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We've recently been covering children's acquisition of the sounds of English in AS classes, and I made a passing reference to how very young children can make any sound in any language (like the clicks of Xhosa in South Africa) but gradually tune in to their mother tongue as they grow older.

This fascinating post by Julie Sedivy in Discover magazine tells us a lot more about Xhosa and its clicks but also makes a number of interesting points about how we perceive sounds. Sedivy points out that to an outsider, the clicks of Xhosa sound "a bit like highly-skilled beatboxing, mixing recognizeable speech with what sounds like the clacking of objects striking each other". Of course, to a Xhosa speaker, the sounds are as familiar as t,s, and d are to English speakers.


In terms of children's acquisition of sounds, the article raises some good points to consider. We often treat the phonological part of a child's language development as mostly to do with the production of sounds and patterns of "errors" in those sounds (deletion, consonant cluster reduction, deletion of unstressed syllables, for example), at least I know I do when I teach it. But what about how we hear sounds as children and how we process those sounds and create a mental representation of what they mean?

Sedivy tells us that "your brain cares as much about how sounds function in a language than about their actual physical properties, so the same acoustic input can be interpreted very differently by the brain depending on its role in a language", so when toddlers are listening to speech all around them, they're not just parroting or imitating it, but making sense of how sounds are used, where they appear and what they might mean. It's as much to do with fathoming out meanings as it is to do with trying to replicate the production of the sound.

Toddler talk

Yesterday's Telegraph featured an article about recent research by Leslie Rescorla into children's acquisition of vocabulary in the early years. Rescorla may be familiar to some A level English Language students for her work on acquisition of lexis and semantics and the different categories of over-extension that some children make.

The article takes a look at some of the recent ideas about a child's language environment and how the language used around a child might influence their vocabulary and understanding. It also includes a checklist of some simple words that most children would be using by the time they're 2 years of age.

The 15-year project followed 40 children from privileged backgrounds who were diagnosed as late talkers but were otherwise developing normally.
While most of the children had caught up and developed an average range of vocabulary by four or five they remained slightly behind peers from the same background in vocabulary, grammar and reading throughout their school years, suggesting that their late development of speech had put them at a disadvantage.
The word test devised by Prof Rescorla can be completed in ten minutes and doctors can tell at a glance whether a child's speaking ability is poor for their age.

Personally, I think it discriminates against yokels from Norfolk who would not know many of these, but would probably be able to label several types of tractor.

New approaches to child language acquisition

http://www.instablogsimages.com

This probably isn't a link to follow if you're still struggling with the basics of child language on your A level course, but it's a really fascinating way of looking at how languages are acquired that offers a challenge to the Chomskyan model of a language acquisition device that's specifically designed to process the rules of grammar.

Construction grammar is a relatively new field of linguistics to me and one I can't claim to fully grasp as yet, but in this blog post, the expert grammarian and ELT specialist, Scott Thornbury takes a look at how construction grammar might be applied to language acquisition.

Instead of looking at language as words and rules (lexis and grammar) as we often do when looking at stages of acquisition and how children move from one word to two words to telegraphic talk, and the rest of it, construction grammar offers a model in which children pick up chunks of language from those they hear around them. It's not a simple parroting of input, as per Skinner's behaviourist model, but a more subtle processing of meaningful units of language that they hear around them.

As Thornbury explains here, language learners are not just picking up words from around them like leaves and sticking them back onto a pre-programmed grammar tree:

Rather than mapping individual words on to a pre-specified grammatical ‘architecture’ (as in a Chomskyan, generative grammar view), speakers construct utterances out of these routinised sequences – the operative word being construct.

It's therefore an active process, one which involves putting together chunks of meaning rather than piecing together individual units and linking them by grammar rules to other bits.  Where this differs markedly from Chomsky's model is that he sees a child's language environment as linguistically impoverished: this is the poverty of the stimulus argument in which a child can't be simply taking in language data from around them and regurgitating it because what they hear is so fragmented and often apparently ungrammatical. Construction grammar offers a different approach which seems to be arguing that a child can make much more sense of this language input and that by hearing enough language they tune in to the patterns that emerge and can start to spot the most frequent structures, using them in their own language soon after.

