Childish Things and Grown-Up Words. Children Language Acquisition as Echoes of Adult Speech in Peanuts

Abstract

 This paper investigates the language of Peanuts as a site for reflecting on key theories of language acquisition, drawing on Piaget’s cognitive developmental model, Vygotsky’s socio-cultural perspective, Skinner’s behaviorist framework, and Chomsky’s nativist approach. In addition, the study incorporates insights from more recent research in usage-based, statistical, and pragmatic models of acquisition to complement these foundational theories. Schulz’s child characters display both sophisticated lexical choices and humorous distortions, illustrating how cognitive growth, social interaction, reinforcement, and innate linguistic competence intersect in the construction of meaning. The analysis combines developmental and linguistic frameworks with preliminary insights from comics theory – McCloud’s concept of “closure” and Groensteen’s spatial semantics – through a close reading of selected, paradigmatic strips. The paper argues that Peanuts not only mirrors children’s linguistic growth but also visualizes the cognitive and pragmatic mechanisms through which meaning emerges, making Schulz’s work a subtle reflection on how language is both acquired and performed.