William ogrady how children learn language (cambridge approaches to linguistics) (2005) (1)

1 Small talk Most of the time we adults take language for granted – unless of course we have to learn a new one. Then, things change pretty quickly. We can’t get the pronunciation right, and we can’t hear the difference between sounds. There are too many new words, and we forget ones that we learned just the day before. We can’t say what we want to say, and we can’t understand anything either, because everyone speaks too fast. Then, as if that isn’t bad enough, we come across a three-year-old child and watch in envy and amazement as she talks away effortlessly in that impossible language. She can’t tie a knot, jump rope, draw a decent-looking circle, or eat without making a mess. But while she was still in diapers, she figured out what several thousand words mean, how they are pronounced, and how they can be put together to make sentences. (I know that I’ve used “she” all the way through this paragraph, as if only girls learn language. Since English doesn’t have a word that means “he or she,” I’ll simply alternate between the two. I’ll use “she” in this chapter, “he” in the next chapter, “she” in the third chapter, and so forth.) Children’s talent for language is strangely limited – they’re good at learning language, but not so good at knowing what to say and what not to say.1 “Daddy, did your hair slip?” – three-year-old son, to his bald but long bearded father “Why don’t you get some expensive money?” – three-year-old daughter, when told by her mother that she could get a small toy, but that the ones she had asked for were too expensive “I wish someone we knew would die so we could leave them flowers.” – six-year-old girl, upon seeing flowers in a cemetery “If I was a raccoon, I would eat the farmer’s corpse.” – a kindergartener, writing a story about what he would do if he were a raccoon “How will that help?” – kindergarten student, when the class was instructed to hold up two fingers if any of them had to go to the bathroom 1 2 How Children Learn Language These samples of “childspeak” are funny because of the misunderstandings that they contain about rather basic things in the world – beards, money, raccoons, death, going to the bathroom in kindergarten, and so on. It’s easy to lose sight of what they don’t contain – mispronunciations, words with the wrong meanings, or grammatical errors. There is something very intriguing about this. Despite their naivet´e about the world in general, children can make and hear contrasts among dozens of speech sounds, they have learned thousands of words without having heard a single definition, and they are able to build and understand sentences of impressive complexity. Herein lies the mystery of language acquisition. How can children be so good at language, and so bad at almost everything else? Sounds, words, and sentences From a parent’s point of view, the most important and exciting thing about language acquisition is probably just that it allows their children to talk to them. But exactly what does it take to be able to talk? And how do children get from the point where they can’t do it to the point where they can? Most children start producing words some time between the ages of eight and twelve months or so, and many children have ten words in their vocabulary by the age of fifteen months. Things gradually pick up speed from that point on. Whereas an eighteen-month-old child may learn only one or two new words a day, a four-year-old will often acquire a dozen, and a seven-year-old will pick up as many as twenty. (That’s more than one per waking hour!) How does this happen? Adults don’t pause between words when they speak, so how do children figure out where one word ends and another begins? How do they learn to make words plural by adding the suffix -s and to put verbs in the past tense by adding -ed? Why do we find errors like eated and goed? Why do children say things like I can scissor it and I sharped them? By themselves, words are just empty shells, and there’s no point in learning a new word if you can’t also learn its meaning. Children are remarkably good at this too – so good in fact that they are often Small talk 3 able to learn a word’s meaning the first time they hear it used. For instance, a child who sees a horse running in a field and hears her mother say “horse” typically figures out right away that the word refers to the animal, not to its color, or to its legs, or to the fact that it’s running. What makes this possible? Meaningful words are the building blocks out of which we create sentences, our principal message carriers. Most children begin producing sentences some time between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four months, at about the point where they have vocabularies of fifty words or so. First come two-word utterances like (Mommy here and That mine), then longer telegram-like sentences that are missing little words like the and is as well as most endings (That a green one. Mommy drop dish). By the age of three, the basics of sentence formation are in place and we find many sentences worthy of an adult – I didn’t know that one stands up that way, Does that one get a button?, and so on.2 How does a child master the craft of sentence carpentry at such an early point? A whole different set of challenges face the child when it comes to the meaning of sentences. How, for example, is a child who can only say one or two words at a time able to make herself understood? How does she figure out that The car was bumped by the truck means the exact opposite of The car bumped the truck even though the words car, bump, and truck occur in the same order in both sentences? Why doesn’t The doll is easy to see mean that the doll can see well? And then there are speech sounds – the stuff of nightmares for adult language learners. Just how does a child go about distinguishing among dozens of speech sounds? And, equally