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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
LANGUAGE AND SELF AS EMERGING WITHIN
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THE MOTHER-CHILD RELATIONSHIP
A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in
Education,
Educational Psychology
by
Sandra B. Ackerman
June, 1977
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The Thesis of Sandra B. Ackerman is approved:
(Richard Thiel)
(W. Dean McCafferty
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-/Pfia~~an)
California State University, Northridge
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ABSTRACT
LANGUAGE AND SELF AS EMERGING WITHIN
THE MOTHER-INFANT RELATIONSHIP
by
Sandra B. Ackerman
Master of Arts in Educational Psychology
A discussion of Pragmatism as well as selected
reviews of theories of self and theories of language acqui-:
sition were undertaken in order to understand the emergence
of language and self as related to action and interaction
between the infant and his environment, particularly his
mother.
Adequate acquisition of both language and self
' were discussed as necessary for the survival of humans in
complex cultures.
The mother-child relationship was noted,
as being the key to the successful development of these
skills (language and self); the normal infant was described as both active and competent from birth.
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Evolutio-;i
nary traits were seen to be greatly affected by human
cognitive capacities which have created rapid cultural
changes in this century.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Title Page . .
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Signature Page
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Abstract
Table of Contents
v
PART I - PRAGMATISM
1
Charles Peirce
William James
John Dewey
George Herbert Mead
11
PART II - THEORIES OF SELF
Charles H. Cooley
William James
George Herbert Mead
Harry Stack Sullivan
Gordon Allport ·
Erik Erikson
Seymour Epstein
PART III - LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
31
What is Innate?
Universals
Imitation
Five Terms - Linguistic Structures and
Processes
Topic-Comment Structure
Attention
Case Grammar
Speech Acts
Pragmatics
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PART IV - PROCESSES, DEVELOPMENT IN INFANTS,
MOTHER/CHILD RELATIONSHIPS . . .
47
Evolution
Birth to Eighteen Months
Competence in Newborns
Mother-Child Interactions
Pre-Linguistic Concepts and Gestures
One Study on One-Word Utterances
PART V - SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
61
BIBLIOGRAPrN . . . . .
65
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PART I
PRAGMATISM
Greatly influenced by Darwinism and supported by the
scientific method of observation, the Pragmatic Movement
of the late nineteen century and first third of the
twentieth century, was concerned with. the possibilities
and consequences of action.
Ideas such as 'truth' and
'reality' were being defined in terms of their application
and consequences.
Common was the feeling that personal
interests and needs motivated one's beliefs which were
no longer anchored to traditional, rigidly-held, proofs
or religious ideas.
This philosophic movement was associ-
ated with works of Charles Peirce, William James, John
Dewey and George Herbert Mead.
It was an early statement of Peirce's which was to
color subsequent pragmatic theory.
This statement, or
maxim, suggested that objects be defined by the practical
actions or consequences related to them, or by the effects
they have upon actions directed toward them, (Scheffler,
1974).
In other words, meaning was conditional; it
depended upon perceptions and common, or habitual,
responses to an object.
Actions modified environment,
thereby modifying meaning.
By relating meanings to
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actions, it was suggested that ideas were related both to
; actions and to predictable consequences.
:basic
This became
to progressive educational theory in which teaching
; of ideas to children was to be linked with concrete actions
:and experiences, not to memorization of definitions,
!
(Scheffler, 1974).
For William James, a practical meaning of an object
or idea was related to its effects on human conduct.
Pragmatism had no dogmas; it attended to consequences,
facts and possibilities for change.
of truth, (James, 1907).
It was also a theory
Along with Dewey and Schiller,
a new idea or opinion, for James, was 'true' if it felt
good in relation to previously-held views, thus bringing
satisfaction subjectively.
A new theory often combined
old and new experiences if they worked well together; the
resulting new theory became the 'true theory', (James,
1907).
If a new idea clashed with an old one, and there
was no reconciliation, one of them must be relinquished,
(James, 1907).
Since there were no rigid beliefs in the name of
Pragmatism; any hypothesis or evidence was deserving of
consideration.
A mystical experience or strong religious
belief could be pragmatic if it had pragmatic consequences,
i.e., if it gratified a need, relieved pain or guilt.
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Reality was always in the making; there was an openness,
a person-oriented feeling, and the implication that one's
self determined one's truths.
For an idea to be 'true',
it had to be useful; it had to relate to our experience in
; a worthwhile way.
Abstract truths, which are unconditional
were not overlooked by James.
But these absolutes were
'relations among purely mental ideas', which required 'no
sense-verification', (James, 1907).
In Pragmatism's
· Verification of Truth (1907), James said, "True ideas are
those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and
verify", (McDermott, ed. , 1968, p 430).
This sounds diffe-·
rent from the earlier emphasis upon personal ideas stressing feelings of comfort and need gratification, (Scheffler,
1974).
But the two are not in conflict if we accept that
verification or the truth of an idea is relative to time
and person.
Ideas remain true for a time, but not neces-
sarily forever, (Scheffler, 1974).
William James took a fresh look at knowledge.
Expe-
rience took on an important position, as did the self, (to
I
I
be discussed in a later chapter).
Ideas as part of one's
experience became true if they helped one to "get into
satisfactory relations with other parts of ou:t experience"
(James, 1907; Thayer p 216).
i
New ways of thinking, feeling
and knowing opened the mind from the closed convictions
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, and certanties of the past.
Whether truth really changes
-.;.vas not the question; some truths never can be known, some
never will change.
But the importance of the truth of an
i idea as a person knows it, feels it, and experiences it,
, ~v-as appreciated in a new light, because of the philosophy
[ of William James.
John Dewey brought to pragmatism the idea that inquiry·
brings a solution to unsettled situations through a change
in one's thoughts.
Knowledge, the result of inquiry, arose
in this process of trial and error within the present reality, (Randall, Jr. and Buchler, 1942).
It was acquired as ,
one saw relationships between actions and consequences.
To grasp these relationships, one must experience, or
interact with, his environment, (Dewey, 1922).
~~en
a
doubt, conflict, or problem arose, which blocked ongoing
!
action, scientific intelligence must search for a solution
through observation, anticipation of a variety of possible
, outcomes, and selection of an answer or solution.
Contri-
buting to this process, for Dewey, were not only one's
ideas and observations, but also environmental conditions
and human qualities such as habits, language, and purposes
which one brought to the new situation from one's past
experience, (Thayer, 1970).
New knowledge would lead to
control over future conduct, and future choices, thus
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;bringing a greater responsibility for one's conduct and
purpose, since the choices were one's own, (Scheffler,
: 1974).
Sensory perceptions were considered very important in
,the pragmatic doctrine, a welcomed opposition to traditional and classical emphasis upon the intellect as fundamental to acquiring knowledge, (Scheffler, 1974).
But Dewey
carefully pointed out that "experience is in truth a matter
:of activities, instinctive and impulsive, in their inter: actions with things".
~received
1
It was not passive experience
through sensations, but experience which combined
activity with sense perceptions, activity being emphasized.'
When discussing an individual's psychological outlook,,
• in Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey felt strongly
, about the influence of the environment:
Each person is born an infant, and every
infant is subject from the first breath
he draws and the first cry he utters to
the attentions and demands of others.
These others are not just persons in
general with minds in general. They are
oeings with habits, and beings who upon
the whole, esteem the habits they have,
if for no other reason than that, having
them, their imagination is thereby limited.
The nature of habit is to be assertive,
insistent, self-perpetuating." (Scheffler
1974, p 209)
Thus, group action was considered to have come before the
:individual's development of mind:
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Different customs shape the desires,
beliefs, purposes of those who are affected
by them. The problem ... is ... how different
customs ... form and nurture different minds."
Ibid
A particularly interesting hypothesis of Dewey's was
his belief that custom and habit, while acquired, were
considered 'primitive' behavior in infants rather than were,
impulses and instincts.
While impulses came first right
after birth, the baby could not survive many hours without
the responding adult, who had already-formed habits, deter-;
mined by customs and culture.
A child's habits and customs:
are formed from the earliest days in response to the responsive behavior in caretakers.
Only by knowing the social;
conditions in which the earliest activities were learned
or formed into habit or disposition, can we understand the
psychology of the individual.
"This is the true meaning
of social psychology" for Dewey, (1922).
Before turning attention to George Herbert Mead, one
other major concept of John Dewey's should be included.
This was first published in a paper in 1896 named, The
Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology; a later, slightly revised:
version was called, The Unit of Behavior.
Apparently, this:
paper had an enormous influence upon Mead's concept of 'the!
act'.
Behavior was seen as intimately related to environ-
ment.
A stimulus was not an isolated, external, object or
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·event to which one responds; it was seen rather as anything
which calls out a response in the individual.
What becomes •
·a stimulus depends upon the individual's needs at that
'time.
