SOME STRATEGIES FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a few strategies for the first two years of language learning. Studies of children's texts and of such other performances as comprehension and imitation have given some basis for testing plausible generalizations about what is necessary for language processing in its early stages. The prerequisites to language are environmental circumstances, cognitive development, and children's information storage. On the basis of these considerations, the basic acquisition of regularities of order and inflection, the fundamental grammatical features found in the early performances of children, can be examined. There are three categories of prerequisites to language learning, the first consisting of what the environment must provide, the others the knowledge that language refers to, and the processing skills that the child brings to the learning task. At the onset of grammar in children, while surface markers of simple structure may facilitate the discovery of processing heuristics, they are not absolutely necessary. The abstracting process that allows children to discover formal similarities, presumably from distributional features, is at least as early in development as the appearance of the auxiliary system in English.