The Next 200 Years; Children and Language

one of the reason why the suggestions made a tour and perhaps having a capacity for grammar in particular was that the onset of grammar that is the first appearance of mali where voters as particularly appears to be so regular cross challenge very different environments hack and communication a university of texas austin this is the next two hundred years as the united states looks beyond the bicentennial celebration the next two hundred years explores the american future our guests this week are donald j false professor of psychology lead baker associate professor of linguistics and benjy blunt associate professor of anthropology at all at the university of texas at austin this is bob davis for the next two hundred years as children make sounds from birth but as we all know sometime most elapse before their first words and

sentences begin to take four we'll be talking today about children and language that still rather mysterious process by which the child learns to speak german well you know as a child began to sort out the sounds of language and respond to reforms were somewhat amazingly there's some evidence that children are already responding to the sounds of languages early as one month but of course it's not until quite a bit later that they begin to produce language and still wary of when they are producing novel utterances so response and production are two different things and dr baker how do you respond to that well there's some there's some evidence from current research that even as early as the first twenty four hours of life children can recognize differences between very similar english sounds like b n a p but we have ways of testing that is iran yes we do not want it depends in part on what we really mean by respond to what kind

of responses involve children respond to sounds of various kinds including language even prenatal ii but we're talking about response to something like human language ten to twelve weeks and began to see him funds astonishing eye contact with parents when parents speak to them and these are ways you measure your response by to whether the trial looks or move rather follows joe action patterns and movement or movement turning a head thing to that time one of the things we'll be discussing the then a word will be using a number of times as language acquisition which is a fairly technical term in some of our disciplines what really do we mean by language acquisition it's not just hearing the sounds it's more much more than that in the us i think go when we talk about acquisition it will probably help us to start cracking language down into some of its components are parts we can talk about the sound system the applause in laws and so on and the mom was that the children come out with and there's a separate somewhat separate

the acquisition sequence for that than there is for the activity of putting words together so i think one of the things we'll have to do is to decide what aspect of flying that you're talking about ok an acquisition could be broken down into recognition and then production of sound is that our languages that acura yes in fact harris argue about whether or not there is production and acquisition end of comprehension are the same thing in terms of the rate which they're acquiring data but what about that position from your point of view as a researcher well one of the things that you can see in the fall in the field is that people have meant different things to it by language acquisition different times and i think in the beginning phases in the mid nineteen sixties so there's a real effort to talk about language acquisition as a capacity or competence her soundtrack of us on the poor the children either to produce or to comprehend or so structures of sound whatever level talking about since that time it has been much more concern

about touring using language to communicate that as extending the concept of language to broader context really even more discussion of acquisition of the copies to communicate rather than just to do huge sentimental in which features okin are we make a distinction between establishing contact between individuals as communication and just the production of sound well that's one of the point has been discussed and that different people working in the field out in different ways as are many people who still hot we're primarily are interested primarily in the area of what the airstrike competence is that you have to have said to produce a sentence would be able to do copper him what a person is saying in and respond in some semantic a meaningful certainly what about this whole thing of a tryout for example babbling the bah bah bah bah bah kind of thing simply making sounds that you hear babies make it is that a part of language

acquisition or is that so this extended the type of work that was referring to how yes i think when people would say that is portland's acquisition or at least it's a precursor of language acquisition that's what you see from again from just a few weeks of the trial is the ability to establish regular pattern of interaction with apparent using them in effect babbling sound and nonsense ounce or there's no reference your semantic cut meaning that all it involved yet others a pattern to actually considers there's meaning at some level some type of linguistic cannot lose this context and yes in this context of a senate rule governed the sense that you can observe it and write rules that the data will describe for you throw a happily and incomes again and again yes yes and those predictable yes yes but measurable yes so all of a sudden you have language starting to develop really before we talk about words at all we're talking about sounds in my towel yes so

there are many people who would be very uncomfortable with that definition english i why would they be what kinds of problems are there in this regard about language is simply the making of sounds by trial are they are they learning a language at creating a language or are they being forced into a pattern of language which is what we call english or whatever how we learn this i would probably want to make a distinction between children and their caretakers communicating reasons having a language in the sense of it being a maoist english i think that there are certain rules of communication that to them is has pointed out that probably are starting very early and is battling phases and you can see those happening i'm sure with children who are deaf they too are in a battle for the first few months of their lives and then they don't get the he structured sound system of the language of their parents so they're battling is is the end for them