Dewey (1896), proposed that the many phases of an
; act be called "coordination", the stimulus being the first
; phase and the response a later phase as opposed to the socalled reflex arc which consisted of three isolated stages
· of an act, namely the "sensory stimulation, central connections and motor responses".
i
The stimulus itself was seen
by Dewey as emerging out of the individual's experiences
. preceding it, i.e., prior activity influences the nature
:of the stimulus and is very much a part of the completed
; act.
We do not have first a sound and then
activity ofattention, unless sound is
taken as mere nervous shock or physical
event, not as conscious quality. The
conscious sensation of sound depends
upon the motor response having already
taken place; ... it is the motor response
or attention which develops the original nervous shock into the stimulus to
another act. Thayer, p 267.
: Every phase of an act occurs with relation to every other
: phase and helps to determine it.
!
For the purposes of this paper, only a few ideas have
i
been cho$en from the greatness and range of John Dewey's
:work.
They include:
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1). the belief that the environment, the culture, is key to
;
1
the understanding of the psychology of individuals 2)
:knowledge is gained through the activity of experimenting,
. di§covering, and testing theories or alternative solutions
, to a problem or conflict which temporarily inhibited
[
i
:action; 3) all phases of an act are interdependent, any
one phase both determines and is determined by all the
others.
George Herbert Mead met Dewey in 1891 at the University of Michigan; they became fast friends and neighbors,
, discussing problems of philosophy, psychology and socii
: ology.
in 1931.
They were to remain close friends until Mead died
In 1892, when the University of Chicago was
: opened, Dewey was asked to be head of the philosophy
'I
department; he accepted the position on the condition that
Mead be invited as assistant professor of philosophy.
Both:
\ men believed that philosophy should provide theories which
'
could be put into practice.
They believed in the scienti-
. fie method of thinking, and were optimistic about the
' capacities of human thought and action as related to the
betterment of the future.
Mead's major works consist of
lecture notes taken down by his devoted students; these
, notes were compiled and published posthumously.
Mind,
Self and Society (1934) contains the main body of Mead's
! work in social psychology.
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Mead was continually concerned with the development
of the self and consciousness-of-self within experience and
social settings.
Once self had emerged, however, the indi-·
vidual had the capacity to influence his environment,
through thoughts and resultant actions, just as the environment continued to influence these processes.
As did
Dewey, Mead saw the child's earliest gestures being
immediately influenced by social processes, deriving their
meaning within the social setting, and being dependent upon
the responses and habits of those around him.
Mother and
child, one might say, become a partnership in determining
their respective environments as well as the overall
environment which surrounds them, e.g., the family,
community, etc.
Attention and memory (to be more fully discussed
later) select objects from the social setting and social
conduct and enable the individual to carry past experiences
into the present.
With the development of language, the
individual can organize the stimuli received, and arrive
at responses.
Consciousness of self emerges from such
selection, attention and organization of objects.
Mead
makes the basic assumption "of an ongoing social process
of experience and behavior in which any given group of
human individuals is involved, and upon which the existence of their minds, selves and self-consciousness
i_d~pend~---~1\1ead,_l934~ 822_·---------------------------------------~
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Having been influenced by Dewey's concept of the act
as being a circuit of many interacting phases, (see pp 6-7
above), Mead was to enlarge upon it.
Anticipation of the
alternatives which might constitute the end-phase of an
act would determine to a great extent that which initiates
an early phase; just as the initial phases of an act have
a great effect on later phases.
The conditions "at the
time of action decided the beginnings and subsequent phases
of an act; the individual's past experiences brought to
the act contribute to these conditions heavily, once a
self has been developed.
Included in the following chap-
ters will be more detailed study of Mead's work on the
acquisition of the vocal gesture, its development into
"significant symbols" or language, in humans, and the
subsequent emergence of self and mind.
These pragmatists addressed their thoughts to the
understanding of the meaning of human life; each in his
own way contributed to the ideas \•7hich have remained
associated with that movement.
It can be said that prag-
matism meant different things to each of its exponents.
This in itself expresses much about its openness to
untried ideas which do not demand acceptance without proving useful, purposeful and personally gratifying.
PART II
THEORIES OF SELF
There is no one best definition of self; it has been
called something which is acquired during "a slow process
of differentiation as a person grows and finds out who and
what he is'', (Hamechek, 1971).
It has been named a system,
a self-system, an object of knowledge, a process having
·many functions, one's identity, a self-as-agent and· many
other things.
There is agreement, however, about the importance of
studying the phenomena that is "the subjective feeling of
having a self", Epstein (1973).
Discussed in this chapter
are six theories of self, namely those of Charles H.
Cooley, William James, George Herbert Mead, Harry Stack
Sullivan, Gordon Allport, Seymour Epstein and Erik Erikson.,
It is hoped that the reader will keep in mind that the
relationships implied among the firs·t three sections of
this paper will be more explicitly considered and reviewed
in the concluding sections.
Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) saw self-consciousness and social consciousness as always initimately
related.
The child began to express his "will" in a social.
setting, his personal thoughts growing along with his
consciousness of the world around him, (Cooley, 1909).
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'While each individual had a unique psychical life, the
• cooperation of minds led to a social unity and social
•consciousness.
The ideas in one mind were similar to those
•of others and as these ideas "act and react" upon each
i
other's ideas, there occurred a group in which people under-
; stood each other, (Cooley, 1909).
Within this social consciousness, and inseparable from
·it, "is each one's consciousness of himself, which is
· largely a direct reflection of the ideas about himself he
. attributes to others, and is directly or indirectly alto;gether a product of social life."
Cooley strongly spoke
:of the importance to society of each person's doing his
!'
ibest in his own field and he cautioned against looking
· beneath oneself for justification that one was doing enough..
James and Hamechek also spoke of doing one's best or being
, the best in one's field of endeavor as one measure of selfesteem, (Hamechek, 1971).
The self, according to Cooley, developed in "primary
groups" which were "characterized by intimate face-to-face
i association and cooperation" (p 23), beginning with one's
1
family, but including the group, community, or village of
:many families who all knew each other, (Cooley, 1909).
Coming from a small town, and wishing to see urban industrial life of the future as having great potentials,
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. Cooley needed to believe that humans were capable of plac- ;
ing the common good above all else.
He hoped that
industr~:
• ~edia, and machinery would be the means by which to further'
'community feeling and sympathy for one another.
!
The
famil~i
the child's play-ground, the community and neighborhood
: were seen as basic to the foundation of such feelings .
. These were the primary groups where the first intimate
experiences with society existed, and as such they were
universal:
In the essential similarity of these
(groups) is to be found the basis, in
experience, for similar ideas and sentiments in the human mind. In these, everywhere, human nature comes into existence.
Man does not have it at birth; he cannot
acquire it except through fellowship, and
it decays in isolation." (p 30).
If there is a universal nature in persons
there must be something universal in
association to correspond to it."
Cooley, 1909) p 30.
The self as Cooley described it grew within a small
social group along with the growth of social consciousness.
, One's consciousness-of-self was based upon the views of
the group toward oneself, a like-minded group in which one
developed his own self-awareness and ideas.
society are twin-born," (Cooley, 1909, p 5).
"Self and
If there was
a lack of freedom of choice in this view, there was an
abundance of hope for security and sympathy among human
·beings.
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William James stated as a given that "thinking goes
: on"; consciousness exists before sensations can be felt,
i
i
and it exists or goes on in a continuum, a flowing stream,
not in separate units of parts or separate sensations.
, Ideas are the fusion together of parts or sensations related to that idea, (James, 1890).
James described thought as having certain characteristics; each thought was seen as part of a personal
consciousness within which thought is always changing.
two thoughts were identical.
No
Thought was continuous; there
; was always some liason between past and present thoughts.
i
Thought always "appeared" to deal with objects independent
of itself, and thought selected certain objects and reject-.
ed others according to its interests.
;! part of a personal consciousness.
i
Thus, thought was
The fact that thought
was given and existed, was not more important than the
personal self and feelings, (James, 1890).
When James said,
(1890, p 291), that the "me" is the self as known, the
"sum total of all we call our own", he was including one's
thoughts and experiences as part of the self.
In The
Consciousness of Self, he said, "In its widest possible
sense, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can
call his."
This included his body, psychic powers, clothes,,
house, family, friends, work, and possessions.
As
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·"constituents" of the self he named the material Self,
i
the social Self, and the spiritual Self, all as objects
1
known by the knower, the "I" who had strong feelings about
. them, (James, 1890) .
The material Self consisted of the body, as most
, intimately possessed, then the clothes, immediate family,
home and collections.
One's emotions about these were the
result of "instinctive preferences" and practical concerns.
· A loss of any of these objects threatened one's very being ..
The social Self included the recognition gained from
others, desired from others.
There were many social selves,,
just as there were many social situations requiring different behavior.
