Language Acquisition

[Zaarin]

So I am in the process of reading Marianne Mithun's article on language acquisition and polysynthesis based on Mohawk. I was wondering if anyone knew of any similar articles dealing with language acquisition and the polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian languages (just for comparison). I was also wondering if there were any good articles dealing with the subject with simpler agglutinating languages like the Uralic languages (I'm sure there must be something on Finnish or Hungarian, but in English is the question...).

[Gulliver]

Are you talking about first or second language acquisition? They are very different things. Could you follow references in the article you have?

[Zaarin]

Are you talking about first or second language acquisition? They are very different things. Could you follow references in the article you have?

First language. She does cite a few sources on general language acquisition which I'm looking into; I was just hoping to find something concise and specific for comparison. This is mostly just curiosity, so if no one knows of any that's fine.

[clawgrip]

I don't know any resources, but I do have experience raising children to speak a simpler agglutinating language. I can tell you one or two things I've noticed, if you want.

[Plaas]

Armenian might be interesting for you too, as this is a language very often acquired in two language environments (Armenian diaspora), and it is surprisingly agglutinating for an IE-language. I haven't read articles about this myself yet, but a quick Google scan shows that there is some material available online.

[Zaarin]

I don't know any resources, but I do have experience raising children to speak a simpler agglutinating language. I can tell you one or two things I've noticed, if you want.

I'd appreciate that.

Armenian might be interesting for you too, as this is a language very often acquired in two language environments (Armenian diaspora), and it is surprisingly agglutinating for an IE-language. I haven't read articles about this myself yet, but a quick Google scan shows that there is some material available online.

You're right. I'll definitely look into sources on Armenian as well.

[clawgrip]

Both of my children first start speaking using fully-conjugated (Japanese) verbs (sometimes quite long) as single "words". My son, for instance, who is one and a half years old, frequently says "ochichatta" ("(unfortunately) (it) fell"), though he has no idea that this verb phrase is actually a string of three distinct, conjoined elements. However, he also sometimes says "ochita" ("(it) fell"). My daughter did similar things when she was younger. I guess this is probably similar to children acquiring any language, communicating in chunks before learning to break them down to their constituent elements.

One other interesting thing that my son says is related to negatives. Although Japanese does have a word roughly equivalent to "no", it is not as versatile or as common. The most common way of expressing negation of something someone else said or did is to respond with a verb conjugated into the negative. Because of this, there is no single strategy as simple as English "no" of denying something in the way a young child would want to. My son's solution is the word "kanai", which seems like it may be a corruption of either "ikanai" ("does not go") or "konai" ("does not come"). He uses this apparent dummy verb conjugated in the negative as an equivalent to English "no", especially when he does not want something that you are trying to give him. This is limited to negation of things specifically directed at him, because he has a separate word ("mame", from "dame") to express disapproval of other people's actions or intentions.

I don't recall my daughter ever incorrectly conjugating things though, which is frequent enough in English. This may simply be due to much higher regularity in Japanese, though.

There are some interesting things about raising children bilingually as well, though this is probably not what you are asking about. My daughter, when she was younger, actually merged "open it" with the Japanese equivalent "akete" into a unique phrase, "opete". Both my children learned to say "no no" before learning a Japanese equivalent, probably because, as I mentioned above, it's easier to acquire and use in English than in Japanese. My son says "opepe" to ask for something to drink, which appears to come from "water please" but run through a Japanese filter first and then a baby-speech filter next.

[Zaarin]

Both of my children first start speaking using fully-conjugated (Japanese) verbs (sometimes quite long) as single "words". My son, for instance, who is one and a half years old, frequently says "ochichatta" ("(unfortunately) (it) fell"), though he has no idea that this verb phrase is actually a string of three distinct, conjoined elements. However, he also sometimes says "ochita" ("(it) fell"). My daughter did similar things when she was younger. I guess this is probably similar to children acquiring any language, communicating in chunks before learning to break them down to their constituent elements.

One other interesting thing that my son says is related to negatives. Although Japanese does have a word roughly equivalent to "no", it is not as versatile or as common. The most common way of expressing negation of something someone else said or did is to respond with a verb conjugated into the negative. Because of this, there is no single strategy as simple as English "no" of denying something in the way a young child would want to. My son's solution is the word "kanai", which seems like it may be a corruption of either "ikanai" ("does not go") or "konai" ("does not come"). He uses this apparent dummy verb conjugated in the negative as an equivalent to English "no", especially when he does not want something that you are trying to give him. This is limited to negation of things specifically directed at him, because he has a separate word ("mame", from "dame") to express disapproval of other people's actions or intentions.