Thornbury points to the fact that so many of English's phrase and clause structures are repeated patterns, where if you know the first part you can have an educated guess at what the second part will consist of. He points to structures such as:

• take the [noun] for a [noun] (e.g. take the dog for a walk, take the cure for an illness, etc.)
• [prep] the [sing N] of the [sing N] (e.g. on the top of the mountain, in the middle of the night, in the tip of the tongue)

So, perhaps what young children acquiring language hear around them isn't quite the jumbled mess of  random noises and unfinished structures that the poverty of the stimulus argument posits, but a rather regular system that can be picked up more quickly than previously thought.

Child Language research updates and summaries

We've started Language Development in my AS classes and - snow permitting - will carry on with it this week and up to Easter.

Here are some useful links to clips of TV programmes, You Tube presentations and research  papers that should complement your class work on the topic.

One of the most handy links is this You Tube presentation (powerpoint plus handy voiceover) outlining the key arguments about child language.

Then you'll find the impressively-mustachioed Robert Winston presenting this short extract from his series, The Human Body a good intro to the main developmental stages of child language acquisition. 

The Horizon documentary Why Do We Talk which we watched in class a week or two back is split into five separate You Tube clips which can be found here.

Did you shed a little tear at the plight of the lickle baby Zebra Finches? I did, but I weep when I hear Black Eyed Peas lyrics, so ignore me. If you want to find out more about the impressively-consonanted OferTchernichovski and his work on the fluffy birds, have a look here. Or here.

If you're ready for some hard stuff, then go to these clips from the big daddy of language acquisition, the living man-god that is Noam Chomsky. In this clip he talks about his theories of language acqusition (Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device) while in this one (only for the hardcore ravers, it has to be said) he talks in more detail about how his ideas on UG have changed.

I've just found this Patricia Kuhl lecture about the critical period hypothesis on TED, which is a very clear explanation about what goes on in the first year of a child's language development.

If all of that is too much for you (or you are from Ipswich and struggle with anything beyond grunts) then check out this clip of cute twins talking to each other.

Edited to add Kuhl lecture link on 09.02.12

ENGA1 June 2011: language development questions

Here are the titles of the essay questions set since June 2009 on spoken language development:

Jan 2011
To what extent does acquisition of language depend on children’s experiences of the world about them?

June 2010
How important is interaction between children and adult speakers in the process of language acquisition?

Jan 2010
Discuss the ways in which children develop their grammatical skills.

June 2009
Discuss what you have learnt about language acquisition from children’s early uses of words and meanings.

If you're looking for possible essay titles for June 2011, it's probably a good idea to look through the questions set on the old A spec which are very similar to what's on the current spec. You can find a set of them here.

ENGA1 June 2011 language development

Following on from this week's first revision post on ENGA1, here's a link to the collected language development posts on this blog for the last few years. You'll find revision and exam tips, as well as snippets of new research and links to discussions about theory and case studies.

Twintastic

As the proud father of twins (although not so proud now one has started claiming he's an Arsenal supporter), I really liked the clip of babbling twins that circulated on the web last week. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's here.

There's also a nice bit of analysis of what's going on, provided by a child speech expert.

Baby Gaga

a view from one of the cameras

Deb Roy's longitudinal study of his own son's acquisition of language is the focus of this TED lecture. It's a clear explanation of how he went about gathering many hundreds of thousands of hours of data and some observations about what the data tells us about how his child's language developed over three years, particularly the social dimensions of interaction and acquisition. The idea of feedback cycles - caregiver speech and child's speech working together in an ongoing process of acquisition and influence - is a key point from the lecture.

One particular case study is his son's movement from gaga to water (from about 5 minutes in). The "wordscapes" created from the data are pretty amazing to look at and the tagging of particular words is a particularly fascinating way of mapping language to events. So, for example, Roy and his team have mapped the child's use of words to where he and other family members were in the house and who they were talking with. Here's the wordscape for water:

"water" wordscape, with peaks in the kitchen

You can also read more about the study in this pdf.