The spiritual Self was "a man's inner or
, subjective being, his psychic faculties ... the most enduring
and intimate part of the Self", (1890).
To consider one's
own spiritual self was to reflect upon one's point of view, i
one's thinking itself, rather than what one was thinking
about.
This special part of the subjective stream of
thought was felt as an innermost center, both active and
: spiritual, presiding over the "perception of sensations",
(1890) .
It is the home of interest, ... It is the
source of effort and attention, ... a sort
of junction at which sensory ideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed,
... Being more incessantly there than any
other single element of the mental life,"
(1890).
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For James, the reality of passing thought and the
unity of these thoughts affirmed that the me's of the
past were functionally the same as the me of the present.
, The sense of personal identity depended upon feelings of
being a continuing me which resembled itself day after
day.
Each new thought was replaced by another, but each
new thought knew the thoughts which went before; all
thoughts were part of the functional self or me.
For George Herbert Mead, gestures, which became meaningful and symbolic among a community of human beings,
led to the development of self through the language (of
these gestures), (Mead, 1934).
Early man first came to
live together as families in groups in order to fulfill
their needs for food and shelter, protection from outsiders, and to reproduce safely.
Fishbein (1976), has
noted that cooperative hunting, for example, required
reduced aggressiveness between male adults as well as a
good deal of planning; it also required "the ability to
extract and store a large amount of spatial and temporal
information", (p 143).
Mead felt that the beginnings of
communication occurred in these social processes of fighting, caring for young, reproducing, and sharing.
Communi-
cation evolved because human physiology (the brain) was
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equipped with the capacity to allow one human to take the
attitude of the other toward himself.
Through cooperation
and adjustment of one's responses in a social situation,
a consciousness-of-self arose.
Gestures made in the very earliest of human groups may'
not have been conscious or "significant".
A "conversation
of gestures" was the use of unconscious gestures by lower
animals in whom a self had not developed.
!
When one such
animal began to gesture or act, this became a stimulus for
a second animal; the response from this second animal in
turn became a stimulus for the first animal to act again,
this time in a modified way as he adjusts in accordance
with the new stimulus.
Neither animal thinks about his own:
shared participation in these acts; thus significant meaning is not involved.
However, Mead believed, that, in time, the vocal gestures in early man came to have special (significant)
meanings which all members of a social community could
understand and use to communicate.
It was assumed that
like tendencies existed in individuals, "at least a tendency to respond in the same way", (Mead, 1934).
Mead considered that the vocal gesture was most important
because one could hear oneself speak, and thus one's
speech had an effect upon oneself as well as on others.
-18-
, From these gestures, and with the human physiological
capacities and intelligence, there developed a body of
similar responses and meanings.
By expecting a certain
response from another, one actually was similarly stimulated by his own (vocal) gesture as was the other.
Adjust-:
ed responses could be made through anticipating the
behavior of oneself and others.
Self-consciousness emerged:
from this use of (vocal) gestures as meaningful symbols,
1
which was the use of language.
Both Dewey and Mead saw
meanings to arise in the experiencing of phases of the
social act, which for Mead was primarily the act of vocal
gesture.
Basic to this belief of Mead's, was the assump'
tion "of an ongoing social process of experience and behav-l
ior in which any given group of human individuals is
involved, and upon which the existence of thier minds,
selves and self-consciousness depend", (Mead, 1934, p 82).
The basis of the Self-sytems described by Harry Stack
Sullivan (1953), resided in childhood experiences of
interpersonal relationships the nature of which were
determined by cultural expectations.
Due to prolonged
dependent stages of human infancy, occurrences of anxietyprovoking situations seemed unavoidable.
The infant felt
anxiety not only when a need was not satisfied, but also
when the mother was anxious as she fulfilled a need; her
! anxiety often caused the infant to interrupt his own
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activity, (Sullivan, 1953).
Sullivan postulated that this
early, primitive, anxiety must be extremely unpleasant
for the infant, much like fear, and when severe, much like
terror.
\Vhen the baby's crying was responsed to immedi-
ately, as usually occurred, the tenderness evoked became
needed by both mother and child.
Unheeded crying, occurr-
ing occasionally in infancy, led a child to strive to
relieve anxiety situations.
In extremely neglected infants
one often found that the child could develop an apathy to
his own needs, in place of the terror.
In the course of these early interactions, the child
comes to sense certain "personifications" of those caring
for him (or not caring).
The child was able to organize
and differentiate between the good caring experiences and
the bad ones.
All good and useful qualities came to stand '
for a "good mother", while those which induced anxiety
represented a "bad mother".
As the child's perceptions
became more acute with age, he began to differentiate
between what was his body· or himself, and the object world:
which was not part of himself.
Somewhere in mid-infancy,
according to Sullivan, (1953), the child began to feel
tha~
there was a "good me" and a "bad me"; more anxiety feelings
accompanied the feelings of the bad me.
Both were rudi-
mentary self-personifications which came before the
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development of the self-system or the later self, although
the self-system was also a product of interpersonal
experience as related to anxiety.
There came the time in later infancy when the mother
began to encourage socially acceptable behavior.
Often the
mother might use tenderness as a reward for that behavior;
she did this unconsciously, and it worked well only if the
child was ready to learn that behavior.
A most important
stimulus to learning at this time was anxiety itself,
which was used by the child to gauge all varieties of his
behavior.
Sullivan (1953) referred to differing "grades
of anxiety" as directing the child in his attempts to
avoid as much anxiety as possible as he learned approvable
behavior.
The good and non-anxious mother, caring for
her~
child, used this "anxiety gradient" of the child's much of:
the time, through late infancy, in order to teach acceptable and safe behavior.
This mother did not wish to see
her child suffer from severe anxiety feelings.
During the time when the mother was enculturating the
child, and when the child continued to pursue need-satisfy-·
ing activities, _the child developed a way to organize all
of these experiences such as to keep anxiety down, please
his mother, and satisfy his needs.
Sullivan called this a
self-system, a "dynamism", an "explanatory conception", or
-21----------------------~--
----
-------------~-
a type of personification of self, learned as the child
attempted to be the 'good me'.
It was the culture and its
unique characteristics which were basic to the force behindi
the need to have a self-system.
The self-system was seen
as necessary for human development in the complex atmosphere, of almost any culture.
There was much pain in this '
process, and much hard-feeling against the enculturating
mother.
Some children were seen to have much difficulty
learning sublimation or delaying need-gratification.
Sullivan also referred to the problem of malevolent mother
figures, and the non-malevolent mother who expects too
much.
The self-system was a necessity, and once it devel-
oped as a way of perceiving and coping, it was not likely
to change easily, and not likely to learn from experiences
after the early stages of life!
This, said Sullivan, was
both its strength and weakness, for while favorable changes
were then hard to accomplish, so would be unfavorable
change.
Gordon Allport (1955), recognized the importance of
the early relationship between mother and infant, but this
affiliation was not seen as responsible for forming the
personality or uniqueness-of-self in the older child or
adult.
An adequate, nurturing, early childhood which
gratified needs was seen as leading the normal child
L _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
-22--------~-·---~----~----··--------------~-----------
towards the ability to give up childish demands and to
acquire the "freedom to become".
A disordered and insecure:
early "affiliative" relationship with the mother would
lead to pathology of one sort or another, and "becoming"
would be blocked at an early age.
Thus, only the unheal-
thy person's character was seen as being formed by ages
three to five, while the healthy child could continue to
grow, learn, change, and become himself.
Allport believed that there were inborn dispositions
or capacities to become a unique self and he found evidence of this in the commonly seen resistant, angry, or
negative behavior in infants, and in the personal
integrit~
implied in the behavior of older children who wished not
to conform.
Each person had a unique group of traits which
were consistent and developed over a lifetime; this implied
that the consistency was relative and changeable.
In
studying the self and its functions, Allport named eight of
the functions which aided the coherence, unity, purpose,
integration, organization and striving of the individual
(1955).
These eight functions were called the "proprium"
or the "propriate functions": 1) bodily sensations, 2)
self-identity - which developed gradually until age five
or thereabout, 3) ego-enhancement - which included feelings
of self-love, self-seeking, pride, narcissism, humiliation, etc., all related to emotional survival.
(These
-23-----
- - - - - -------
~
------
--~-- ----~-
..
~----------·- -----~-
- ···----------- ----------------
first three functions developed in earliest stages and were1
seen as the child's proprium.
They provided a foundation
for the following functions which came with age and with
learning; 4) ego-extension - the sense of self was extended
through the process of identification with parents, pets
and toys, which led to later identification with groups,
possessions and abstract ideals; 5) rationale coping; 6)
self-image or phenomenal self which included the way one
saw oneself and the way one would like to see oneself, both
of which greatly influence behavior; 7) propriate striving
or motivation based on the belief that once ego-extensions
and self-images had entered the personality, motives no
longer were controlled by drives and conditioned drives.
