The Resurgence in Child Language Research, 1965-1975: Language Development Review

Until the 1950s, there were two major thrusts in research in language acquisition: diary studies of individual children and the so-called normative studies of large numbers of children across age and social class. In the late 1950s, an increased interest in child language acquisition was inspired by innovations in linguistic theory and cognitive science coming largely from MIT and Harvard Universities. By 1965, three landmark longitudinal studies of very young children’s earliest sentences had been published by Martin Braine in Washington, Wick Miller and Sue Ervin-Tripp at Berkeley, and Roger Brown and his students at Harvard. A remarkable thing about these studies was the convergence of their results and, together, they precipitated an unprecedented sharing of ideas and data through conferences, the circulation of pre-publication manuscripts, and new professional journals. This chapter provides a review of the decade that followed, between 1965 and 1975. It was an exciting time