What's also interesting, as the lecture goes on, is Roy's team's application of this model to patterns of language usage beyond his own son and house and into the wider world, where mapping of language is linked very closely to national media events.

Learning the language/s

The ways in which children acquire language have been thoroughly researched for the best part of a century now, and even before people like Piaget, Vygotsky and Chomsky arrived on the scene, there were many observations about how children picked up (or didn't pick up) features of language, and the issue exercised the minds of great thinkers such as Kant and Plato.

More recently, studies have tended to become more intensive and involve masses more data than the earlier studies which often consisted of researchers tracking their own kids' development (or in my case publicly humiliating my children by showing clips of them to my classes or writing about them in the textbook) . The Deb Roy study at MIT which was featured in the BBC Horizon Programme Why Do We Talk (see here and here for links and further reading) showed how huge amounts of data could be collected by filming a child through CCTV for literally years, and then processing that data to see exactly what happened when.

This study shows how another large scale investigation is shedding light on the acquisition of Standard English and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in children. The findings, as reported in Science Daily, show that African-American children arrive at school with quite a high incidence of vernacular features in their speech. This then drops off as they go through the first four years of school before spiking again at the end of elementary school and dipping as the children enter high school.

The article suggests that there are implications in these findings for the teaching of Standard English in schools, which might well be the case, but it would also appear that the data tells us a bit more about how young people feel about themselves and their vernacular forms as they get older. Language is of course part of a wider system of social signification as well as a set of words and structures to be acquired, so it's quite likely that as children get older their relationship with their own language will change, and as the research seems to suggest this isn't a regular, smooth process but one that goes in peaks and troughs.

It's interesting to see how children start to pick up slang from their peer group at school as they get older and how this sits with the different varieties of English they hear around them - at school and at home -  so it's no surprise that a variety as well-established and widely used in the USA as AAVE will go through cycles as its users negotiate the complex territory of age, ethnicity, individual identity and mainstream, standard language forms.

One of the implications for English teaching might be that studying AAVE (or in the case of the UK, British Black English and other dialects or sociolects) alongside the Standard forms helps to develop a better understanding of both forms and their suitability for different situations. After all, what is being talked about here is quite a positive thing: being fluent in two languages/ codes rather than just one.

Other research into bilingualism in the early years of childhood would seem to suggest that having two or more languages around you is actually a very positive thing, leading to enhanced flexibility in thinking and even health benefits in later years:

Studies of children who grow up as bilingual speakers indicate they are often better at perspective-taking tasks, such as prioritizing, than monolingual children. Experiments with older bilingual speakers indicate that the enhanced mental skills may protect them from problems associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

So, as the report puts it, "juggling" two languages helps in many ways, and that doesn't just apply to recognised languages but also varieties of languages.

(If you can get hold of Graeme Trousdale's chapter Variation and Education in Analysing Variation in English (eds.Maguire, Warren & McMahon, April) you can find a clear explanation of how studying non-standard varieties is actually very good for our understanding of grammar in general, and helps with our grasp of standard forms too.)

Variety is the spice of language acquisition

Some new research into children's acquisition of language, reported here, suggests that children who are presented with more diverse objects of a similar type are quicker at developing their grasp of nouns than those who are shown a smaller range. The report explains further:

Two toddlers are learning the word "cup." One sees three nearly identical cups; the other sees a tea cup, a sippy cup and a Styrofoam cup. Chances are, the second child will have a better sense of what a cup is and -- according to a new University of Iowa study -- may even have an advantage as he learns new words.

This might not strike you as such a great surprise, but it's a study that sheds a bit of light on the processes children go through as they develop a sense of what a word means and the limits to which they can stretch that word's range of meanings. The linguist and child language expert, Jean Aitchison, talks about children acquiring words and their meanings as going through a process of labelling, packaging and network building. As you can probably see from this research, showing children a range of different objects, all with similar characteristics, seems to help them with the packaging and network building elements of their language acquisition.

