The Relationship of Maternal Speech to Children’s First Words

Abstract

Claims about the relationship between children’s language development and the language they hear are, to say the least, controversial. It is probably an understatement to say that, throughout thirty years of research into child language, the view that development is influenced by the child’s language experience has generally had a bad press. The most dismissive review was undoubtedly that given by Chomsky (1959) to Skinner’s behaviourist account of language (Skinner, 1957) and, since then, the continuing power of Chomsky’s rhetoric has made it very difficult to appear both intelligent and in favour of a view that there are significant environmental influences on language development. (See Botha, 1989 for a recent discussion of Chomsky’s influence.)