Motives were now seen as more dependent upon one's images
of self and idealized self.
But the most important factor ·
of this propriate striving was that it resisted equilibrium
and maintained tensions even as it tried to unify the
personality; 8) the knower - knower of self, (which Allport
later excluded as part of -the self or propriate functions) •:
'' was seen as a part of the self which was distinguishable
from the other functions, or experiences of the self.
James, it can be recalled here, felt that there was no
self outside of thoughts, experiences, and perceptions,
both actual and representational.
----·----·-----
-24-
These propriate functions, as defined by Allport
(1955), were emerging aspects of self which did not form
an unchanging center of self.
Any theory or personality,
; he felt, must be_ dynamic and must not ignore the uniqueness:
and contemporaniety of personal motives.
Hotives in adult-;
hood were different from those in childhood; historical,
early fixations, and infantilisms must be seen in perspective in-the adult.
adults primarily.
These existed forcefully in abnormal
Allport (1960) was interested in the
intrinsic nature of each individual, the unique working
units of personality in each human being.
These traits, he!
felt, formed more or less consistent mental structure in
each person.
Furthermore, he did not believe in a genera-
lized mind based on common cultural traits, although he
did not deny that all individuals in one culture had a
similar-looking set of conventional habits and controls,
values, attitudes, and such, which shaped their conduct in.
society.
Erik Erikson said in Childhood and Society (1950):
A lasting ego identity ... cannot begin to
exist without the trust of the first oral
stage; it cannot be completed without a
promise of fulfillment which, from the
dominant image of adulthood reaches down
into the baby's beginnings and which by
the tangible evidence of social health,
creates at every step an accruing sense
of ego strength, (p 218).
-25-
Erikson's work continued in the tradition of the
founders of psychoanalysis who focused on "introspective
honesty in the service of self-enlightenment", (Erikson,
1950).
He was to further this search for identity by
recognizing the importance of one's cultural milieu, and
its values.
Erikson found that many of his patients were
searching for something to believe in, and were unsure of
what to become.
He understood this to be related to both
the existence in America of the many immigrant groups and
identities, and the fact that technological advances here
and in Europe threatened the primarily "agrarian and
patrician identities" of the past, Erikson (1950).
For
Erikson, not only the early stages of babyhood, but also
later stages of childhood and adolescence were seen as
important in the search for one's identity
~n
a social
world.
During the earliest months, the infant felt the warmth
of familiarity with his surroundings and comfortings; the
consistency of this, according to Erikson (1950), led to
"a rudimentary sense of ego identity which depend(ed) on"
inner knowledge as it emerged in relation to outer occurranees, (p 219).
It was with the pains of teething and
the wishes to bite, that the first conflicts arose.
solution had to come in which the child's trust and
'-------
A
-26-
reliance upon continuous, familiar caring for him is
maintained.
Successful solutions of such conflicts, which
' continue through early childhood, depended on the quality
of maternal sensitivity to the child's needs combined
with the mother's personal sense of trust that she has
acted in accord with cultural expectations.
The child's
frustrations along the way were endured if he retained the
feeling of being accepted as he learned what was expected
of him.
Erikson felt that if the parents imparted "a
deep, and almost somatic conviction that there is a mean1
ing to what they are doing", the child could manage the
frustrations, (1950, p 222).
In this earliest stage, the child began to internalize!
certain standards of behavior.
It was also in this Stage,
known as Trust vs. Basic Mistrust, that the child's sense
of identity began to form.
As the child proceded through-
out subsequent stages of the life cycle, new conflicts
requiring new solutions continued to be successfully
managed by the healthy child.
Each new solution was
integrated with the past solutions.
If the new solution
was a poor one, later stages were adversely affected and
less successfully managed by the child.
Initial "basic
trust (was) the groundwork of all later viable identities"
(Berman, 1975).
-27-
Seymour Epstein (1973), in describing his views of
the self-concept asked the reader:
What is it that consists of concepts that
are hierarchically organized and internally
consistent; that assimilates knowledge, yet,
itself, is an object of knowledge; that is
dynamic, but must maintain a degree of
stability; that is unified and differentiated at the same time; that is necessary
for solving problems in the real world;
and that is subject to sudden collapse,
producing total disorganization when this
occurs? (p 407) .
His conclusion was that it is a self-theory which each
individual forms about himself and which serves many purposes such as "to optimize the pleasure/pain balance of
the individual over the course of a lifetime", "to facilitate the maintenance of self-esteem", and "to organize
the data of experience in a manner that can be coped with
t
effectively", (Epstein, 1973, p 407).
Furthermore, he
said that individuals were always trying out new hypotheses!
about their self-theory (self-concept) and could change
this concept if the new idea improved the system.
Observed
experiences were organized into the existing system in ways1
which allow the system to deal with the complex, and
infinite amount of detail to be processed and recalled, and
which allow for satisfaction of emotional needs.
also said that there is a world system.
Epstein
The interactions
between the self-system and the world system required that
i individuals distinguish between that which is self and
L
-28-
non-self.
Seven views concerning the meaning or develop-
ment of "self" have been presented in this section, and
' can be summarized as follows: 1) Cooley described the
consciousness-of-self as growing within small, social, like'
minded groups of individuals.
This self depended very muchr
upon the vi·ews of others towards oneself; these views of
others were based upon the values learned in and from
society.
2) James, in personalizing thought and self, felt
that thinking and thought existed prior to but were not
more important than the personal ideas and sensations which:
thought experienced.
The self was an object of knowing;
the spiritual Self being man's inner views, one's thinking,,
itself, and the most intimate part of the self, the source
of one's interests.
The reality and unity of thought
assured the self of functional sameness and continuity.
3) Mead believed that mind and self emerged from the ongoing social process of a group of human individuals.
He
further concluded that it emerged only with the development:
' of language which grew from the vocal gesture.
There
; existed the capacity for speech, sharing, planning, attention and memory, as well as like tendencies in individuals.
Once the gestures became meaningful symbols, a person became conscious of the attitudes of others as well .as his
own, which was the beginning of attaining mind and self.
-29.----------~-----
---------
--~-----------------------·--
·-----· ---------------- ---
---- ------- ----------------------
--
---~------
4) Sullivan described the necessity for the child to
develop a self-system or personification-of-self as "good
me" in order to cope with the need(s) to please mother,
delay gratification, and st·ill remain fairly free of
anxiety.
A caring and confident mother was seen as good
and she imparted acceptance towards the child who in turn
was self-accepting and developed a working self-system
in which a good self flourishes.
5) Allport saw the
healthy adult as free from early infantile affects on
later growth or "becoming".
He believed in inborn dispo-
sitions to become unique; each person was unique with his
own personality traits which were relatively consistent
over time.
Eight functions called propriate functions
helped to integrate and organize the self.
6) Erikson
expanded psychoanalytic theory by including the importance
of the affects of one's culture.
He saw man's lifetime
as a passage through eight different stages during each of:
which certain conflicts arose and needed to be solved
before passage to the next stage.
The emotionally healthy·
person was most likely to resolve problems successfully,
and therepy to develop a strong ego-identity.
In the
earliest stage, called Trust vs. Basic Mistrust, the
child's sense of identity began; this stage was the foundation for the later stages.
7) Epstein saw the self as
i
I
L
----------·--------~
-30-
organizing, optimizing, facilitating.
The self-system
enabled a person to deal with data to be processed and with:
emotional needs which required adequate gratification.
His:
theory operated and evolved in a pragmatic manner.
These selected views of self represent differences
and divisions among those who have tried to define it.
George Herbert Mead clearly linked development of mind and
consciousness with the advent of (vocal) gestures which had,
become a language and thus allowed for understanding oneself and others.
Hirsch.(l975) said:
Linguists are primarily concerned with the
formal properties of language. The main
interest of academic psychologists centers
around the role of language in cognition.
Both disciplines have largely neglected to
probe the part language plays in the child's
growing ability to define himself, to gain
control over drives, and to cope with reality demands. (p 109).
In the following section, a discussion.of language
acquisition and five linguistic structures or concepts are
briefly defined.
Many linguists and academic psychologists;
alike are currently intere-sted in the intended meanings of
the child's earliest utterances as these occur in, and
are affected by, social interpersonal relationships.
~--~~-------------
--~--------------
------
.
----
------- -----
~----·-------------
·--
------------------------·
PART III
ACQUISITION
UL~GUAGE
The symbols and signals which are agreed upon and
understood among one group of people constitute the language of that group or culture.
Communication can be non-
verbal gesture or sign; it can be verbal intonations such
as pre-linguistic sounds commonly used by the very young
child.
To be a language, such as American Sign Language,
the signs or gestures used must be the same for every
1
member of the group.