and then they don't go on then to acquire the structured system that i would call saying much so i think there's a different interrogation which can be done bye bye lots of them without language subtly even by other species and language i think a lot of the work that has been done under the heading of language acquisition there's been an enormous amount of focus on the utterance is that the trump loses himself and yet it's clearly the case with with some children that have been studied who have some kind of problem with their stay with their vocal apparatus and cannot produce any sentences that we would still say of them after the age of five or ten years that they had learned english because they half are competent to understand any english sentences away or any normal child would so on this makes it look as if the understanding of the comprehension was at least as important and learning you know or the it gives as good an index to what is minus the actual productions do

and possibly in some cases even better or how do you how'd you correlate all this with parents with parents talking to children is that important in this process of acquisition i think the years although it's again something that is and then look at who's been explained very differently now throughout the past ten fifteen years of work in this area i think would begin to see ah happening now more maurice realization that for some aspects of language acquisition prosecutor important how some of the early work it said that that the way that parents speak to children has little bearing on children grammar is something that stood up to two research and damn good deal of effort to try to answer the question and almost all cases it it seems to be that it has very little impact here but pro speech an artist who's going to play a very large role and talent acquisition of

vocabulary that you're not going to discover what words are what words mean unless we have some purple extent even beyond that though and nine and it's important and that it's the initiation of interaction the initiation of the mutual exchange of some kind of behavior patterns part of oppression trial that that really is important and setting the stage for my position is really what i was alluding to a moment ago that is that parents will begin to engage children in games the interaction games where there'll be mutual exchange of organization part of the parents and children and you can see things that look like conversations their total conversation with a parent who are simply making nonsense sounds and then an infant making perhaps the same sound different back parent picking up on those and you give them these chains of needle exchanges those chains of exchanges serve

more to the us context and four children to discover through the parent directed in control activity to discover what the relative dimensions of inaction are they should be named it's easy for instance parents introducing an object statoil bowl truckers simple into the interaction and then focusing a child's attention on it how to use is nonsense things in nonsense words maybe eventually introducing the idea of the word oh and then through unbelievable about a repetition repeated action over and over again the trial began to learn about the name of dollars and that much of a vocabulary acquisition procedural charge today a matter of imitation that as an imitation of psalms imitation of patterns imitation of words spoken to children it at this particular state are talking about may drink now the trial of old approximately six or seven months to about eleven and twelve months perhaps kind of

restricted to that ranging talk about imitation imitation i think is a meaningful way it uses to get methodical a procedure to be used to explain what's happening imitation works both ways on the part of the parent child in fact if anything parents probably imitates a child more than vice versa but there's a danger in talk about imitation of bitterness and because i think one of the standard ways of people think about children acquiring language as an assembly where all of it through imitation and that clearly is not the case what has the controversy surrounding this let's get into that a little bit because that's very interesting to me he was a very naive person in language acquisition what kinds of controversies either about this acquisition this notion of acquisition well one of the i think the most controversial new album past twenty twenty years or so has been the view that that was first advanced by professor noam chomsky of

mit to the effect that children come into the world there are a few like our with certain kinds of expectations or predispositions of course of an unconscious sort about what kind of language systems are going to find them how to end try to make sense of the parental speech around them and the basic argument here of trump's keys is simply that without some kind of pre disposition to learn the rules of a certain kind say that the army when you wanna make a noun plural ending wish you hadn't asked run without some predisposition to learn the rules of that kind of child would be unable to make any sense out of what he hears around them because the possibilities for interpreter you are so vast unless he is genetically sort of steered ahead of time in a certain direction was this a radical

departure from the series held before it was very rare now but what were those or those aren't earlier period of the most simplistic and i think that during our language through imitation an intrusion successive approximation to the adult language an effective there are those would be limited first a limited only simply touch of things and there's a lot to be able to imitate her or accurately but for the kinds of reasons that they pointed out here that we know that that we couldn't possibly do it the children know that language hostile to suggest the children had some innate capacity for graham are going to position was a real breakthrough short break with what people inhale past one good way perhaps are thinking about this and talking about is how to revive the whole nature nurture and controversy as to whether camp and its informal support and there's something internal about a

combination of the two dead language and much of the these controversial issues at that not raised here taking one point to somewhere and in that general area and order for one over the other one you're like you know i heard on this your moment on this imitation matter one reason why physicians made in addition to leave until i get one reason why suggestions made a tour and perhaps having a capacity for grammar in particular was at the onset of grammar that is the first appearance of them or they were addresses and particularly appears to be so regular crossed your and very different environments different cultures different societies and jimmy guiffre classes different directors nine states you see that their children roughly from eighteen to twenty two or twenty four months began to use more they work construction regardless of what kind of input they have records of the trial during training techniques or like and that was taken a very good