I don't recall my daughter ever incorrectly conjugating things though, which is frequent enough in English. This may simply be due to much higher regularity in Japanese, though.

There are some interesting things about raising children bilingually as well, though this is probably not what you are asking about. My daughter, when she was younger, actually merged "open it" with the Japanese equivalent "akete" into a unique phrase, "opete". Both my children learned to say "no no" before learning a Japanese equivalent, probably because, as I mentioned above, it's easier to acquire and use in English than in Japanese. My son says "opepe" to ask for something to drink, which appears to come from "water please" but run through a Japanese filter first and then a baby-speech filter next.

Interesting. So it seems that agglutinating languages share that feature with polysynthetic languages that children first learn words as non-grammatical chunks before learning to string together morphemes properly.

[zompist]

There's a bit about Turkish in Michael Tomasello's Constructing a Language. E.g. agent-patient relations are mastered far earlier for Turkish-speaking than English-speaking children. As he puts it, Turkish case affixes are "child-friendly". They're stressed, fixed, obligatory, and generalizable.

His major source here is Dan Slobin, so you should probably look up that name for more.

A cute example of learning words as unanalyzed chunks, from English: a child we knew used to ask for "a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without jelly in it". That is, a peanut butter sandwich.

[Zaarin]

There's a bit about Turkish in Michael Tomasello's Constructing a Language. E.g. agent-patient relations are mastered far earlier for Turkish-speaking than English-speaking children. As he puts it, Turkish case affixes are "child-friendly". They're stressed, fixed, obligatory, and generalizable.

His major source here is Dan Slobin, so you should probably look up that name for more.

A cute example of learning words as unanalyzed chunks, from English: a child we knew used to ask for "a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without jelly in it". That is, a peanut butter sandwich.

Both of those look like good sources, thanks.

[Lambuzhao]

Wow. Bilingual Acquisition. Awesome stuff!

Since we may be trading a few "proud-parent" stories, I have one (among many). My son grew up bilingual Spanish-English.
He was an avid scribbler from an early age, and would sit for easily a half an hour frenetically scrawling and slowly, deliberately sketching thingamabobs. But, when he asked for drawing materials, he used the same word for the medium upon which to draw, as well as the instrument with which to write. His all-purpose word was bapil [bɒ.'pɪ:l]. The structure is obviously related to Spanish 'papel'. But IMO the final /i/ pron. [ɪ] must've come from a mash-up of the final vowel in English 'pencil' + Spanish 'lapiz'. The accentuation could have only come from Spanish 'papel'.

Kids are amazing language-innovators and inventors!

[marconatrix]

Maybe this deserves a new topic, acquisition in bilinguals?

I've always understood, from both academic and hearsay sources, that when kids are exposed to two languages (or more?) from an early age, although they may mix them up a bit a first, they always reach a point where they make a clear distinction, and end up with native competence in both languages. In particular, the idea that speaking a separate home language can impair a child's ability to learn the local majority language, while often popular in the past, is now considered to be wrong. Quite the opposite is often said to be the case, that bilinguals are often better at both their languages, and supposedly in their more general cognitive abilities.

So, what do we make of a recent Irish study which found that native Irish speaking kids had their ability to speak Irish damaged by early exposure to English. (Admittedly based on only a sample of 50).

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/educatio ... -1.2025774

NB. I've still to track down the original report, so maybe the press are exaggerating??

EDIT: Here's the report if anyone's interested. It's mostly in Irish which I only half-understand, but the intro and conclusions are given in English also.

http://www.cogg.ie/wp-content/uploads/i ... angach.pdf

[hwhatting]

Well, I think the article gives the response - what I see here is not so much that learning English in itself lowers competency in Irish, but that learning a prestige language that is the main means of communication in the community undermines the incentive for learning the second language.
I think it's a well-known fact that children educated bilingually undergo periods where they try to communicate as little as possible in a second language that is only spoken by one (or even both) of the parents, but not at the same time in their wider environment (at pre-school or school, among their peers, during other daily interactions). I know this from my daughter, whom we raised bilingually German and Russian. When she was about eight, living in Germany, she would not speak Russian - she understood everything my wife said, but responded in German. She would only speak Russian when we were on holidays in Kazakhstan, after about a day or two of acclimatisation. The age bracket of the children in the study is about the same my daughter was in when she had that period of "boycotting" the non-environment language.

