiring the linguistic system in the wider sense, including the socially appropriate use of language, can be said to begin with the babbling stage when the infant produces sounds that begin to approximate the sounds of his or her native language.

When infants are about nine months old, they extend their range of communicative tools from producing sounds to using gestures. An infant who points at something and makes grasping movements of the hand is clearly “asking” for the object in order to elicit a certain response from others. Adults around the child will interpret the grasping gesture as an act of pointing, indicating the child’s desire to have that object. The child then internalizes the significance accorded to the gesture by adults and now performs the grasping gesture for them more consciously and intentionally. In doing so, the child demonstrates that he or she can consciously send out signals to others, and obviously anticipates a certain reaction. Although pointing does not constitute a sign system, it is a sign form that the child begins to master. It clearly shows that the child has begun to develop an “internal plane” of consciousness (cf. Wertsch 1985: 65). It also indicates that there is no direct reciprocal connection between thought and speech because there is “speech” without thought (infants in the crying, cooing, and babbling stages), and there is also thought without speech. But those two areas of thought and speech overlap in verbal thought, and this is coincident with language. Since we can share only what we articulate and communicate, it is this linguistic dimension alone that has historical validity.

The one-word stage for infants typically starts at about ten to twelve months of age. When learning to produce words, children have to perform four separate tasks, namely segmenting the speech stream into units that represent recognizable words, learning the sound-image of words, learning the syntactic properties of words, and associating meaning with forms of words. The early words produced by infants are often not like the adult versions of the word but are approximations of them. The rate of learning words is initially very slow (3-4 months for ten words) but at some point between 18 and 21 months a “vocabulary explosion” (Winkel, Petermann, and Petermann 2006: 237) or “language explosion” (Siegler 1998: 152) occurs. Normally, a two-year-old child adds an average of ten words per day to the 500-600 words of vocabulary he or she has already acquired. An average six-year-old has acquired a vocabulary of approximately 14,000 words to which he or she adds another 3,000 words annually from school-going age (cf. Kuczaj II 1999: 133). This amounts to knowledge of a huge range of vocabulary when compared to the much slower rate of learning vocabulary in the L2. At this rate of L1 learning, children frequently make a quick guess about a word’s denotation on the basis of experience and of knowledge of known words. This phenomenon has come to be called fast mapping. If, for instance, “a child is first exposed to the word beige in the context of the instruction ‘bring me the beige one, not the blue one’, the child might conclude that beige is a colour term and that it is a colour other than blue (assuming the child knows the denotation of the word blue)” (Kuczaj II 1999: 141; emphasis in the original).

The child therefore increasingly gains additional experience with a word and its conventional uses by comparing new words to the meaning of familiar words, thus constantly refining meanings. The child’s increasing awareness that words can denote things, people, and actions fosters more proactive word-learning with a greater degree of intent and effort. In this process, the knowledge of morphosyntax, lexicon, and the stock of experience also expands and refines rapidly, leading to higher cognitive abilities in the child, in that the representational nature of thought is influenced by the manner in which language organizes the construction of self, Other, and world.

The exact mechanism of how children acquire a lexicon is still being researched. When segmenting the flow of speech into words, the child first has to identify useful chunks of language, such as whole utterances, beginnings and ends of utterances, rhythmic stretches, or certain intonational packages (cf. Peters 2009: 44-45), and then associate meaning with the corresponding lexical items. One explanation for how children acquire the meaning of words and phrases focuses on the theory that infants learn words by forming hypotheses about their meanings and then testing them. When children notice a co-occurrence between a word and the object it refers to, or between a word and an object being pointed at, they will form hypotheses about what could be meant by that word. Subsequently, they will test them in new contexts and either verify or falsify their hypotheses (cf. Bruner 1975; Bruner, Olver, and Greenfield 1966). This approach, however, cannot explain the child’s construal of meaning for abstract or mass nouns referring to non-perceivable constructs. It also does not explain a situation where children can form multiple hypotheses about the meaning of a word they hear in a given context. For example, the word can refer to an object as a whole (e.g., a table), to its parts (e.g., its legs), or the material that it is made out of (e.g., wood, PVC, metal, etc.).