A given spoken language is a collection
of sounds, called phonemes, a set of
rules for sequentially combining these
sounds form words (morphemes), a set of
meanings for these words, a set of rules
for combining these words into sentences,
and a set of rules for relating sentences
to meanings, i.e., the same words in different orders may have different meanings
and different words in different sentences
may have the same meanings, (Fishbein,
1976, p 184).
Just how the child learns all of this is not clear.
, Research in linguistics has become increasingly focused
upon language acquisition and development.
Lennenberg,
(1966~1967),
as reported in Fishbein,
found that in normal children up to age four, specific
1
stages in language development coincided with specific
, levels of motor development; he also found this to occur
;
L
-31-
-32-
regardless of the "language environment to ,.7hich the child":
had been exposed, (Fishbein, 1976).
Furthermore, the same
sequence of language acquisition was found in retarded
children, but with a slower rate of language development
than in normal children.
These findings lent weight to
Lennenberg's view that man has been biologically endowed
with "knowledge" of language, the development of which
relates to maturation.
One other interesting theory of
Lennenberg's, concerns a 'critical period' for learning a
first language, this being the period between two and
1
twelve years of age, (Brown, 1973, Fishbein, 1976).
This
is based upon the belief that brain growth is minimal after:
the age of twelve; it was generally found that brain damage;
to the left hemisphere (which governs language function),
caused "permanent spoken language deficiencies" in those
over twelve, and not in children under twelve, (Fishbein,
1976, p 148).
In a recent issue of Psychology Today,
however, E. Roy Johns questions this "one-region, onei
function" theory, (1976).
He found that different func-
tions were found to exist throughout most of the brain;
some regions contributed more than others to a particular
function.
Johns saw that the brain might learn to use
' different regions to compensate for damaged areas.
-33-
Nelson (1973) reported that early rates of word
acquisition are not correlated with later rates of language:
development, i.e. there is low predictability between
early rates of acquisition and those later than thirty
months, (Fishbein, 1976).
Nelson did find, however, a
correlation between a faster rate of early language development and the amount of attention from, and interaction
with, adults.
This early input was not significantly
correlated to later stages of language acquistion.
Fishbein (1976), concluded that Lennenberg's and Nelson's
findings were suggestive of a genetic schedule for learning spoken language which may be temporarily influenced by
j
the environment.
A study by Cooperman, Joseph and Tizard,
(1972), reported by Fishbein, (1976) confirmed Nelson's
findings related to spoken language.
Furthermore, they
found a surprisingly high correlation (positive) between
the amount of informative adult talk heard by children and '
children's language comprehension.
Also they found a
(moderately high) positive correlation between comprehension and amount of active play.
This study was conducted
with normal children in lower-class residential nurseries,
while Nelson's was done with white middle-class children
in a different setting.
Neither found that any environ-
mental effects had a lasting influence on spoken language,
-34-
but it does seem that attention and interaction with
caretakers had a positive effect upon rate of development
of early spoken language, as well as upon early and late
ability to comprehend language, (Fishbein, 1976).
Cazden
(1972) mentions White's (1971) study of homes in which
there was a child of either very high or very low intellec-:
tual competence.
Observing their mothers' interactions
with the one-and-two-year-old children in these homes,
White found that the mothers who provided the most success-·
ful home environment for language development were permissive and indulgent, allowing for explorative curiosity.
Also, they responded to their child with short, enthusiastic, subject-related comments or ideas.
actions lasted from ten to thirty seconds.
These interHere again was
evidence that environment can affect early language
· development and later intellectual competence.
Basil
Bernstein (1973), described the speech of lower-income
children in England as 'restricted code', restricted 'in
the sense that it contained pronouns rather than nouns,
few adverbs and adjectives, a minimum of dependent clauses,
and is generally not very informative', (Cazdun, 1972, p
101).
Middle-class English children spoke in an "elabo-
rated code" which used more parts of speech and more
syntactic forms.
i
L_ _ _
Gleason's experiment with four year olds
-35-
(1970), showed that restricted code did not imply an
underlying restricted thought process.
In a short period
of time, lower-class children began to use an elaborated
code after being given models of this communication.
Furthermore, they learned it with ease through playing
communication games.
It has been accepted among linguists
that children
do not speak simply in imitation of adult language around
them.
The language of children has definite variations
from adult language; this occurs in
over.
langu~ges
the world
All children use words which they have never heard
such as mices, corned, doed, or foots meaning feet.
Imita-
tion of a word does not occur until the young child already
'knows' the word and has just begun to use it in free or
spontaneous speech, (Dale, 1976).
In fact, imitation is
only used for speech patterns which are emerging but which .
are not yet well-established.
As Gleason said (1970), when
we listen to a child's answer to a question, the child very,
often uses incorrect word-:forms even though the correct
word-form was used in the question.
Apparently children
pay attention to the meaning and not to the form.
This
lack of imitation is age-related; as the child grows older,:
1
he uses adult grammar more and more·often, for seemingly
, practical reasons.
It is believed that learning language
· - - - --------
---------------·----------·
-36-
remains an active process throughout childhood, one in
which the child is continually both making hypotheses about
the rules of language, and testing these hypotheses in
order to improve in decoding and using language.
This
certainly brings to mind the pragmatic views which were
reviewed in a previous chapter.
Trying out new words, and
new word-combinations, until one works
best for conveying
meaning, is the child's method of language acquisition.
He grasps words and sounds from what he hears and from
observing the social context in which the sounds take
place.
He begins with the many babbling sounds which are
the same around the world.
Early on, babbling becomes
intentional and the child is usually clearly understood
by his caretaker; he is almost never corrected for a mismatch in syntax after he begins using sentences.
~fuat
is
it then, that encourages the growing child to continually
improve his language usage?
Brown (1973) suggested that
perhaps linguists should study more closely those few
situations where the child's language is corrected by
strangers or when the child is not understood by an adult.
Pressure to learn at these infrequent times may lead to
much improvement.
Or, Brown continued, perhaps Lennen:-
berg's critical periods are to be considered.
-37-
There are many known universal characteristics of
different languages; these include universals of language
acquisition.
Jakobsen (1941) reported that certain phone-
mes are acquired in the same order in all languages despite!
the frequency with which they occur in each.
For example,
the sound of a as in cat is among the last sounds acquired '
in all languages, although it is fairly commonly used in
some. (Brown, 82 mentions that frequency plays a minor role'
in order of the acquisition of language forms in the
earliest stage of speech).
Jakobsen went on to link lan-
guage acquisition with innate knowledge of characteristics
of language.
Years later the theory of innate knowledge
was claimed for syntax and phonology.
found to be universal, (Dale, 1976).
Babbling sounds were
Other universals
include: using two-word phrases at about the time a child
has a fifty-word vocabulary (Fishbein, 1976), certain
word~
order rules for expressing semantic intentions of children,:
1
~
(Brown 1973); subject-predicate constructions are a universal phenomenon (Greenberg, 1973, reported by Bruner
1974); etc.
Dale reported (1976) that the earliest stages
, of languages around the world contain the same basic
properties.
-38-
Similarities in early language acquisition around the
world give rise to the belief that all children have in
' connnon the same capacity to learn language, due to either
innate, biological structure or knowledge, or transmission
from generation to generation through learning processes
which are similar throughout the species.
The fact that all humans, and only humans, possess
language suggest the innateness theory to many linguists;
the transmission-learning-process seems at least as important to others.
Having knowledge of one's language before speaking is
agreed upon; another theory proposes that there is a universal strategy for learning language.
This strategy
determines the language similarities, and helps answer
questions as to why children learn one feature of language
before another, both of which they are capable of learning,,
(Dale, 1976).
John Dore (1974), found two strategies for
learning English (to be discussed later).
Universals are
still being discovered, and the debate continues concerning
what is innate.
As Dale said, even if it is assumed that
certain features of language are innately known, are they
part of a "general cognitive development", or a "linguistic
endowment" only.
Many feel that the "nature of the human
cognitive capacity" is innate, and Bruner said, (1974)
-39-
What is universal is the structure of
human action in infancy which corresponds
to the structure of universal case categories. It is the infant's success in
achieving joint action (or the mother's
success for that matter) that virtually
leads him into the language. In this
sense, mastery of 'utterer's meaning' effectiveness or felicity in achieving
ends - provides the child with a conceptual structure that is also embodied in
the language he is to learn, (parentheses
Bruner, p 6).
Five features or processes related to language should
be briefly mentioned and discussed before going on to the
next chapter of this paper.
These five are: topic-comment
structure, case categories or case-grammar, speech acts,
, attention, and 'pragmatics'.
Many linguists consider one-word utterances (halophrases) as primarily relating to predicates, as opposed
to subjects, (Brown, 1973).
These single-word utterances
have long been recognized as representations of a whole
sentence; and by the time a child used early sentences he
, was expressing both subjects and predicates known as
agents-and-objects or agents-and-actions, in semantic
terms.
