Language-learner Language

Abstract

It is not so long ago that people ceased to think of dialect speakers as some sort of second-class citizens because the language they spoke was considered to be no more than a distorted, incorrect, or defective form of their mother tongue. It is only more recently that people have come to think of pidgins and creoles as languages in their own right and not some “inferior, haphazard, broken, bastardised version of older, longer-established languages,�? as Loreto Todd (1974) puts it. It is even more recently still that some people have been prepared to consider the [‘inter-language’] of the second language learner as other than a defective, distorted, or incorrect form of the language they are learning. And yet to do so is now coming to be seen as a necessary preliminary step toward investigating objectively the whole phenomenon of second language learning and second language use. Only by treating language learners’ language as a phenomenon to be studied in its own right can we hope to develop an understanding of the processes of second language acquisition, just as it is only by treating child language as a phenomenon to be studied in its own right that we can hope to understand something about the processes of first language acquisition and the use that infants make of language. […] It is now well established that mothers or other adults, when interacting with infants and young children acquiring their mother tongue, simplify their language in various ways which correspond to the age or linguistic development of the child (Snow and Ferguson, 1977). This simplification is not so much in terms of the range of structures employed but rather in terms of the range of speech functions and topics, the length of utterances, the tempo, pitch, and other prosodic features as well as the amount of partial or total repetition, rephrasing, and redundancy in their speech. This means that, in general, mother talk is an adaptation of the adult’s normal language behavior which has the effect of facilitating the child’s perceptual processes and interpretation of utterances. Mother talk is perceptually simpler and more explicitly related to situational context.