It seems to be a cross-culturally observable feature that children’s early productive vocabulary consists mainly of nouns. This can be explained by the “word-to-world” procedure whereby the word is mapped onto the object it refers to (cf. Guasti 2002: 81). Abstract lexical items such as verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, etc. are actively used only at a later stage since the concrete object-relationship is missing. Thus, children must rely on other evidence, and that is provided by the syntax of a sentence. As soon as children begin to combine words, their lexicon starts to grow massively (cf. Gilette et al. 1999: 139). It seems likely that the emergence of syntax accelerates the acquisition of the lexicon. Children start to use verbs meaningfully, based on the syntactic context and the meaning of nouns they already know. This suggests that children bootstrap the meaning of verbs onto syntax, that is, they can infer the category (and hence meaning) of a lexical item from its position in a sentence, provided they understand some of the nouns used in that sentence. For example, in the sentence Frank hits Oliver, it is obvious from the placement and syntactic marking of Frank and Oliver who the guilty party is.

The term “syntactic bootstrapping” was coined by Lila Gleitman (1990). In direct opposition to Bowerman (1974) and Pinker (1984), who suggest that children develop an understanding of syntax on the basis of semantic information, Gleitman (1990) suggests that children attend to the structural regularities of the language they are exposed to from a young age. Thus, they develop sensitivity to syntactic and semantic correspondences that are inherent in the linguistic structure. The key for the process of bootstrapping seems to be the initial word-to-world procedure. With this procedure, children will have acquired basic scaffolding around nouns on which they then can construct partial sentential representation by inferring the meaning of other words used in a sentence, such as verbs or adjectives, from the syntactic cues. This basis can be expanded by associating words and phrases with other words and phrases or morphemes that occur with them. For instance, in learning a language where nouns have different genders (for example, German, French, or Russian), the child must not only learn the correct articles (which infer gender, number, and case) but also the corresponding pronouns and adjectival endings for each of the different cases, both in singular and plural. This is possible because children have the general ability to develop associations between articles, words, and pronouns that frequently occur together, whereas second language learners, especially in adulthood, have to explicitly learn these complex and potentially confusing constellations. The differences in syntax between languages also implies that the mechanism of syntactic bootstrapping is always specific to a language.

In the process of acquiring a fair amount of lexical items, children start to expand their single word stage and start producing two-word phrases at about the age of 18-24 months. These two-word utterances are called “telegraphic speech” (Haslett 1989: 23) and usually consist of content words (verbs, nouns); function words (articles, conjunctions) are generally not yet produced. This two-word or multiple-word stage marks the starting point for the development of syntax. Once children start to combine words, they learn grammar very quickly and “pass through a number of phases that are characterised by increasing complexity of grammar and sentence length” (Lund 2003: 43). At about 30 months, children start to use more complex grammar and enter a phase of “grammar explosion” (Bee 2000: 237-239). There is evidence that children in this phase do not simply imitate adult speech but actually learn, by trial and error of forming assumptions, the rules of grammar so that they are able to independently produce increasingly complex sentences in a grammatically and syntactically correct manner, including the use of conjunctions (cf. Pinker 2003). In addition to acquiring the structure of the language in terms of grammar and syntax, children also “acquire entire systems of mappings, blends, and framing, along with their concomitant language manifestations” (Fauconnier 1997: 189; cf. Section 4.7). The success of these processes is even more astonishing when we consider that language directed to small children by adults is frequently deficient (e.g., baby talk, motherese, parentese).

However, during the process of acquiring the standard language, the child’s protolanguage is, at any given time, a legitimate system in its own right (cf. Catell 2007). The child’s linguistic development is not a linear process of producing fewer and fewer incorrect structures. Rather, the child’s language is systematic in that the child constantly forms hypotheses on the basis of the input he or she receives. These hypotheses are then actively tested in utterances; based on the feedback received, these hypotheses are continuously revised, reshaped, or abandoned.

In the famous “wug” experiment of 1958, conducted at a time before generative linguistics became dominant, Jean Berko Gleason (2004) showed that children learn language not as a series of isolated, discrete items but as an integrated system. In this experiment, children aged six or seven years were shown drawings of imaginary creatures with novel names or people performing mysterious activities. For example, they were told “This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ” (Berko Gleason 2004: 256), or “This is a dog with quirks on him. He is all covered with quirks. What kind of dog is he? He is a dog” (Berko Gleason 2004: 159), or “This is a man who knows how to bod. He is bodding. Yesterday he did the same thing. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday, he ” (Berko Gleason 2004: 159). The correct answers are “wugs,” “quirky,” and “bodded,” and by completing the sentences correctly, the children demonstrated that they knew the rules for the formation of plural, derived adjectives, and the simple past tense in English. In her experiments, Berko Gleason discovered that English-speaking children as young as four years of age correctly applied rules to the formation of plurals, present progressive, third person singular, and possessives. By being able to apply these patterns to expressions they had never before encountered, the children demonstrated that their language was not based solely on a list of memorized words, but that they were able to creatively apply rules to new contexts.