Topic-comment structures reflect this subject-
object or agent-object and agent-action pairing.
(Topic-
comment and subject-object are grammatical terms as opposed
to semantic.)
Gruber (1967) in Olshewsky, (1975) felt
that at first a sentence is just a comment (predicate) to
[~--------
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --------------
-40-
which topics are later added, which eventually become
subjects.
For example, a sentence "close the door" becomes;
"I, you, Joe closes the door", (Olshewsky, 1975).
Brown
found many subject-predicate sentences in early simple
speech which were not preceded by the topic-con:n:nent sen' terice described by Gruber, and apparently Gruber found very
few clearly topic-con:n:nent types in the strict sense, such
as, "car, it broken", (Brown, 1973, pp 131-133).
Chomsky
said that topic-comment was the basic grammatical structure
spokeri but that topic and subject often coincided, (Bruner,
, 1974).
Apparently Bruner used the term, 'topic-comment'
in a paper to better imply 'the feature of attention'
(perceptual attention) brought to bear on the order and
rules of grammar.
Attention can be seen as a process which is necessary •
to learning.
It includes both the exploration of the
environment and feature-selection from the sensory information available.
George Herbert Mead saw attention as an
organizing and selecting process.
He felt that animals
organized their environment by attending to certain stimuli
while shutting out the rest.
The ability to pay attention·
to specific parts of an act, parts of a whole, or parts of
a topic, along with the ability to combine or recombine
the parts into new wholes, was a uniquely human process,
-41-
:
(~ad,
1934; Bruner, 1974).
:possible.
To Mead, this made learning
For Bruner, this process seemed perfectly
i
suited to topic-comment structure in language which allows
for a flexible use of topics plus a variety of comments
: upon them, which, when regrouped, might lead to a new
i
! whole.
Case grammar refers to semantic relationships between
nouns and other parts of a sentence; it tries to specify
the relationship between noun-phrases and verbs, and it
offers linguists one more way in which to view the structure of language, (Dale, 1976).
In English, nouns are
most often related to verbs by the use of propositions.
Fillmore (1968) described a 'case-grammar' which Brown
(1973) praises.
In this system, six basic categories of
case for any noun were named.
They were agentive, instru-
mental, dative, factative, locative and objective (Brown,
1974).
These case categories seemed universal to Fillmore;
other categories have been discovered, considered, and are
being debated.
Each case .stands for a distinct semantic
role of noun phrases.
Bruner (1974) felt that action was
so closely related to the above-named cases of grammer,
that he undertook a "close scrutiny" of both, "for what it
suggests about how language is first used and therefore
how it is first acquired", (p 5).
His study of this will
'-----------·----------------
-42-
be discussed in Chapter Four.
But he proposed that "the
facts of language acquisition could not be as they are
unless fundamental concepts about action and attention are
available to children at the beginning of learning", (p 6) .'
These concepts must be "developed in mutuality with a
speaker of the language", (p 6).
The paper of Bruner's,
which will be referred to again later, and from which the
above direct quotations have been taken, is called The
Ontogenesis of Speech Acts.
Searle (1969) used the words 'speech acts' to mean
Acts such as making statements, giving
commands, asking questions, making promises
and so on; and more abstractly, acts such
as referring and predication ... these acts
are in general made possible by and performed
in accordance with certain rules for the
use of linguistic elements, (Dore, 1974, p 343).
There are three parts to a speech act: one is the utterance
itself; second - the propositional force which is the
1
meanings of the words, the conceptual content; and third the illocutionary force of the utterance which indicates
the speaker's attitude, or speaker's intentions.
John
Dore (1974) described 'primitive speech acts' as very
early speech acts used to express intentions before the
child entered the two-word stage of language.
These acts
can be a word or an intonation (prosodic pattern) which
is often used by the child to convey intentions.
Dore
found that primitive speech acts, or PSA's, were used for
-43-
varying purposes such as for labelling, repeating, answering} requesting, calling, greeting, etc.
The same word
could be used for any or many of these.
Dale (1976) reported that both Bloom and Brown felt
that a single-word utterance can have so many different
possible meanings that it can't be understood and interpreted.
Word-order, itself, in two-word utterances, would
add contextual clues and enrich the interpretation.
To
really understand two-word utterances, it was considered
: necessary to know the situation or context in which they
were spoken.
John Dore (1974), however, exposits some very exciting information on one-word, or one-intonation, utterances
as was previously mentioned.
Using methodology first
established by Brown and Fraser (1963), and elaborated by
Bloom, 1973, Dore videotaped two children in the one-word
stage.
They were recorded during natural communication
with their mothers and teachers who were very familiar;
the adult utterances were redorded as was a "description
of" ... all non-linguistic behavior and "the salient features of the context were noted", (p 345).
Eight distinct
categories of primitive speech acts were observed as fulfilling specific criteria.
These were: labelling, repeat-
ing, answering, requesting (action) or requesting
(answer), calling, protesting, practicing.
The results
- - - ----------
-44-
of this research showed that an analysis of very early
utterances can reveal the pragmatic meaning of a child's
early intentional expressions.
The pragmatic meaning is
the meaning intended by the child; the pragmatic view of
language acquisition sees language emerging as an instrument (or function) of the child's needs, wishes and
intentions.
Linguists agree that they have overlooked the
functions of language for too long, (Bruner, 1974).
Recent research has brought attention to the pragmatic
meaning, the illocutionary force of the speech act, in the
early intonations and one-word sentences used by the very
young child.
The routines and responses of the caretaker
seem to play key roles in the concept development of prelinguistic children; and the ability of caretaker and
child to understand each other's intentions and signals
are required for the success of joint attention and mutually shared activity which seem necessary to the acquisition
of language (Bruner, 1974).
!
Thus, research with the prag-
matic view of language in focus has enhanced the literature
on language development by adding a deep concern for the
functions of language.
For Mead, (1934), as was mentioned in the previous
chapter, language played a central role in the emergence
of the mind and the self in a social setting.
Language,
the vocal gesture especially, was the mechanism through
!_ _ _ _ __
-45-
which man learned the meanings of things around him; he
could then indicate meanings to others through the shared
symbols of the language.
Mead saw language as developing
from earliest gestures (vocal) which occurred when humans
first began to live together, in groups, for the purposes
of sharing the problems of food-gathering, and protection
against others.
Eventually these gestures took on mean-
ings which were known and shared by others in the community; a gesture by one person called out a response from
the second person which was similar to the response it
would have called out in the first person, (Mead, 1934).
The symbols, gestures and words were referred to as
"significant symbols" or "significant" gestures, when both
parties were similarly aroused, and wherein responses were
understood by both parties.
Conversation could take place
because each party was able to take the attitudes of the
other toward himself; both parties were part of a social
group which had similar attitudes, and understood similar
meanings for the significant symbols.
This chapter has described language and language
acquisition.
Included were different viewpoints concerning:
both environmental and innate influences related to learning ones' language.
Several universals were discussed with
their implications; and five structures of processes
-----------·---------·
-46-
related to recent studies in language acquisition have
. been briefly defined.
Lastly, reference was made to
Mead's thoughts on the beginnings of language.
It is hoped
that this chapter will serve as partial background for the
following considerations about the simultaneous emergence
1
of language and self in social settings during the earliest;
childhood years.
- - - --------------------------- ---------------- ------. --------·-
.
PART IV
PROCESSES AND INTERACTIONS
In the late nineteenth century, Darwin's theory of
natural selection posed serious questions about the traditionally held views of fixed causes determining the present.
It was to change man's ideas on the origins of forms:
in nature and it brought out the fact of a life-process as
ongoing and changing, favoring those forms which were best
adapted to survive.
Darwin spoke of a life-process which
flowed throughout all forms of life.
The life-process of
a plant or animal depended upon the processes of others;
if conditions called for a changed form, the change occurred or the fqrm didn't survive.
Form was determined by
conditions of nature.
With the advent of human cognition, man gained the
potential to change environments, or to control them.
The
method of science, said Mead (1936), the conscious trial
and error method, affected progress much more rapidly than
~
natural evolution did before the existence of the human
cognitive processes.
Mead called this the conscious
process of evolution.
About 2.6 million years ago, three behavior changes
took place in hominid evolution (apes and early man).
These were: walking on two feet rather than four, manufac-
-4,7-
-48-
turing stone tools, and acquiring an omnivorous diet.
Following these changes, the brain began to increase in
size, so that it tripled in the next 2.3 million years.
Skilled use of eye and hand was necessary for tool making,
and areas of the brain which enabled this coordination and
complexity were selectively valued in evolutionary terms
by increased brain size.
It was felt by Fishbein (1976)
that pre-human hominids must have "acquired effectance
motivation for object manipulation".
Early hominid tool
use seemed to have several survival characteristics such
as defense and dominance, and "hence the underlying psycho-;
logical capacities were selected for", (Fishbein, 1976).
