Not as simple as they sound or look

If your child is past the age at which most children normally start putting two words together – in the second half of the second year, if your child still has only single words, or if his or her only word is for cat, dog, bird, horse, bus, car, lorry, or to ask for his or her favourite drink, or to say hello or goodbye, it is not obvious what the importance or relevance is of any of the theories here. You might reasonably say to yourself: I don’t care which theory says what about the situation as long as my child just starts to put two words together.

This is the stage in the acquisition of language, which Roger Brown (1972) called the ‘one word stage’, when single words are all that child’s system generates or can generate.

The set of accessible words or signs used in a language is known as the ‘lexicon‘. The lexicon varies at least slightly from person to person, sometimes greatly.

It might seem that single words or signs are simple. They aren’t.

Parents are rightly delighted when a child utters his or her first word or uses his or her first sign. This is the first step on the way towards building the lexicon. But by the Proposal here this is by doing more than just linking a symbol either a spoken word or a sign – what by the framework here is known as ‘externalisation’ – to a meaning. It also involves defining the position of the symbol in the lexicon, thus making it both classifiable and accessible, effectively ‘indexing’ it in the terminology of computer databases, as shown by the digram below.

The effect of the doubled binary branched structure is that it can be extended indefinitely.

This is exploited when a child of say two and a half says something like “I got one like that” where like that is by a branching off one.

By what I believe is the latest research on this point. Marinus Huybrechts (2017) shows that since a structure with an infinite capacity is more simply stated than one with a finite capacity, there is no logical way for the latter to grown into the former. The doubly branched structure must have been there from the first single words.