In the process of language acquisition, the child grows, so to speak, out of the relatively general (or universal) realm of protolanguage and into the relatively specific structure of his or her native tongue of which he or she becomes an increasingly competent user because of the ability to successfully project certain parameters. For example, the English language has a very strict positioning of subject, verb, and object in sentences. This is so to avoid ambiguities in the roles of agent (doer) and patient (sufferer) of actions expressed. In other languages this is not the case. For example, German has a more flexible word order because the cases of nouns and pronouns, including corresponding inflection of verbs, are more marked than in English. Therefore, the agent is always in the nominative case whereas the patient is expressed in the accusative (or dative/genitive) case. Thus, a rule of projection would be that the morphological endings of words can be neglected for English, whereas a child acquiring German would stress exactly the opposite features (cf. Edmondson 1999: 26—27). For example, the English clause “The student donates his books to the library” could be translated into German as Der Student schenkt seine Bücher der Bibliothek. However, in German one can put semantic emphasis by positioning an item at the beginning; if one wants to emphasize the receiver of the books it is possible to say Der Bibliothek schenkt der Student seine Bücher (‘*To the library the student donates his books’), or if one wants to emphasize the objects in question, one could say Seine Bücher schenkt der Student der Bibliothek (‘*His books the student donates to the library’). The flexibility in word order is facilitated here by the case marking in German, so that, unlike in English, the grammatical subject does not have to be positioned in the first place in the sentence but in fact any expression can occupy the first position, including prepositional phrases or subordinate clause, as long as the conjugated form of the verb remains in second position in the German main clause.

Growing into any language implies that the infant and child are not just regurgitating what he or she hears; children are highly creative in what they construct linguistically, as Pinker explains:

These rules are productive in the sense that they specify a string of kinds of words and not just a string of actual words which allows for the spontaneous production of new sentences and texts. The words contained by the rules are, of course, symbolic and hence abstract, which allows for talking about all kinds of things; events, feelings, thoughts, etc. Furthermore, according to Pinker (2003: 7), the rules are combinatorial, meaning that every position in the sentence offers a choice of possible words, thus facilitating an immense number of syntactically correct and semantically meaningful utterances. Pinker (2003: 7) calculates that these rules allow for 6.4 trillion possible five-word sentences in the English language.

By the age of five years, most children can give commands, ask questions, report events, and create stories about imaginary events, using correct syntax and grammatical markers. It is generally accepted that by this age children have mastered the basic structures of the language they have acquired (cf. Schumann 1997: 34). While continuing to learn vocabulary at the rate of approximately ten items a day, their acquisition of linguistic structures slows down. However, this is mainly because they have already internalized most of the basic structures of the L1 so that their learning now focuses on more complex linguistic structures, such as the passive voice, the subjunctive, and subordinate clauses which take more time to acquire than the simpler foundational morpho-syntactical and grammatical structures. This increasing complexity of grammar acquisition is complemented by the child’s ability to use language in a widening social environment. Using language in a greater variety of situations implies that children begin to develop sociolinguistic competence, i.e., they are learning how to use language appropriately in different contexts. Children at the age of five are typically able to defend their place in the playground in an aggressive voice, while being polite when talking to their grandparents.

In the developmental phase of the first four or five years of life, the child experiences his or her self to be at the center of gravity for all (inter-)action and understanding. This can be seen by the child’s ability to deal with increasingly complex conceptual-grammatical relations and deixis. The main types of text the child is exposed to and engages in are dialogues and narratives. Narratives are complex forms of text and are used by children even younger than three years of age as a means of problem-framing, which the child expresses by asking questions such as “How come?”. Narratives, such as fairy tales, serve as an instrument for invoking morals and ethics, but also as a tool for developing the skills of abstract reflection.²⁵