Six general areas of "social competency emerged as
crucial to an understanding of man's evolution and social
adaption; these were: highly developed motor skills, language, highly developed attentional capabilities, highly
develop,ed memory capabilities, highly developed spatial
understanding and a highly developed moral 'sense'",
(Fishbein, 1976, p 153).
Also it was noted that massive
growth in the neocortex was much greater in areas of the
brain which underlay these six features.
Robert t{hite
(1959, 1960) as reported in Fishbein (1976) believed that
motivation was crucial to psychological development.
His
view of- social competence was that each person had an
innate drive to master his environment, (Fishbein, 1976).
~-------------
----------·· - - - - - - - - - - - -
-49-
This competency gave pleasure; its tasks were age and
stage related.
This motivation was not dependent on other
drives such as sex or hunger, but was called "effectance
motivation which has its immediate satisfaction in a feeling of efficacy and its adaptive significance in the growth
of competency", (Hhite, 1960 in Fishbein, 1976, p 157).
With evolutionary features in mind, this chapter considers the simultaneous development of language and self
during the first year and a half of life, both for practical reasons, and because by this age a child seems to
have a knowledge of many of the concepts needed to master
spoken language as well as many concepts needed to realize
; the existence of the self as apart from others and as
~
having inner feelings.
The author wishes to consider that
both use of language, and
possessing a self are (skills)
most necessary for survival in complex cultures.
Consciousness-of-self, and therefore consciousness
of not-self, are basic to humans only, as is the conscious'
process of evolution through which humans control their
surroundings.
The following pages will contain discussions
of the competence of newborns, the importance of motherchild interactions, the development of pre-linguistic
concepts and gestures, and the subsequent accomplishment
of early language and self-concept.
The final section of
this paper will suggest some conclusions and further
-50~--
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - --
~----
----- -
-- ---- - - - ---- --- ---·-··- ------------------ ------·---------------· --------·----------
questions about those skills, relating to development of
language and self, which are culturally selected, encouraged, practiced, and valued in educating the young.
As
Bruner said, (1974) when he noted that all languages of
young children have universally similar grammatical categories of agent, action, object, possession, etc., these
"categories, might after all, have been universally mindful" of different distinctions, and not these.
Although immature, and dependent on adults for survi, val, the newborn was found to exhibit competence in many
areas.
Abilities to discriminate odors (Lipsitt, 1971 in
Fishbein, 1976), to show an "extraordinary capacity for
imitating the behavior of an adult" and possession of a
highly flexible perceptual system were attributed to the
'neonate (Bower, 1976, p 38).
An infant, from birth, was
able to sense temperature change, pain, noise and pressure,:
i.e. both internal and external stimuli (Gordon, 1975).
The newborn was definitely not the incompetent passive
person he was once thought to be.
Bruner (1974) paraphras-
ed Trevarthen (1974) as saying that the few-week-old
i
infant "distinguished category of people from the catefory
of things, and showed distinctive responses to each",
(p 8).
1
Mahler (1968) cited that at age three or four
weeks of age, a "maturational crisis occurs" and results
-51-
in a "marked increased in overall sensitivity to external
stimulation", (p 15), or the lack of it, and more crying
and tension existed from then on.
Also existent during
' the early weeks of life, Hartmann (1939) in Hahler (1968)
referred to an inborn, autonomous, perceptive
faculty
which can register, through memory traces, the difference
between pleasure and pain.
Sight, according to Bower
(1965) was as good as an adult's by the age of four to
eight weeks.
By the third month, the child began to under-·
stand that his needs were being fulfilled by "an unspecific need-satisfying part object" outside of himself,
(A. Freud, 1965).
Thus, very early, the baby felt inner sensations, and
in some "tvay remembered them.
The sensory percel.ving organs:
along with these sensations build a structure for selforientation; the inner sensations were the center of the
i
self, (Hahler 1968).
Piaget (1964) stated that newborn's
activities were all reflexive.
In sum, the mental life of
the neonate and young infant was seen as being genuinely
active.
The words and sound patterns of the mother were the
primary communication to the child; as the child associated
these patterns with the social situations in which they
occurred, he was provided with the data needed to begin
i__ ___ ._ _ _ _ _ _ _
-52-
to make sense out of the linguistic signals he received.
If the mother's communications, her voice, and the many
uses of it, were properly tuned in to her child, and to
her own world, the child was likely to develop normally.
If the mother was unstable, overly anxious, hostile, or
lacking confidence in herself, the child would not have thel
suitable partner he needed throughout early development,
(Mahler 1968, Erikson 1950, Sullivan 1953, etc.).
By
being tuned in it was not suggested that a mother was
omniscient, rather, it seemed to mean that she responded
; perceptively and lovingly to her child's cries and cues.
A study by Muller, Hollien and Murry (1974) showed that
mothers of infants from three to five months of age generally could not "match cry samples with cry..;,evoking
situations" e.g., pain, hunger, loud noise, even when
judging samples of their own child's crying.
While tenta-
: tive, this study suggested that in the home, the baby's
cry functioned to alert mother who then needed to consider
other situational clues.
Mahler (1968) observed that the child's earliest
awareness of outer surroundings was accompanied by "checking back to the mother's Gestalt", particularly her face
(p 16).
Bruner (1974) found that "as early as four months
of age, the infant will follow an observer's line of
regard" (p 8), that is, both adult and child came to focus
-53-
on or jointly look at the same object, following some sort
of signalling.
Corrnnunication in general between mother and
child took on familiar, standardized signals, sequences and
joint references often through such activities as eye-toeye contact, verbal comments upon what was jointly
observe~
the child's learning intonational patterns and exclamations, and the many rules and pleasures inherent in play,
(Bruner 1974).
Mead (1934) and Erikson (1950) also felt
that games and play offered special opportunities through
which to develop both language and self.
During the development of corrnnunication patterns with
her child, the mother came to accentuate the importance of
the act which she initiated, rather than her role of
agent:
It consists of dramatizing or idealizing the act itself ... Handing the child
a desirable object, the mother will move
it slowly towards him with an accompanying sound increasing in pitch or loudness
as it approaches the child, or changing
sounds with steps in the approach. Over
a period of days this will be repeated as
a game ... (Bruner 1974, p 13).
Thus does the child learn the difference between
agent and object, and later he grabs the object, and hands
it back to the adult, becoming the agent.
All the while,
verbalizations are accompanying the interactions; word
order and word sequences are being heard by the child,
until he makes the correct association.
Pre-linguistic
-54-
concepts (such as, at what precise part of the act of
giving-receiving one says 'thank you') are constantly being
observed, used, practiced before they are finally used in
spoken, standard language.
Mahler (1968) also reported a "mutual selection of
cues" between mother and child.
The child learned which
of the variety of his signals given were most likely to
receive responses.
Often, the mother's selective response
led to the altering of the child's behavior patterns, language patterns, qnd early personality.
(Mahler 1968, de
Hirsch 1975, Sullivan 1953) and others.
Dore (1974) implied that the mother's early language
routines or personal emphasis upon certain usages of language strongly influenced the child's variety of uses of
language.
A 15 month old child who appeared to know and
"use" many words, was mainly using words as labels for
things, and therefore not using language in the rich
variety of ways and categories reported by Dore (1974),
which will be discussed later.
Bruner (1974) noticed that mothers were constantly
interpreting their child's actions, usually by "inferring
the baby's intentions or other directive states," (p 12).
He said "I ·am entirely in agreement with Nelson (1973) and
Ryan (1974) that an enormous amount of consequent behavior
flows from the nature of these interpretations" (p 12).
·---------·-· - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-55-
Furthermore, he found that there were mainly two types
of interpretations used; some mothers saw their baby's
behavior as "an intention to carry out some action" while
others thought that their child was trying to find out
something, rather than do something.
Thus, mothers saw
their roles differently, responded to their children in
their own way, encouraging the child to attend to things
accordingly.
Considering the normal child's wish to please
the mother, avoid anxiety, etc., and considering that language and self both began to develop in early months, it
, was apparent that early identity formation, and early
formation of self, reflected unconscious needs of the
mother (Mahler 1968).
As de Hirsch said:
Language develops in the matrix of a
close mother-child bond. There are
mothers who do not "tune in", who
either fail to provide carefully
dosed stimulation and feedback or
who swamp the baby with their verbalizations, thus failing to make him
aware of crucial features of input.
(de Hirsch 1975, p 99).
This recalls the study reported earlier concerning
the successful home environment for language development
QWhite 1971) in which mothers responded to their children
with short, enthusiastic, subject-related comments.
The superior mother
~ras
the one who tuned in best to
her child's needs, or whose child's needs tuned in to hers,
----------------------------
-56-
: who neither swamped the child with her presence nor gave
too little attention.
