This diagram is based on Barry Prizant’s descriptions of variations between two language acquisition styles, from his 1983 paper on language development in autism, which he subtitled “Towards an Understanding of the Whole of It” in a nod to the holistic nature of a gestalt. Additional information about intelligibility and motor planning comparisons comes in part from Ann Peters’ 1973 book The Units of Language Acquisition, which includes the fitting chapter title “The initial extraction problem and the one-unit stage.” The center column comments about the common features (assumptions and principles, above) shared by all language learning, guided by the observations of Lois Bloom in her summative chapter, “The Intentionality of Word Learning: How to Learn a Word, Any Word” (2012).

As early as 1974, the linguist John Dore wrote of his observation that there appeared to him two “partly separate” paths to language learning it was possible to observe in his infant subjects: the “word babies” and the “intonation babies”. He suggested that, although the “word babies” used more words, the “intonation babies” had more effective communication overall. Dore noted their turns in conversation more often caused the adult in the interaction to do or give something in response to the baby’s message. Later, Barry Prizant added more detail to this model, as well as opting to alter the terminology from “word babies” and “intonation babies” to the more developmentally descriptive, age-neutral “analytic processors” and “gestalt processors”.