[alynnidalar]

Another anecdote, but I agree it seems pretty common--I have an aunt and uncle and some cousins who now live in the US, and while their two older children speak Spanish fluently (the family previously lived in Mexico, so they grew up there), the youngest daughter refuses to speak Spanish to her father or in church, even though she understands him just fine. She only will respond in English, presumably because she goes to an English school and has lived most of her life in the US. Young kids can be very adamant about not wanting to be "different"; she recognizes that most kids she knows don't speak Spanish, so she doesn't want to either.

She's... I don't know, seven or eight now? I know they go to a Spanish-speaking church, but I'm not sure if she speaks in Spanish there.

[clawgrip]

My daughter is similar in that she rarely speaks English and mostly speaks Japanese. This isn't really a conformity thing though, because she does occasionally say some things. It's just a lack of incentive to speak, as someone mentioned, because Japanese is easier since that is what pretty much everyone around her other than me speaks. I want her to speak more, but because of my job, I only see her about an hour a day. She's too shy to try speaking English to my parents on Skype. It's tricky!

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

You got parents; now, let's get the kid speaking.

I was raised in a French speaking home, in an English speaking community. (In Canada, where both languages are official, but French less prestigious and in a place where French was not the common local language.)

It would seem that until we moved to a French speaking community again, I would not speak at all in French; only English. My mother, however, being very patient, would only answer to a request if we requested it in French, meaning that, when speaking to our parents (my father was mostly absent, but when home, would do the same), we'd only get something out of her if we used our French, which was, according to my mother, highly anglicized in pronunciation.

According to my mother again, my (older) sister's first word was in English, but she straight ahead was able to distinguish both French and English and use them separately. My case was different; according to my parents, I had a case of cryptophasia, with only my (older) sister understanding and therefore somewhat translating. I started to speak in French and English separately only when I started to go to kindergarten (at three). My cryptophasia was so severe that at one point, I was thought to have aphasia, and consequently worried my parents.

To answer to marconatrix's hearsay, this may not always be the case. I have an extended family that has four true bilinguals, but our proficiency 0varies. Our language proficiency correlates a lot with our environments. My two cousins, born and mostly raised in an English environment are, despite going to French schools for all of their life, definitely more proficient in English than French. I only think of myself as half-bilingual in English, because I definitely feel a lot more comfortable speaking in French than English. Then again, in my case, from six years old, I have been living in a mostly French-speaking environment, which has impacted my acquisition of English. (Interestingly, I consider the ZBB one of the reasons why I can still use my English at a not-so-bad level; it has been one of the few English-writing environments in which I have been active.) My sister's case was even worse; she wasn't able to prove her "native level" when passing an English test back in high school.

Yet, agreeing with marconatrix's post, there is a distinct quality between my English and my Japanese (which I am highly proficient in). My sister was able to regain good proficiency just by going back to the English part of Canada; she had no need for English classes, which are offered to French military personnel living in English environments in Canada. Were I to do the same, I am pretty sure I'd be back on track in a couple of months, fully back after a couple of years. Indeed, due to the state of French speaking regions around the world, including what is supposed to be my own, I am definitely considering the possibility myself. (If anything, my experience in Japan gave me tons of reasons not to stay in Japan and definitely move into an English speaking area.) My sister and I might have lost much of our English out of the Anglosphere, but regaining it is not an issue. We definitely have something close to a native ear. My Japanese, on the other hand, does not fare that well, despite my three years here.

[clawgrip]

I went to a French immersion elementary school, so from ages 5-12, the primary language of my education was French (actually in grade 6 it was half-English half-French). I was quite proficient by the time I was 12 years old, though I rarely used French outside the classroom, even while still at school. I remember though, that when I was taking French classes in high school, I actually purposely Anglicized my pronunciation somewhat to fit in and sound more like the other students. In the end I did surprisingly poorly in the French classes, considering my previous experience with the language. Now, I am able to communicate on a basic level and make a lot of mistakes and especially forget a lot of words I want, but I feel like if I were to move to a French-speaking environment, I would be able to improve very quickly. At the moment though, it could be a lot better.

[marconatrix]

Possibly of interest, although she is rather pushing her POV, so her examples may be selective?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSs1uCnLbaQ