First Language at 40

By Chloë Marshall, Editor-in-Chief of First Language

SAGE journal First Language celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and this milestone offers the opportunity to look back not only on the journal’s 40 years of publishing, but also on the field of child language acquisition as a whole.

How children acquire their first language has been a topic of scientific and lay interest for centuries, if not millennia. Back in the 7th century BCE, the Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus reportedly ordered two infants to be brought up by a shepherd who was forbidden to speak in their presence. After two years the children uttered their first word, bekos, which turned out to be the Phrygian word for bread. Psammetichus concluded from this “experiment” that language is an innate capacity, and that Phrygian is the natural language of humans. Fast-forward to the late 19th century, and Charles Darwin’s detailed diary recording the language development of one of his sons, as well as his ideas about the co-evolution in humans of language and mind, have been credited with kick-starting the scientific study of child development. During the cognitive revolution that started in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky’s discoveries concerning the grammatical structure of language and his speculations about how children acquire that structure inspired an ever-increasing volume of research on language acquisition.

Few would agree with Psammetichus’s conclusions about Phrygian. Nevertheless, debates over to what extent language acquisition is driven by an innate capacity, and whether that innate capacity is specific to language or more general to human cognition, still rage. Other big questions include (1) what differences and similarities there are between how the world’s approximately 7,000 languages (which include sign languages) are acquired; (2) how the time course of language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual children compares to that in monolingual children; and (3) why it is that some children (whether monolingual, bilingual or multilingual, and whether speakers or signers) have difficulty acquiring language while the majority of children around them seem to acquire it without any effort.

First Language is quite specialised in scope, in that it publishes empirical and review papers that focus on how children acquire language. Yet it reaches a broad readership. The journal publishes work by authors from diverse theoretical and methodological traditions, including those in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, neuroscience, communication, sociology and education. Methods range from individual case studies, through experiments, observational/ naturalistic studies, analyses of corpora, and systematic reviews, to parental surveys.

To celebrate the 40 years of First Language, I have curated a Virtual Special Issue comprising 40 papers, one published in each year. I have grouped them under 7 broad themes, each with a short introduction. The themes are: acquiring words; acquiring grammar; input and interaction; multimodal communication; atypical language acquisition language and cognitive development; and under-studied languages. These broad themes have featured consistently both in the field as a whole and in the pages of First Language during the past 40 years.

The papers are free to access for the whole of 2020, and I invite everyone to delve into the collection. You will discover some historical gems that have been very influential on our understanding of language acquisition, and some more recent work whose impact promises also to be important. Together they reveal the excitement of this research field and the variety of scientific views within it. Happy reading!

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