Language, Culture, and Society: The impact of language socialization on grammatical development

An offer 1 Thearchitectureofgrammaticaldevelopmentinthetalkofyoungchildrenisthe central concern of language acquisition research. The critical task of language acquisition scholarship over the last several decades has been to account for when, how, and why children use and understand grammatical forms over the course of the early period of their lives. Language socialization ‐ the process in whichchildrenaresocializedboththroughlanguageandtouselanguagewithin a community (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986a, b) ‐ has been largely examined without regard to the dynamics of grammatical development, focusing, rather, on culturally relevant communicative practices and activities. 2 In this discussion, we reverse this orientation and focus directly on theroleoflanguagesocializationintheacquisitionofgrammaticalcompetence. What can a language socialization perspective offer to scholarship on grammatical development? A language socialization perspective yields a more sophisticated model of grammatical development, that is, one tuned into certain cultural realities that influence when, how, and why young children use and understand grammatical forms. Such a model of grammatical development takes an informed look at ideology and social order as forces that organize children’suseandcomprehensionofgrammaticalforms.Alanguagesocialization enriched model decries reductionistic visions that view the sociocultural context as “input” to be quantified and correlated with children’s grammatical patterns. Rather than reducing the context of grammatical development to frequencies of grammatical forms in the child’s linguistic environment, our socialization enriched model accounts for children’s grammatical development in terms of the indexical meanings of grammatical forms. This approach rests on the assumption that, in every community, grammatical forms are inextricably tied to, and hence index, culturally organized situations of use and that the 1 Our thanks to Lois Bloom, Patrick Gonzalez and Brian MacWhinney for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. An earlier version of this paper was published under the title “The Impact of Language Socialization on Grammatical Development”, in P. Fletcher and B. MacWhinney (eds.), The Handbook of Child Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 73‐94. 2 ForreviewsofrecenttrendsinlanguagesocializationresearchseeGarrettandBaquedano-Lopez