The research goes on to suggest that a knock-on effect of this early boost to lexico-semantic acquisition is an enhanced ability to generalise. So, when children were later asked to identify objects that they hadn't seen before (or types of objects that they had seen in slightly different forms) they were better able to label them:

When tested on unfamiliar objects that fit into the categories they'd been taught -- such as a bucket they'd never seen before -- kids in the variable group performed better. This showed an ability to generalize the knowledge. "We believe the variable training gave them a better idea of what a bucket was. They discovered that the buckets were all alike in general shape, but that having a handle or being a particular texture didn't matter," Perry said. "In contrast, the children exposed to a tightly organized group of objects developed such strict criteria for what constitutes a bucket that they were reluctant to call it a bucket if it was different from what they'd learned."

Talk (seriously) to me, baby

There's a nice bitesize piece of research here for anyone who wants to impress their ENGA1 examiner this summer with an up to date reference. According to Lotte Henrichs, a Dutch researcher, verbal interaction with young children (3-6 year olds) can have a positive impact on their language skills, especially if they are approached as intelligent conversational partners. According to her research, if we talk to children in a way that is similar to the "academic discourse" they hear at nursery and school, their language development will be helped.

Top tips for ENGA1 - part 2

Part 2 Language Development (question 2b)

Again, here are some quick pointers gleaned from my marking experiences over the years about what to do and what not to do when answering essay questions on child language acquisition.

Do these:

• Answer the question! This is an obvious point, but one which about 20-30% of students don't do. You have to think about what the question is actually asking you and write your first paragraph in response to the question itself. Don't launch into a generalised "Children make their first sounds straight after birth and move through three different stages..." when the question is asking you about grammar, interaction or imitation.
• Make sure you use plenty of real examples of child language, either from your text book, your own research and experience, or from the data given to you in question 2a. Explain what the examples show and try to make sure you're linguistic in your approach (i.e. using technical terminology to describe the processes shown by your data).
• Link in research and theory to your arguments, but don't just wheel out the old Chomsky versus Skinner battle at every opportunity. Examiners get very bored of seeing the same old arguments in the same old words. Try to think of a clear way of explaining the problems different theoretical positions have when accounting for how children acquire language.
• Try to conceptualise your answer: think of the bigger picture. What is actually happening when children say things like "I runned" or "She falled over"? Yes, they're overgeneralising, but why?
• Think about your structure and guide your reader. Try to use paragraphs and discourse markers to make your answer fluent and easy to follow.

For a list of (nearly) all the past questions set on language development on the old spec (which is very similar to your spec) look here.

Language development - revision help

Here are some (hopefully) useful links to material on children's language development (AQA A ENGA1 or AQA B ENGB3).

• This is a clear and helpful summary of Roger Brown's 1973 research into children's stages of development.
• Here's a summary of Jerome Bruner's key ideas about interaction and language development
• Some very good stuff on Patricia Kuhl's work on language development (no, I hadn't heard of her either, but it's interesting stuff)
• And some good stuff on Piaget, Lenneberg and Theory of Mind

All of these are from this blog, which I wasn't aware of before, but is well worth a look at.

The class divide

The language that children are exposed to has long been thought to have some kind of influence upon their own lexico-semantic and grammatical development. But more importantly perhaps, the verbal interaction that children have with carers has often been thought to have a huge impact on the pace of a child's language development. A report, commissioned by the educational charity, The Sutton Trust suggests that the impact can be as much as one year's language development on a child by the time he or she is 5 years old. In other words, a child from a poor background - poor in terms of their family's income but poor too in terms of amount of contact time, reading time and time spent interacting verbally - could lag as far behind as a whole year compared to children of wealthier parents who spend more time reading to, talking with and generally interacting with their children.

The results might need a bit of unpicking, but there are some quite stark findings that the researchers, Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook, come up with:

Just under half (45%) of children from the poorest fifth of families were read to daily at age 3, compared with 8 in 10 (78%) of children from the richest fifth of families. Comparing children with the same family income, parental characteristics and home environments, those who were read to every day at age 3 had a vocabulary at age 5 nearly 2 months more advanced than those who were not read to every day.