evidence for the fact that that they must be some strong any component worry what is the effect of parental corrections on language on language acquisition if you as a parent correct your children regularly in the formation of sentences or even the choice of words what is the effect well the original view i think was a while back several years ago it i suppose the view of psychologists in the view of parents would've coincided really closely both would've believed that the our perfect was very significant that the earth providing negative far feedback in cases where children made mistakes would be a very important in fact very critical way of indicating to him that be the idea he had about his language on that point was somehow old mistaken if he thought was going to say a sentence like he just said end up a more recent work however suggested that

most parents when they react negatively to a child's utterance it saw him it's not on account of the grammatical formally utterance but rather on account of either the production or the pronunciation rather or the truth value that is they will react negatively if the child says something that they think does not fit the occasion or isn't true in the occasion and frequently they won't even notice when an utterance is badly for an hour for instance one little girl at a dinner party are that i attended several years ago said why did you didn't come earlier which of course is not well formed adult science but none of the adults likes of myself my wife noticed i noticed because i'm going with my wife miles of the child's parents did not noticeable was that a matter of expectation on their part or they simply had the child train the parents well i think

they they weren't attending to that aspect of their child's utterance they wanted they mean even even with the bad grammar no one had any trouble understanding of the child's utterance and they were thinking almost certainly thinking about the form of it rather than be the substance of it rather than the form so you wouldn't you really though wouldn't put a great deal of stardom proud of corrections and why am i right in this or in english and grammar and secondly yeah this is a band substantiated to a large degree from studies in languages other than english the evidence to mourn east african languages mayan languages that show sister universally that parents not don't pay much attention to the forum they're really much more concerned with the children are untrue says telling the truth is what they're saying is accurate in relation to the context of activity which was not surprising i think if you think about it from or because parents would rarely be

able to say what the structure of language is anyway except on average in a way within their concern would not be teaching that to the chopper that were trying to be able to say something meaningful about an activity that child engaged too surprising degree that's even true for us if you've ever have the unfortunate experience of having one of your lectures transcribed and you find out all of the un grammatical sentences that you've come out with and your audience typically unless they're group of linguists and then the wives will not catch this survey was somehow are able to listen through these there is and if we take the side of english teacher point of view about what's correct we listened through through them quite a bit of ourselves listening for the content the harvard psychologist roger brown pointed out the irony in this in that parent's indeed correct children when they tell lies and don't correct your grammar but we end up knowing grammar but not linked to glee truthful so it's not clear whether all of

correction is this another day another question which is often raised i know with linguist with a psychologist is this whole relationship of baby talk and parental influence rarely does that seem to her children and all this battling baby talk that we talked to them no i don't think it does there certainly is a common belief in our society at least it they can be harmful to children the truth and that only of baby talk is continued to be used in addressing the trial when the trial was really too old for to be socially appropriate but it's very difficult to see anything about the structure baby talk are critics of a veto that would interfere with the child's ability to perceive language power to begin to put aspects of it together so that they can begin to do things like make phrases and clauses in services and how to the contrary there

are some features of baby talk that but that seemed to function very well have a very useful place in language acquisition is that the takeaway two point very quickly much baby talk and it's universal and much baby talk has high pitch has registered and we know that that's something that children can perceive and respond to infect from birth even beyond that it's a mammalian trait all mammals can respond to president abbas yeah so that baby talk has seems to have at least as a functional use a higher pitch to track a child's attention to focus attention focuses on some activity so that then these are the kinds of meaningful things we've been talking about gun control in a very short time ago about what kind of advice would you give parents with respect to language and language acquisition in their children what can a parent do to help a child that her acquire the language the chat room will be using the rest of its life it

the best advice might just be to talk with their child interact with him or end the don't worry about it because i think the child is at an organism that is so eminently well designed to learn his native language i agree with that khaled i'm on one soda which wants these bays the child in language and that's not quite right because i think in one does not want to speak human an adult ways to children one one wants to come down and give them things of interest to talk about is there being interested in what's being minted is i think important but also it is i think important to for parents to sometimes liana look out for some of the milestones because it's unfortunate that there are number of kids who are very hard of hearing who get quite a bit into up into school it before this is detected and so if if a child is five years old and does not begin to say say have fairly

complex sentences under his or her control why that's a time when they might well even before that were there some some milestones that one would want to look were but in general i agree that for an intact child that fear being relaxed about it is the best advice so language acquisition a very complex kind of process is a very natural process for children beginning very very early and the best thing the parent can do with a child has to simply made the atmosphere of conversation and language acquisition available in other words talk to the child set an atmosphere where language is a part of the environment and my great in that yes and to do it isn't actually is what possible government thank you very much within talking today about language acquisition process by which children learned to communicate and speak the zimbabwe votes for the next two hundred years have these

is a continuing series of weekly conversations about the american future the next two hundred years is produced by katie of them an association with the news and information service and distributed by communication service university of toxins about this is and he's there and i am a piece