Posts tagged linguistics

A subtle yet noteworthy observation about how children learn their native tongue. In language, at least, we are explorers more than imitators.

re: cultural worlds, language, linguistics

Christy:

In spite of the commonsense notions of parents, they do not “teach” their children to talk. Children learn to talk, using the language of their parents, siblings, friends, and others as sources and examples—and by using other speakers as testing devices for their own emerging ideas about language. When we acknowledge the complexity of adult speech, with its ability to generate an unlimited number of new, meaningful utterances, it is clear that this skill cannot be the end result of simple instruction. Parents do not explain to their children, for example, that adjectives generally precede the noun in English, nor do they lecture them on the rules governing formation of the past participle. While parents do correct some kinds of mistakes on a piecemeal basis, discovering the underlying rules which make up the language is the child’s job.

From what we know, children appear to learn language partly by imitation but even more by hypothesis-testing. Consider a child who is just beginning to form past tenses. In the earliest efforts, the child is likely to produce such incorrect and unheard forms as I goed to the store or I seed a dog, along with other conventional uses of the past tense: I walked to Grandma’s. This process reveals that the child has learned the basic, general rule about the formation of the past tense—you add -ed to the verb—but has not yet mastered the other rules, the exceptions and irregularities. The production of forms that the child has never heard suggests that imitation is not central in language learning and that the child’s main strategy is hypothesizing—deducing from the language she hears an idea about the underlying rule, and then trying it out.