Similarly, a child taken to the library on a monthly basis from ages 3 to 5 is two and a half months ahead of an equivalent child at age 5 who did not visit the library so frequently.

 Regular bedtimes at 3 and 5 are associated with gains of two and a half months at age 5.

At the end of the summary of their findings, the researchers rate the factors that they have found as more or less responsible for contributing to the gap in test scores between children and decide that the most significant influence is in the category of "parenting and the home environment" (which includes reading to your child, the nature of the social interaction you have with your child etc.) while "material circumstances" (income, savings, pressure of bills etc.) is the second most significant factor.

The full report can be found here, a summary here and a BBC news story about it here. For anyone interested in other studies into the role of interaction and the development of children's language, have a look here at a 2009 blog post about gestures, here for a Polly Toynbee article about Hart and Risley's influential research into American children's language development, and here for a link to the Children of the Code site where Todd Risley is interviewed about his work

First word hurdles

There's quite a bit of coverage in the media of a recent survey on children's early language development, with the main focus being on the story that (according to The Times) some children are "reaching the age of 3 without being able to say a word" and that "boys are almost twice as likely to struggle to learn to speak as girls".

The average age for a baby to speak their first word is 10 to 11 months. However, a significant minority (4 per cent) of parents reported that their child said nothing until they were 3. Toddlers between the ages of 2 and 3 should be able to use up to 300 words, including adjectives, and be able to link words together, according to I CAN, the children’s communication charity. Late speech development can lead to problems, such as low achievement at school or mental health problems.

The BBC reported it yesterday in this news story, but in a slightly less alarmist way.

What makes me feel a bit sceptical about the alarmist tone of The Times article is that the whole piece is based on a YouGov survey, which would seem to indicate that parents are self-reporting what they claim to have heard or not heard. This is problematic for a couple of reasons: a) self-reporting is not a particularly accurate methodology for assessing what actually happens, just someone's perception of events ("I'm sure my son said daddy just then" or "I don't really see much of my kids because I work all week, but I reckon they can say 50 words..."); and b) it can be heavily influenced by demand characteristics ("If I don't say that my daughter can say 50 words, people will think I'm a bad parent.").

So the truth might well be that things are just as they always were: some kids speak very early and others relatively late, but it's only a very small minority who have genuine difficulties (sometimes those on the autistic spectrum).

We'll come back to looking at the whole issue of children's first words and the role of environment and interaction in the next few weeks, and I'm sure we'll return to this story and some of the arguments around it.

Why do we talk?

There was a really good documentary about children's language development on BBC2's Horizon programme last night, called Why Do We Talk? Have a look here on BBC's i-player this week to watch it. And the BBC magazine has an article about it here.

And there's more on Deb Roy's massive child language data experiment here on a blog post back in July of this year. Meanwhile, have a look at this TED online lecture by the mighty Steven Pinker for his view on "the blank slate". But first, make yourself a nice cup of tea and put on your thinking cap (rather than your dodgy New Era hat).

Children's melodies

Recent German research into children's early exposure to sounds seems to suggest that newborn babies have noticeably different cries, with distinct intonation patterns linked to the sounds of their mothers' language. What is even more striking is that these patterns seem to become established before the child is even born:

The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation.

So in other words (and helped by a news piece on Radio 4 this morning that I'll try to link here later) a French baby's cries will be closer to the melodic patterns of the French language, while a German baby's will be closer to the intonation patterns of the German language, and these intonation patterns will have been developed while in the womb. The audio can be heard by going to this link on Billy Clark's London Language blog.