importantly, how does she go about figuring out how to make those sounds and then assemble them into fluent melodies of syllables and words? What, if anything, does babbling have to do with all of this? Do children really produce all the sounds found in human language before learning to speak their own? All of which brings us to the ultimate question: how do children learn language? Every time I’m asked that question, my first inclination is to respond by simply saying that I wish I knew. In a way, that’s the most honest answer that anyone can give. The fact of the matter is that we still don’t understand how children learn 4 How Children Learn Language language – any more than we have figured out how the universe works, exactly what happened to the dinosaurs, or why we can’t all live for two hundred years. But that doesn’t mean that we are completely in the dark. On the contrary, research in the last three decades has yielded many exciting and important findings that reveal a great deal about how language is acquired. The job of this book is to report on those findings in a way that makes them accessible to scholars, students, and parents who are not specialists in the field of language acquisition research. Methods 101 There are basically two ways to go about studying child language. The first is called “experimental,” because it involves conducting experiments. Contrary to popular belief, experiments don’t have to involve a laboratory or special equipment – although some do. An experiment is really just a way to test an idea. Good experiments are often ingeniously simple, and you don’t have to be a specialist to understand them. In the chapters that follow, we’ll have a chance to look at the results of some of the most famous of these experiments to see what they tell us about children and their language. The second way to study child language is called “naturalistic,” since it relies on the observation of children’s speech in ordinary everyday situations. Two techniques are particularly popular. One involves keeping a language diary. For the first few months after a child begins to talk, it may be possible to write down each and every one of her utterances – or at least each and every one of her new utterances. (For those of you who’d like to keep your own diary, you’ll find some guidelines in Appendix 1 at the end of the book.) By the time a child is two years old, though, she typically becomes so talkative that it’s impossible to keep up. From that point on, a diary is usually used just to make note of more specific sorts of things, like the pronoun in My did it or the double past tense in I ranned away. A different research technique is needed to keep track of other aspects of development. Small talk 5 As a child becomes more loquacious, acquisition researchers often gather naturalistic data by recording samples of her speech and conversations, usually for about an hour every two weeks. (These days, researchers like to make video recordings rather than just audio recordings. That allows them to have a record not only of what children say but also of what they are doing, what they are looking at, what gestures they use, and so on.) Once transcribed and analyzed, these speech samples become a linguistic “photo album” that captures many of the major milestones in a child’s journey to language. Thanks to the efforts of dozens of researchers over the past thirty years, there is now a significant database of child speech transcripts, both for English and to a lesser extent for various other languages as well. These are available to everyone through the Child Language Data Exchange System, or CHILDES (http://www.childes. psy.cmu.edu/).3 (In case you’d like to do some recording and transcription of your own, I’ve included some basic information in Appendix 1.) As we will see in the chapters that follow, both observational and experimental techniques have a place in the study of child language. Each is appropriate for answering particular types of questions, and each is subject to limitations that may make it inappropriate for other types of research. You’ll see lots of examples of how both techniques are used as we proceed. What’s next To make our task more manageable, it helps to divide language into its component parts – sounds, words, sentences, meanings, and so on – and deal with them in separate chapters. This is a bit of a distortion, I admit, since children don’t first learn sounds, then words, then sentences, and then meanings. In reality, children start using words and learning meanings before they master all of a language’s sounds. And they usually start building sentences after they acquire just a few dozen words. So, there’s actually an extended period of time during which children are working on sounds, words, meanings, and sentences all at 6 How Children Learn Language once. But it’ll be a lot easier for us to figure out what’s going on if we can untangle these different things and look at them separately. We’ll get started on all of this in the next chapter by talking about how children identify and learn the words of their language. But if you’re more interested in how they learn meanings, or sentences, or sounds, feel free to skip ahead to another chapter. Each chapter can be read independently of the others and, hopefully, each will pique your curiosity about what comes next. Just one word of reassurance before beginning, especially for readers who have young children of their own at home. When it comes to language acquisition, all children share the same destination, but no two follow exactly the same path or travel at exactly the same speed. Except in the rarest of cases, these differences should be a cause of delight rather than concern. Children need people who will listen to them and talk to them. Beyond that, they typically do very well on their own, so there’s no need to take on the role of teacher. Just watch and listen – something amazing is about to happen.