Within the first five years of development, children learn an enormous number of words, and master the complex skills of using language grammatically, phonetically, and syntactically to a high degree of competence so that they can understand and produce a vast array of novel sentences. Parallel to this process of learning words and working out the basic grammatical and syntactical rules, young children also acquire knowledge about the socio-pragmatic appropriateness of using linguistic and communicative patterns (cf. Winkel, Petermann, and Petermann 2006: 237) so that they are by now fully interactive members of their speech community who are able to explain their opinion, talk back to others, verbalize experiences, memories and dreams, reason, and critique the actions and opinions of others. The term speech community, as introduced by Hymes (1974), foregrounds the social entity of languages users (Hymes 1974: 47), thus departing from the traditional approach of linguistics. In Hymes’ view, language has the function to create meanings in a particular context of use. This requires the subject to have acquired pragmatic skills in order to be able to recognize contextual cues which can sometimes overlay the meaning of what is actually said. Children at the age of five years have acquired these skills to a good degree, although they still have to refine them further in terms of understanding satire and irony.

2.2 The interplay of early linguistic and cognitive development

As we have seen, language gradually develops in tandem with the subjective mental capacities during early socialization into the primary means of communication and social activities by means of interaction with more knowledgeable others. Hence, language acquisition (or lingualization) is an integral part of the process of socialization. Therefore, the acquisition of language is neither an innate mechanism nor a purely cognitive process but a social skill, driven by the subjective desire to communicate with others. It is incidentally acquired by interacting with others. Consequently, the analytical focus of the process of language acquisition should be neither on the syntax of language (as Chomsky would suggest), nor on the cognitive stages the child develops on the basis of biological mechanisms (as Piaget would suggest), but on social pragmatics.

Messer (2000: 140) observes that “children make little or no progress with the language they hear” when the main source of language is a technological apparatus such as television which does not allow for social interaction nor facilitate the active testing of hypotheses about language because of the absence of constructive feedback. This observation was verified by Jacqueline Sachs and her colleagues (1981), who studied the linguistic development of a boy they called Jim. Jim was the hearing child of deaf parents who did not interact with him in sign language, nor obviously in verbal communication. Hence, Jim was not exposed to any interpersonal interaction, although he frequently watched television. An assessment of his linguistic abilities at three years and nine months of age showed that he was well below age standards in all aspects of language. Although he tried to express ideas typical for his age, he did not have the appropriate lexical, grammatical, and syntactical means to do so. Once he began a sequence of sustained interactive learning sessions with an adult, his linguistic abilities began to improve, and after five months his deficient language structures had been replaced by structures more typical of his age. The fact that Jim rapidly acquired the rules of English grammar once he began interacting with an adult demonstrates the relevance of dialogical human interaction and sociocultural embeddedness for subjective language acquisition and development. This is highlighted by the fact that Jim failed to acquire language normally when he was exposed to impersonal media such as television.

Technical media do not allow for meaningful interaction, as they are one-dimensional and unresponsive, and are thus not suitable for language learning – good news for the profession of L2 teachers. In addition, the creative testing, verifying, and falsifying of hypotheses in actual interaction with its implicit and explicit feedback is lacking, denying the child active engagement with linguistic features. When children are exposed to explicit or implicit language teaching through technical media, no discernible effect on vocabulary or grammatical development can be observed (cf. Saxton 2009: 69-71).

In contrast to behaviorist, nativist, and cognitivist approaches to explaining the rapid and smooth process of language acquisition, the sociocultural and interactionist approaches emphasize contextual social factors, rather than internal biological mechanisms or simple stimulus-response patterns. If language acquisition can be explained by the gradual internalization of external factors, then these external factors must also assume a central role for theories of second language acquisition in many respects. This recognition gave rise to the communicative method in the 1980s. Language learning cannot be separated from the general developmental process of learning, which in turn is heavily influenced by social and cultural factors. This observation makes, of course, the whole enterprise of analyzing language acquisition much more complex, as relevant and broad extralinguistic concepts such as psychological, cultural, social, pragmatic, interactive, biological, cognitive, and affective factors have to be considered with regard to their influence on the dynamic and multi-layered language acquisition process.

