Some of you might know that I have recently moved into a new flat in sunny Kielce, city in the south of Poland. I still haven’t met all of my new neighbours but I was pleased to find out that there is a married couple next door with three lovely children. Their 8-year-old put a smile on my face, the day I first met him, when he said Jest Pani bardzo ładna (You’re a very pretty lady). I thought it was cute and wondered about how nice it is to be a kid and be able to say exactly what you’re thinking without worrying about social awkwardness. My new admirer’s little sister struggles with language a bit more. I asked her how old she was and she replied with Mam 3 roki (I’m three years old – this should be Mam 3 lata in Polish as plural from year – rok is irregular – lata). Children make mistakes such as that one by logical analogy as normally in similar words in Polish plural would be indeed created by adding –i e.g. smok – smoki (dragon - dragons) or krok - kroki (step - steps). The newest addition to the family – another little girl is still an infant and makes no more than cooing and babbling noises. So… all of them three kids communicate on different levels.
How do we do it?
All normal children, regardless of what culture they are born into develop their language skills at roughly the same time. The theory has been suggested that the language acquisition develops together with learning motor skills and kids first learn words for laying down, sitting up, crawling, being held up, eventually standing up and walking. This means that we learn language as babies while doing physical activities. At the same time, however, studies demonstrate that the child’s early environment has a huge impact on their linguistic development and this indeed differs from one culture to the next. N. Chomsky describes language development as language growth and sees it as growing just like parts of baby’s body.
Caretaker speech
The fascinating thing I noticed is that the parents next door help their children in their language acquisition by so called caretaker speech – simplified expression of ideas, full of diminutives, rhetorical questions, repetitions and all manner of what we understand as baby-talk. In English it includes words such as daddy, mummy, poo-poo, doo-doo, pee-pee. The difference can be, however, seen in the way my neighbours speak to their oldest son – here their speech is a bit more elaborate as he certainly is able to understand more than his younger sisters and also uses more language. They don’t do it consciously but they change into teachers and are extremely flexible with switching from one level to the next depending on which child they’re talking to. I guess this skill must be buried deep in our brains and we intuitionally know how to mentor our offspring.
Let me know how it’s going!
Without sounding too creepy I’m trying to keep my eye on the family next door as I find it extremely interesting how their children assimilate language. Those were just first few things I've noticed so far and I’m eager to find out more. If you ever wondered about the process of first language acquisition feel free to share your views. I’d especially love to hear from parents about their children’s learning process. Thanks!
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ReplyDeleteGreat topic, Ewelina! Here in Russia grown-ups often use caretaker speech to talk to children. They won't say "car", they say "bee-bee" (imitating the sound it makes) etc. But not all people agree with that (including me). I think if a parent uses normal language (with a bit simplified sentence structure maybe, and there always has to be a clear and simple logic in what you're saying, otherwise your kid will be lost =)) a child will learn to express his/her thoughts better and faster. I kind of tried it with my daughter. I always spoke to her as if she were an adult. She started speaking in compex sentences at 18 months and is still ahead of most other children of her age in her language skills.
ReplyDeleteHi Olenka! Great to hear from you. Some of the features of this type of speech (yes, also common in Polish) are repetitions of questions and distinctive exaggerated intonation. There are positive aspects of this phenomenon including the fact that the child has more of ability to interact and become a conversation participant fairly early on at a very basic level. Repeating things over and over makes children grasp the basic structural organisation of our language and in time improve it. I agree with you too, however, people seem to exaggerate hugely and this doesn’t always have a good effect on a child. I’d be proud too if I had a little girl as smart as yours. What types of mistakes did she used to make and what mistakes does she make now?
ReplyDeleteMy own brother has three children, and with all three, he spoke to them as equals since day one. No caretaker talk, no baby talk. Repetition was still present because that's what people need to learn... but people do not learn from babytalk.
ReplyDeleteThe results? All three are at the top levels in their classes. They all understand complicated technical terminology on a level that would confuse most adults. One of the three children even learned sign language at the same time, due to a tracheotomy that prevented him from speaking for the first few years.
Hi yearlyglot! Thanks for sharing this. The repetition you mentioned is one of the features of the aforementioned caretaker speech even if other features are missing in the way your brother speaks/spoke to his children... Also, there is evidence against how children supposedly learn from repetition and disputing imitation as the basis of children's speech production. This can be found in studies of the syntactic structures children use - simplified versions of what they hear. If I asked the 3-year-old girl next door to repeat a grammatically complicated sentence chances are she will make mistake when repeating it after me - hence her mistake with wrong plural I describe above.
ReplyDeleteOr, maybe her parents have given her simplified input, so she didn't know that you have to change to lata from rok.
ReplyDeleteNo. Giving a simplified input and making grammatical mistakes are two different things. No adult native speaker of Polish would say ''roki'' for ''lata''.
ReplyDeleteHi Ewelina! I lost your blog post and found it again only now. As for the mistakes my daughter used to make, she used to mix the gender of nouns since her dad does that. Russian is not his native language, and in his native language there's no gender, so he often makes such mistakes. Now she corrects him more often than I do! =)
ReplyDeleteThat's fantastic! She is a very smart young lady!
ReplyDeleteHi Ewelina, this is a subject that interests me too. I have a young nephew and love seeing how his vocabulary grows at such an extraordinary rate, and the ways he puts grammar together — sometimes consistently but not correctly!
ReplyDeleteA book I read recently that covers this area quite well, though it's a few years old now, is Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Also, if you're curious and have the luxury of some reading time, here's a link you might enjoy: One Child's Language, in which a parent describes in some detail his daughter's linguistic development up to the age of four.