Child Language Acquisition

Research on the acquisition of English tells us little about how children acquire non-European languages. We know little about how children acquire the languages of the world.

Three features that differ substantially across languages

1. Phonology

English has a consonant inventory that is dominated by contrasts between a series of voiceless and voiced stops and fricatives. K’iche’ has a consonant inventory dominated by contrasts between a series of voiceless and glottalized stops and fricatives. Chipewyan has a consonant inventory with contrasts between voiceless, voiced and glottalized stops and fricatives. The table below shows the consonants produced by two-year-old children learning each of these languages (Pye, Ingram & List 1987; Cook 2006). What similarities and differences can you see?

2. Morphology

English verbs are frequently produced with no inflectional suffixes. English verbs have the inflectional template:

This statistical tendency gives the adult language a telegraphic appearance. Children learning English tend to omit verb inflections:

      papa have it.               (Eve 1;6)

      Eve cracking nut.        (Eve 1;7)

      mumma ride horsie     (Sarah 2;6)

      me in hide hole           (Charlie 2;5)

The observation of children learning English leads to the prediction that children learning all languages will omit functional morphemes like the tense inflections in English.

Mayan languages such as K’iche’ have a complex inflectional template. Transitive verbs in K’iche’ have the inflectional template:

Children learning Mayan languages produce many functional morphemes (Pye 1983):

K’iche’           TIY (2;1)                                                  LIN (2;0)

                           loq.                                                           nchapu.

                        = ch-at-el-oq                                             = k--in-chap-oh

                           IMP-2ABS-leave-DEP_IV                        INC-3ABS-1ERG-grab-IND_TV

                          ‘Leave!’                                                   ‘I will grab it.’

Georgian is a Kartvelian language spoken in the Republic of Georgia and the northeast corner of Turkey. Georgian verbs have the template:

Children learning Georgian also produce many functional morphemes (Imedadze & Tuite 1992):

Georgian          Tamaz (0;11.2)                                        Tamaz (1;7)

                              mina.                                                         gatka

                          =  m-i-nd-a                                               = ga-tq-d-a

                              1SUBJ-VER-want-PRES                         off-break-INCH-PRES

                              ‘I want something’                                   ‘it broke’

Conclusion

The language that children produce reflects the morphology of the adult language. Children acquiring languages with little verb morphology, such as English, will omit functional morphemes. Children acquiring agglutinating languages with rich inflectional morphology will produce functional morphemes.

3. Baby Talk

Parents often use a different style to talk to babies. This style was referred to as baby talk in the anthropological literature, but is now called child-directed speech. The ways in which parents talk to babies reflect their cultural expectations. Culture shapes parents’ beliefs about infants and their readiness for language.

File 8.4 describes some general characteristics of English baby talk

Researchers have claimed that these features are found in the baby talk of all cultures, and help infants process language. Exceptions exist, however. Pye (1986) reports that K’iche’ mothers do not use higher pitch or exaggerated pitch ranges in K’iche’ baby talk. The use of negation (‘Don’t eat that!’) refers to a topic that is not restricted to the ‘here and now’.

General Conclusion

Studies of how children learn English provide a limited view of children’s language learning abilities. Children are exposed to a wide range of sounds, morphemes and sentence structures in different cultures, and exhibit an early awareness of the structural features of the languages that they hear.

Nouns versus Verbs

Dedre Gentner (1982) suggested that children learn nouns earlier than verbs because nouns have a conceptually simpler referent than verbs. She used lists of words collected from children learning different languages to support her hypothesis.

Gentner tested three other explanations:

1. Word Order–Easier to remember the last words in sentences

2. Morphological Transparency–Nouns have fewer inflections

3. Input Frequency

Gentner concluded that since these other three hypotheses failed to account for children’s noun preference her own hypothesis in terms of conceptual simplicity must be the primary factor.

Gentner & Boroditsky (2001) “One might suggest, then, that there is nothing to explain: children’s word distributions simply match those of adults, with many nouns and a few highly frequent relational words. But to say the patterns match does not provide a mechanism of learning.” (p. 232)

4. Patterns of Language Teaching–Kaluli and Chinese parents emphasize family names

The Acquisition of Verb Meaning

Selectional restrictions on verbs are one of the main sources of semantic differences between languages. The breaking domain provides a good example of this variation. English speakers apply the word break to a wide array of objects: sticks, stones, bread, furniture, and machines. At the same time, English insists on marking the difference between breaking and tearing things. We break one and three dimensional objects, while we tear two dimensional objects.

Languages break up this domain in different ways.

I designed a study to test when children became aware of the selectional restrictions that applied to cut and break verbs in English, K’iche’ and Mandarin (Pye et al. 1996). We showed children acquiring these languages various breaking and cutting actions, and asked them ‘What did I do?’

English

            Subjects:   16 American children (2;2-5:5)/22 adults (shown in parentheses)

            Results:     Percentage of children (adults) responding with break

K’iche’

            Subjects:   6 K’iche’ children (4;0)/5 adults (shown in parentheses)

            Results:     Percentage of children (adults) responding with q’upi:j

Chinese

            Subjects:   8 Chinese children (3;0-5;5)/13 adults (shown in parentheses)

            Results:     Percentage of children (adults) responding with duàn

References

Cook, Eung-Do. 2006. The patterns of consonantal acquisition and change in Chipewyan (Dene Sułiné). International Journal of American Linguistics 72: 236-263.

Gentner, Dedre. 1982. Why nouns are learned before verbs. In S. Kuczaj (ed.), Language

      Development, Vol.2 Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Gentner, D. & L. Boroditsky. 2001. Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (eds), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Imedadze, Natela and Kevin Tuite. 1992. The acquisition of Georgian. In D. Slobin, The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition: Vol. 3, pp. 39-109. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Pye, C. 1983. Mayan telegraphese: Intonational determinants of inflectional development in Quiché Mayan. Language 59:583-604.

Pye, C. 1986. Quiché Mayan speech to children, The Journal of Child Language 13:85-100.

Pye, C., Ingram, D. & List, H. 1987. A Comparison of Initial Consonant Acquisition in English and Quiché, in Keith Nelson and Anne van Kleeck (Eds.), Children's Language, Vol. 6, pp. 175-190. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Pye, C., Loeb, D. & Pao. 1996 The Acquisition of Breaking and Cutting. CLRF 27.227-236.