2.3 Development of everyday concepts and scientific concepts

The decontextualization of meaning from the referent is a precondition for the subjective development of what Vygotsky calls scientific concepts, mainly mediated through language in formalized contexts, for instance, highly structured and specialized classroom activities in school. Vygotsky differentiates between scientific and everyday (or spontaneous) concepts. Whereas the former are usually learned in a formal school setting, the latter emerge on the basis of children’s experience of (inter-)acting in everyday real life. However, if the term concept relates to abstracted and subsequently synthesized features, scientific concepts must precede the formation of everyday concepts. This apparent contradiction in the sequence of the development of concepts can be explained by Vygotsky’s notion of pseudoconcepts: as long as the child has not yet reached the ability to think in a systematic, organized, conscious, and hierarchical manner, proper concepts cannot be formed, even though the child clearly and consciously experiences his or her everyday environment: “The child becomes conscious of his spontaneous concepts relatively late; the ability to define them in words, to operate with them at will, appears long after he has acquired the concepts. (...) The development of a scientific concept, on the other hand, usually begins with its verbal definition and its use in nonspontaneous operations” (Vygotsky 1986: 192; emphasis in the original).

The child tries to make sense of his or her environment on the basis of acquired linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. However, this kind of sense is construed with pre-abstract categories, or pseudoconcepts, and is not, therefore, compatible with sense derived from proper concepts. Hence, everyday concepts are closely linked to particular contexts, and lack an overall system. Once everyday concepts have been developed by the child, they enrich existing scientific concepts which, in turn, have a structuring influence on everyday concepts:

Vygotsky argues that one of the fundamental advantages of scientific concepts (as opposed to everyday concepts) is that they form part of a system of interconnected concepts that allows the subject to link up with existing knowledge and to draw conclusions based on this system of decontextualized links. Consequently, Vygotsky (1986: 193; emphasis in the original) observes that “the development of the child’s spontaneous concepts proceeds upward, and the development of his scientific concepts downward, to a more elementary and concrete level.” Whereas spontaneous everyday concepts have the tendency to work their way toward a greater abstractedness, scientific concepts develop toward greater consciousness. Valsiner and van der Veer (2000: 376) illustrate the mutual enrichment of scientific (or academic) and everyday concepts with the example of the concept farmer, which may evoke romantic meanings in the child but more capitalist connotations in the adult:

Scientific concepts are the gateway through which consciousness enters the realm of childish concepts, or pseudoconcepts. In other words, scientific concepts are a necessary precondition for the transformation of pseudoconcepts into proper everyday concepts which structure adult thought.

2.4 Learning the written form of language

If concepts are based on linguistic categories, then concepts must be systematic, communicable, and sharable. The concepts internalized by individuals within the same speech community have to be essentially the same, or at least compatible, in order to facilitate meaningful communication; individuals can also pool their conceptual resources so as to construct and co-construct meanings in order to solve certain problems. This is sometimes done explicitly and intentionally, but for the most part subjects are unaware of the concepts they are using in interaction; thus, conceptual knowledge is usually tacit knowledge, distributed to all members of a speech community. For example, in perceiving a certain situation, we attribute meaning to this situation as a result of the conceptual patterns of knowledge and experiences that we have acquired and internalized: “Perceptual recognition is subject to ‘semantic priming’ whereby previous exposure to a stimulus related in meaning enhances perceptual performance on various tasks” (Harré and Gillet 1994: 169). On that basis, knowledge of self, Other, and world can be co-constructed between individuals, and successful strategies for coping with situations can be developed (cf. Harré and Gillet 1994: 43). This is the core of the symbolic order that constitutes culture (cf. Chapter 7).

Vygotsky’s associate Luria carried out field research of literate and illiterate subjects in Uzbekistan in Central Asia during the 1930s and 1940s with the objective of examining the impact of scientific concepts on the ability to understand selfhood and worldhood in decontextualized structures of knowledge. For example, subjects were given pictures of a hammer, a saw, a log, and a hatchet and asked to group them together. Whereas schooled, literate Uzbeks tended to do so on the basis of abstract word meanings (hammer, saw, and hatchet are hyponyms of tools), non-schooled peasants did not make these connections at all; rather, they based their reasoning on experiential and situational thinking, for instance by stating that, “They [hammer, saw, log and hatchet] are all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these things has to go, I’d throw out the hatchet. It doesn’t do as good a job as a saw” (Luria 1976: 60-61).

Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner (1974) conducted similar experiments with illiterate members of the ethnic group of Kpelle in Liberia (West Africa). Kpelle adults were given simple syllogisms, such as the following:

Just like the illiterate subjects in Uzbekistan, the Kpelle could not solve simple syllogisms by forming analogues since this requires a level of abstraction they obviously had not acquired; instead, they referred to conventional situations they had themselves experienced. The illiterate subjects invoked practical, non-linguistically represented experiences in their reasoning when confronted with decontextualized problems. They were not in a position to grasp the gist and meaning of the decontextualized narrative, and the researchers were surprised by the way the illiterate Kpelle subjects invoked empirical and situational frames of contextualization. By contrast, literate Kpelle demonstrated an ability to effortlessly operate with abstract, linguistically invoked objects and a linguistically created reality (cf. Cole and Scribner 1974: 164). Thus, “The arbitrariness of the hypothetical problem defeats them, whilst Kpelle boys even with limited schooling are able to cope with it” (Jahoda 1976: 183).

However, Scribner and Cole (1981) could show with their experiments among the Kpelle and Vai people of Liberia that the differences between schooling and literacy are not the same as Luria (and Vygotsky) had assumed. Schooling has a much bigger impact than literacy on the successful execution of the task because schooling also influences the ways, manners, and methodologies applied for solving the syllogisms. Hence, the ability to read and write is in itself not as decisive as the manner in which it is used. Schooled children were able to provide verbal explanations to solve the syllogisms, whereas the non-schooled interviewees relied on empirical reasoning, frequently adding further aspects which the original problem did not contain. But the biggest push in the direction of acquiring the potential for abstract thought is also not inherent in schooling itself, as Scribner and Cole (1981) concluded; rather, it is mediated by the written form of language. In this form, the instrument of language as such is objectified, and thus potentially deinstrumentalized. These anthropological field experiments graphically illustrate that empirically-structured illiterate thinking does not know analytical thought; it does not recognize any truth outside its own terms (cf. Demele 1988: 116). By contrast, schooled Kpelle literates were able to use decontextualized categories and assertions quite effortlessly.

The empirical field studies carried out by Luria in Uzbekistan and by Scribner and Cole in Liberia have their flaws. For example, they do not stipulate whether and for how long subjects kept in touch with school-related occupational activities requiring abstract thought, nor do they mention whether the subjects continued to sustain their improved task performance in everyday life. However, both studies seem to support Vygotsky’s general argument that transformation in material circumstances has an effect on mental function.

When children begin to learn to write in school, they have already acquired a vast amount of orally represented lexical and grammatical knowledge of their L1, typically by means of incidental learning. However, they are not usually aware of this knowledge and normally have no reason to make it explicit: “The child does have a command of the grammar of his native tongue long before he enters school, but it is unconscious, acquired in a purely structural way, like the phonetic composition of words” (Vygotsky 1986 :184). Therefore, written words are only objects to small children. Although children may feel that they represent something, they do not know how this mechanism of representation works. In an experiment conducted by Bruce Homer in Canada in the late 1990s (cf. Olson 2002: 158), it transpired that, when preliterate four-year olds were asked to pretend to write the word cat, they produced just one scribbled mark insisting it said cat. The children obviously tried to reproduce what they had seen their parents or other more knowledgeable others do when they were writing.³¹ When asked to write two cats, one child produced two scribbled marks on the paper, and three scribbles for three cats. However, when asked to write no cats the child waved the pencil in the air, saying: “There’s no cats so I didn’t write anything” (Olson 2002: 159). Obviously, the child hypothesizes that a word is something to be read and that it stands for something tangible, so abstract ideas, such as no cats, cannot be written down in words. Homer and Olson conclude that “the child knows something about writing - hence the scribbles – but does not know that writing maps on to utterances, not on to events or objects. (... ) They do not realize that writing represents not events, but language about events” (Olson 2002: 159-160). Preliterate children do not know about lexical or phonological properties of language, therefore they lack the capacity to analyze the constituents of written words which is a precondition for developing the ability to read and write.

In learning to write and in explicitly learning the grammar of the mother tongue, the child reaches a stage in the development of his or her language that is characterized by the conscious use of language. This is a major step in language acquisition, as the child is no longer limited to the unconscious and unreflected usage of language (tacit linguistic knowledge), but can now deliberately operate with language, and consequently operate consciously with his or her own cognitive abilities (cf. Vygotsky 1986:183-184). Whereas language usage in the ordinary world is characterized by spontaneity and context-specific restrictions, schooling puts emphasis on theoretical knowledge, and decontextualized and taxonomic thinking. In learning how to read and in particular how to write words, phrases, and texts, children have to learn to reconstitute their meaning in a new, abstract mode. “In learning to write, the child must disengage himself from the sensory aspect of speech and replace words by images of words” (Vygotksy 1986: 181). Unlike in face-to-face conversation, where responsibility for mutual understanding is shared between the interlocutors, the solitary writing process requires children to take on the sole responsibility for making accessible the meaning of what they want to express. In expressing their thoughts in a written text, children become aware that they must make their thinking fully explicit if it is to be understood by the readers. Consequently, children become aware of the linguistic system in some detail, and they come to understand that, by consciously deploying linguistic means, they can effectively meet their specific communicative intentions.