Yet not every child has responded
successfully to even a most loving and perceptive mother.
Child (1968) in Haimowitz and Haimowitz (1973) reported on
the "consistencies of individual differences in behavior
which are internally determined."
Thomas and Chess et al
(1968), in (Haimowitz and Haimowitz, 1973) in an unexpected:
finding from a longitudinal study, pointed out that a
certain percent of children were clearly seen to be
"difficult" by the age of one year.
All of them had been
born to normal, caring parents who wanted them and who
behaved as the other mothers in the study.
Most of these
children had normal siblings and their ordinal position
in the family was not a factor.
This child undoubtedly
changed the environment around him, as well as its
influence upon him.
Olinick (1964) in Rubenstein and
Levitt (1977) suggested that certain babies "were endowed
from birth with greater than average funds of aggressive
orality and anality", adding stress to mother/child
problems.
T.G.R. Bower (1976) discussed many skills which
infants are born with or acquire in early weeks of life,
but which were lost thereafter and then acquired at later
stages.
Beside the strong reaffirmation of the remarkable
competence of the newborn, Bower's article suggested that
-57-
active practice of these skills might delay their disappearance and/or hasten their reappearance.
findings related to this were mixed.
But his
In fact, he found
that it was those skills which a child practiced enough
to master repeatedly, at an early stage, which were often
not recalled as quickly (relatively) or learned as quickly
later on as those which the child had not mastered earlier ..
Bower explained this as due to the child's having learned
the task with so much specificity "that he is actually
hampered by (the rules) when he is faced with a similar
but not identical task," (Bower, 1976, pp 46-7).
Bruner (1974) assumed that the child had intentions
very early and the child understood others to have intentions as well; Bruner briefly referred to evidence for
both of these, e.g., the ability to imitate, to have eyeto-eye contact, to follow an observer's line of regard,
etc.
The stage of precocious sensorimotor intelligence
was pre-linguistic; manipulation of objects rather than
"words and concepts" were used, (Piaget, 1967); "In place
of words and concepts it uses percepts and movements
organized into 'action schemata'".
~Vith
a variety of
explorations, these manipulations lead to new behavior
resulting from the coordination of the old and new
experiments.
-58-
Thi.s process is analogous to what will
occur later in the ideas or concepts of
thought itself. In effect, an action
that can be repeated and generalized to
a new situation might be thought of as
a kind of sensorimotor concept. For
example, a baby presented with a new
object successively incorporates it into
each of his "action schemata" (shaking
it, stroking it, balancing it, etc.)
as though he could come to know the
object by perceiving how it is used,
(Piaget, 1967, p 12).
This sensorimotor intelligence discussed by Piaget
(1967) enabled the child to learn about the external
world; it also led the child to an awareness of self both
as separate from others physically and as having an inner
world, within himself.
Late in the first year, the child felt like moving
around by himself but was still quite dependent on the
mother's availability, both physical and emotional.
Loco-
motive pleasures and a "self-actualizing" desire (Maslow,
1968) enabled the child to cope with his anxiety and the
toddler appeared to be very pleased with himself.
By the
middle of the second year •. he was well able to deal with
the physical separateness from mother.
At this time,
object permanence, begun toward the end of the first year,
was accomplished along with the beginning of actual
sensorimotor intelligence, (Piaget, 1967).
By the age of
one-and-a-half the child reached the end of infancy.
He
was normally able to speak in one word utterances or more.
~------·
---------
-59-
John Dore (1974) said "before the child acquires sentential
structures, he possesses systematic knowledge about the
pragmatics of his language", (p 344).
In the study de-
tailed on page eleven of chapter three, Dore found evidence:
for both pre-linguistic concept development and familiarity with rules of the language, both syntactic and
inflectional. He reported eight distinct categories in
which two fifteen-month-old children used their language
consistently.
liJhile confirming pre-linguistic competence
and intentionality, further findings inDore's study
suggested that babies may differ considerably from each
other in their method of acquiring language.
One child in
the study used words in 98% of the utterances and intonations 2%; the other child used words about 50% of the time
1
and intonations 50%, and this child also had acquired
fewer words.
But, it was the latter child who used all of
the eight categories of speech (labelling, repeating,
answering, requesting and answer, requesting an action,
calling, greeting, protesting, practicing) while the first
child, with the larger vocabulary and seemingly greater
use of language, used mainly labeling and repeating.
Dore
' noted the different strategies between these two children
as they used and learned language.
Furthermore, the child
who used more categories of primitive speech acts, also
involved other people in 63% of these acts, while the child
---------
-60-
with many more words, involved others in only 26% of the
acts.
One child was using language, it seemed, to affect
others, the other used it to comment on the environment.
In studying the use of language, and considering
cooperative action (between mother and child), Bruner
(1974), as mentioned earlier, saw the possibility of innate!
features "of human action and attention" from which the
child learns fundamental concepts through pre-linguistic
gestures, verbalizations, the rules of paly, etc.
It might be valuable here to return to Mead's "li-rritings on the importance of the gesture.
As gestures took
on shared meanings, man could learn the meanings of things
around him and indicate these meanings to others.
When a
gesture came to elicit similar responses throughout the
connnunity of those living together, it became a "significant symbol" and through such symbols, language evolved.
Such gestures, becoming meaningful and symbolic, led to
the development of self.
Through cooperation and adjust-
ment of one's social responses, a consciousness-of-self
arose.
The gestures between mother and child, as leading
to language and consciousness-of-self, form the key to
human development and survival.
A self which survives in
a minimal way, unable to learn, plan, cooperate and function normally, is less likely to contribute to the
preservation of the species.
'--------~-~-
PART V
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The Pragmatic Movement fostered new possibilities and
alternatives to older, more rigid views of the meaning of
life.
One's actions did make a difference; one's feelings
were important; one could test out a newhypothesis to
find a new truth which fit in with, or replaced, an old
one.
Natural selection in Darwinian terms was accepted as
the explanation for changes in nature.
With evolution made conscious, as Mead remarked,
possibilities seemed unlimited for the control and change
!
which man might affect upon his environment.
It must have
seemed as if man could escape natural selection.
Advances
in medicine, technology, communication, etc., led to
extremely rapid cultural changes.
But survival to maturity,
(human) was still a matter of one's innate capacity to
acquire the skills and strengths necessary to mature and
reproduce.
(Some social biologists feel that cooperative-
ness and caring for others are the genetic traits, existent in man but somewhat dormant heretofore, which will be
required for survival now; these traits will be further
selected for and passed on, (Wilson, 1977)). Man has been
noted as one of the aggressive and selfish species, selfishness being defined as placing the importance of the
'
~-------·---------~--------------------------------------------_____j
-61-
-62-
individual over the importance of the group, (Wilson,
1977).
The self or self-system was discussed as developing
in the child as he learned to cope with the feelings,
demands, and anxieties he encountered while becoming
enculturated by mother and society.
Universals in the
process of language acquisition were seen as evidence of
common, innate, capacities or knowledge the world over.
It was quoted from Bruner, (1974), that "structure of
human action in infancy" and the "infant's success in
achieving joint action" with the mother, may lead the child
to understand his language, its usage, and meaning.
, Furthermore, it was observed that the newborn baby was
quite active and competent; he responded to his environment immediately and began to develop his innumerable,
innate, potentials as they related to his surroundings.
Both the potentials and surroundings were previously
thought to have been selected for naturally.
Finally, evolution was mentioned, in advance of a
discussion of the importance of the mother-child relationship.
Through this relationship, the child learned pre-
linguistic concepts which enabled him to master the use of
his language.
Also through this mother-child relationship,
the child began to develop a self-system.
-63-
In conclusion, both language usage and the possession
of a successful self-system-were seen as necessary for
survival.
This being considered, the mother-child rela-
tionship was seen as key to human survival in cultures in
. which man used his cognition to make decisions, to plan,
to inhibit impulses, to resolve conflicts, to manage
anxiety, etc., i.e., to exist in the complex cultures
which have been known since ancient civilizations.
It was suggested that since social and cultural
changes have occurred so rapidly, a rapid change in the
. kind of survival skills (needed) has occurred, as well.
• Human cognitive processes, which were selected for, in
'
:nature, have brought this about.
There may be a greater
variety of skills needed now and a greater flexibility
'
~
required.
Cognition and emotion must handle increasingly
difficult problems in a world changing so quickly.
The Pragmatists were aware of this in their belief in
the scientific method along with the belief that personal
experiences of one's environment as well as sensory perceptions should be taken seriously.
Concern for the self
and consciousness-of-self grew as these philosophers of the
turn of the century recognized that man could determine his
environment to a great extent.
Knowledge, self-knowledge,
-64-
and action took on a new importance as evolution seemed to
enter a new st·age due to accelerated consequences of
actions taken by highly complex, cognitive, and emotional,
human beings.
!_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.
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