More on this story here. But in this report on the same story, some interesting reasons are suggested for not jumping to conclusions about what this experiment proves or disproves:

More work remains to be done to confirm that parental talk affects how babies cry, remarks psycholinguist D. Kimbrough Oller of the University of Memphis. Newborns cry differently depending on their emotional states, which may have differed for French and German babies, Oller says. Mothers of one nationality may have allowed babies to cry longer before picking them up. Or, recording devices may have been set up more intrusively in one country than in the other. Either situation would complicate an acoustic comparison of French and German newborns’ cries, Oller notes.A related scientific debate concerns whether parents’ native language influences how babies babble during the first year of life. Oller regards babies’ babbling as a universal set of sounds largely immune to cultural or linguistic influences.

Monkey magic

And following hot on the heels of the last post about research into child language and how it seems to support interactional theories of development, here's research on monkeys that seems to offer support to nativist theories. According to the BBC news website and New Scientist (quoted here) by playing repeated patterns of two syllable "words" to monkeys on one day and then mixing up the patterns on the second day, it could be observed that the monkeys were alert to differences in syllables:

The findings do not mean primates can communicate using language, but they do suggest that some of the skills required to use language may be linked to very basic memory functions.

One grammatical structure that is found across many languages is affixation: the addition of syllables, either at the beginning or at the end of a word, to modify its meaning.

For instance, in English, the suffix "–ed" is added to verbs to make the past tense. In German, the same effect is achieved by adding the prefix "ge–" to the front of verb stems.

What this doesn't "prove" (and to be fair, no one is claiming that it does) is that grammar is inbuilt. What it does seem to support is that some sort of learning process - which involves language in some form - is present is monkeys, our evolutionary relatives and that this process can be extended to "rules" of human languages.

Language development under the microscope

This article on the BBC news website offers an insight into one approach to researching children's language development at the moment. As part of the "speechome project", Professor Deb Roy and his colleagues are collecting a quarter of a million hours of data. And the other figures are equally staggering:

"The first task we set for ourselves was to transcribe everything my son heard
or said from nine to 24 months," he says. He estimates that there is somewhere
between 10 to 12 million words of speech to transcribe. "For anyone that has
transcribed speech, they will know that is a laborious and slow process," he
says, with a degree of understatement.

And some initial observations that Roy has made seem to offer support to social interactive theories of language development. The BBC site explains:

By analysing the length, and hence complexity, of sentences spoken by caregivers
to his son, he believes that he has shown that adults subconsciously simplify
sentences until the child understands the word. Once it has been understood, the
adults then build up the complexity of the sentences containing the word. "We
essentially meet him at this point of the birth of the word and gently pull him
into language," he says.

Elsewhere, there's more support for interactive models of language acquisition. A report from UCLA suggests that adult-child conversations can potentially offer six times as much language development improvement as talking at a child (parent monologues/reading) or the child watching TV.

"Talk is powerful, but what's even more powerful is engaging a child in
meaningful interactions — the 'give and take' that is so important to the
social, emotional and cognitive development of infants and toddlers," says Dr.
Jill Gilkerson, language research director at LENA Foundation and a study
co-author.

"It is not enough to speak to children," Zimmerman adds.
"Parents should also engage them in conversation. Kids love to hear you speak,
but they thrive on trying speech out for themselves. Give them a chance to say
what's on their minds, even if it's 'goo goo gah.'"

And finally, in a piece of investigation that could win the No Sh*t Sherlock award for 2009, researchers at Seattle Children's Research Institute have discovered that when the TV is on people talk less and use fewer vocalisations, potentially harming the language development of children who are in the same environment. What is interesting about this is the observation that it's not so much the TV programmes that could damage the children's language (although In the Night Garden is the work of Satan as far as I'm concerned) but the effect watching TV has on the family's spoken interaction.

The study found that each hour of audible television was associated with
significant reductions in child vocalizations, vocalization duration, and
conversational turns. On average, each additional hour of television exposure
was also associated with a decrease of 770 words the child heard from an adult
during the recording session. This represented a seven percent decrease in words
heard, on average. There were significant reductions in both adult female and
male word counts. From 500 to 1,000 fewer adult words were spoken per hour of
audible television.

ENGA1 Language Development essay questions part 3

And here's another one we prepared earlier. It's a suggested approach to the phonology question (question 2 on the list below).

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