According to Vygotsky, the beginning of the process of learning to write is not dependent on the developmental readiness of school children because “the child has little motivation to learn writing when we begin to teach it. He feels no need and has only a vague idea of its usefulness” (Vygotsky 1986: 181). In addition, “the psychological functions on which written speech is based have not begun to develop in the proper sense when instruction in writing starts” (Vygotsky 1986: 183). In this important stage of learning, instruction is clearly leading development, a notion that Vygotsky developed in more detail with his concept of the “zone of proximal development” (cf. Section 9.5). Individual development follows its own internal logic which makes it difficult to work out a path of instruction to follow, but as Vygotsky has shown, development can be guided by instruction.

While speaking, the child “is hardly conscious of the sounds he pronounces and quite unconscious of the mental operations he performs. In writing, he must take cognizance of the sound structure of each word, dissect it, and reproduce it in alphabetical symbols, which he must have studied and memorized before” (Vygotsky 1986: 182). Although every text written in English can be decomposed into the 26 letters of the alphabet, children have to put the letters and words together according to complex linguistic rules and discursive requirements. An additional difficulty is the relation between elements of speech (phonemes) and their corresponding elements in written language (graphemes), for instance, due to different ways of pronunciation (e.g., varieties such as Scottish English, Hiberno English, Estuary English, Pidgin English, etc.), or words that sound the same but have different meanings (for example, homophones such as plain and plane, there and their, etc.). Using written symbols, such as full-stops, commas, and colons can also influence the meaning of a text and provide some guidance to the readers as to how the author intends his or her text to be read.³²

Learning to acquire literacy is an arduous process covering many years, starting (at least in most Western societies) with the preparation phase, when children (of about 6 years of age) learn to form letters, handle a pencil, and copy words for themselves. In the consolidation phase, children (aged about 7 years) can write independently, using only those constructions they have already used in speech. The differentiation phase marks the separation of speech patterns from writing. Children (of 9 or 10 years of age) use increasingly complex literary constructions and genres in their writing. And finally, the integration phase marks the completion of differentiating the control of speaking and writing (cf. Kroll 1981). The child can now deliberately manipulate the differences between the oral and written forms of language, and mix them for intended effect.

During the initial two phases, “young children’s writing occurs at the moment. There is little preplanning or revising” (Rowe 2008: 409). It is only with gaining experience in the variation of texts and their underlying purposes in the subsequent two phases that children “begin to engage in both rehearsal and revision, with an eye toward pleasing their audience” (Rowe 2008: 409). By now, children have experienced language not only as a communicative tool for expressing their thoughts, but have learned to understand it in its objectified and systematic form. This prepares the ground for developing another form of linguistic knowledge, namely metalinguistic awareness, which occurs in the last two phases when children encounter more complex written language requiring conscious planning of the line of argument, the form of expression, and the choice of genre for the text to be written: “Written text conventions promote metalinguistic thinking in various linguistic domains such as sound/letter correspondence, word and sentence boundaries, and appropriate grammatical constructions (e.g., past perfect in English, passé simple in French, or optional bound morphology in Hebrew)” (Ravid and Tolchinsky 2002: 430).

In reaching the stage of metalinguistic awareness, the young learner has now acquired all aspects of language relevant for use in adult life. Language in its written form fosters elaborated decontextualized reflection, for instance, of philosophical concepts of truth or nothingness, and it allows access to archives of texts for the formation of disciplined knowledge. The individual is now a fully competent member of the speech community. For the purposes of L2 acquisition, the achievement of metalinguistic L1 awareness through mastering the written form of language has two sides. On the one side, is eases subjective access to the L2 because it can be approached as a linguistic system in terms of grammar, morphology, syntax, phonology, etc. which is different from the L1. However, the L1 system will, at least in the initial and intermediate stages of L2 learning, provide the basic framework for the subjective metalinguistic approach to the other language. This will lead to interferences at all linguistic levels which can be very difficult to overcome in the long term when using the L2.