LEARNING FROM INFANTS' FIRST VERBS

Across the centuries, people have been fascinated with infants’ first words. This fascination is not a special characteristic of parents of young children, developmental psychologists or psycholinguistics. Instead, this fascination is widespread, and infants’ first words can serve as entry points to heated discussions of topics as far ranging as innate knowledge, the nature of intelligence, and the development of national character. Thanks to the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, we can trace the fascination with infants’ first words to the time of Psammetichus, an Egyptian pharoah who reigned in the 7th century BC. According to legend, Psammetichus held firmly to the belief that the Egyptians were the most ancient peoples in the world, but this was disputed hotly by the Phrygians, who argued that in fact they were the originals. To settle this dispute (and to claim the Egyptian people their rightful place), Psammetichus developed a passionate interest in infants’ first words, a passion that stemmed from a desire to discover the origin of human language and that led him to conduct the first known experiment on language development in children. Apparently, he somehow managed to bring two newborn infants to a shepherd, living alone amongst his flock of sheep. The protocol for this proto-experiment was simple and clear: It was the shepherd’s responsibility to feed and care for the infants, to make sure that they heard absolutely no human language, and to wait patiently and listen carefully for the infants’ first words. The hypothesis was equally clear: he reasoned that in the absence of any linguistic input, the first word uttered by these infants would reveal which language was the origin of all human languages. As it turned out, the shepherd reported that the first word uttered by the children was "becos", a word they uttered repeatedly and excitedly with their arms outstretched. When Psammetichus learned that “becos” was the Phrygian word for bread, he accepted for the first time that Phrygian, and not Egyptian, was the original language of humankind. In the 21st century, our interest in infants’ first words remains strong, but stems from a different source. We are no longer consumed with discovering which language is the lingua franca of humankind, but instead with what infants’ first words can reveal about the nature of the human mind and how it is shaped by experience. In their monograph, Naigles, Hoff and Vear (2009) provide an outstanding example of how a careful analysis of infants’ first words, and especially their first verbs, can inform current theories and debates in language acquisition. Focusing on eight infants, ranging from 16 to 20 months at the start of the investigation, the monograph traces each infant’s first uses of their earliest acquired verbs. The diary records, compiled with the apparently tireless support of the infants’ mothers, offer a rich depiction of the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic properties of infants’ early verb productions. Infants’ productions, and the contexts in which they occur, then serve as an empirical base against which competing hypotheses about the flexibility and productivity of infants’ early-acquired verbs can be tested.