cindy (24months, 16 days) is looking at a picture of a carrot in a book and trying to get patsy's attention.
cindy kawo?kawo?kawo?kawo?kawo?
patsy what are the rabbits eating?
cindy they eating.....kando?
patsy no, that's a carrot.
cindy carrot. (pointing to each carrot on the page) the other.....carrot.
the other carrot. the other carrot.
(a few minutes later, cindy brings patsy a stuffed toy rabbit.)
patsy what does this rabbit like to eat?
cindy (incomprehensible) eat the carrots.(cindy gets another stuffed rabbit.)
cindy he(incomprehensible) eat carrots. the other one eat carrots. they both eat
carrots.(one week later, cindy opens the book to the same page.)
cindy here's the carrots. (pointing) is that a carrot?
patsy yes.(unpublished data from P.M.Lightbown)
cindy appears to be working hard on her language acquisition. she practises new words and structures in a way that sounds like a student in some foreign language classes! perhaps most interesting is that she remembers the"language lesson"a week later and turns straight to the page in the book she had not seen since patsy's last visit. what is most striking is that, like peter, her imitation and practice appear to be focused on what she is currently "working on"
the samples of speech from peter and cindy seem to lend some support to the behaviourist explanation of language acquisition. even so, as we saw, the choice of what to imitate and practise seemed determined by something inside the child rather than by the environment.
not all children imitate and practise as much as peter and cindy did. the amount of imitation in the speech of other children, whose development proceeded at a rate comparable to that of cindy and peter,has been calculated at less than 10 per cent. consider the examples of imitation and practice in the following conversation between kathryn and lois.