different pathways in language development

different pathways in language development. Although the universal
pattern appears true in some respects, not all children acquire language
in the same way. Analyses of young children’s early words have led
psychologists to an appreciation of children’s different approaches to language.
In her 1995 book Individual Differences in Language Development, Cecilia
Shore analyzed the different pathways of two general styles (sometimes
termed analytic versus holistic) in the four major language component areas.
In early phonological development, holistic babies seem to attend to
prosody or intonation. They tend to be willing to take risks to try a variety of
sound chunks, thus producing larger speech units in sentencelike intonation
but with blurred sounds. Analytic babies are phonemic-oriented, paying
attention to distinct speech sounds. Their articulation is clearer.

In semantic development, children differ not only in their vocabulary
size but also in the type of words they acquire. According to Katherine Nelson
(cited in Shore’s work), who divided children’s language acquisition
styles into referential versus expressive types, the majority of the referential
babies’ first words were object labels (“ball,” “cat”) whereas many in the expressive
children’s vocabulary were personal-social frozen phrases (“Don’t
do dat”). In Shore’s opinion, the referential babies are attracted to the referential
function of nouns and take in the semantic concept of object names;
the expressive children attend more to the personal-social aspect of language
and acquire relational words, pronouns, and undifferentiated communicative
formulaic utterances.

Early grammatical development shows similar patterns. The analytical
children are more likely to adopt the nominal approach and use telegraphic
grammar to combine content words but ignore the grammatical inflections
(such as the plural “-s”). The holistic children have a tendency to take the
pronominal approach and use pivot-open grammar to have a small number
of words fill in the frame slots (for instance, the structure of “allgone [ . . . ]”
generates “allgone shoe,” “allgone cookie,” and so on). The units of language
acquisition might be different for different children.

In the area of pragmatic development, children may differ in their understanding
of the primary function of language. Nelson has argued that
the referential children may appreciate the informative function of language
and the expressive children may attend to the interpersonal function
of language. The former are generally more object-oriented, are declarative,
and display low variety in speech acts, whereas the latter are more person-
oriented, are imperative, and display high variety in speech acts.
Convenient as it is to discuss individual differences in terms of the two
general language acquisition styles (analytic versus holistic), it does not mean that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive—children actually use
both strategies, although they might use them to different extents at different
times and change reliance patterns over time.