So let’s talk about guessing. No one likes working from a state of ignorance, but when
we’re just beginning to learn a language as babies, we don't have any choice but to
start out that way. The thing is, on the road to linguistic proficiency, we're not just
aimlessly hitchhiking around. Turns out, we're a lot more cautious than we first look. I’m
Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
When we're born, we come into the world with an array of knowledge about how language can
work, a collection of principles and parameters that we call Universal Grammar. But we're
not ready to swing into action right away, with little infant thoughts expressed immediately.
Some of this is really obvious: babies may be able to differentiate between any pair
of sounds in any of the world's languages, but they're not able to pronounce all of them,
let alone bust out with full, articulate sentences. A six-month-old isn't ready to get all dressed
up and make demands of anyone, except through some full-on crying. They're not smooth talkers.
But as kids get older and start working out the language game, they pick things up faster
than a speeding truck. But even then, though, the ride isn't totally calm. There's a lot
of structure that underlies our speech, our phonology and our syntax, and even with the
deluge of data that an average kid will get, it still takes time. A lot of getting our
sound system nailed down is just physical - we need to put in the rehearsal time to
work out how to make our vocal tract perform its super precisely timed dance. And kids
will often know when they're saying things wrong, like only being able to say [sɪp]
instead of [ʃɪp], or correcting their parents when they repeat [fɪs] instead of [fɪʃ].
They can really know where their problems are in getting the right mouth performance.
But what about when they go bigger and start building sentences? When we talked before
about how kids often ignore corrections when they make mistakes, we argued that this is
largely due to kids having solid ideas in their own minds about how the language they're
learning works. They can't easily be pushed away from their beliefs, so telling them they're
wrong doesn't help – your words just get treated as one more piece of data for the pile.
But here's the thing: if that's true, then it's actually surprising how few errors kids
make. For the first few years of their lives, they're in linguistic flux, making ever-more
educated guesses about what their languages can do. And given what we've said already,
we'd probably expect them to be spouting all kinds of errors. But that's not what we find -
it's just that the language errors kids make jump out at us, like the sign for your
favourite diner. We notice the neon glow of their mistakes because it stands out from the
twilight landscape of all the sentences they say correctly. And if we dig into catalogues
of child speech, we can see that these mistakes actually only happen in only a tiny fraction of
cases where we might predict them.
What's even more interesting is the mistakes almost always go the same way: kids will leave
things out way more often than they’ll put things in wrong. What that means is that when
we look at what kids are saying, the vast majority of the time, we get one of two outcomes:
either they leave out the difficult syntactic markers, or they put them in and just nail
them. The times where they insert things incorrectly are just really rare.
That's because kids are grammatically conservative. They sift through the data that's coming their
way, and at any given moment they have subconscious hypotheses about how that data comes together
to make their language. So if you force them into saying something, they might get it wrong
if their hypothesis is wrong – that's why we can find mistakes in experimental data.
But kids are a lot more sophisticated than you might think when it comes to communication.
Think about what you do as an adult when you're learning a new language. When you don't know
something well enough, you avoid it or slip in a different word. You dodge around
constructions you don't have a full grasp on like you’re avoiding potholes in the
road. Kids may look like they can't handle that, but they do the same thing. They'll
only use constructions that they're sure exist in their target language. But even that's
not enough – deep down, they need to have a grasp of why they're using it and what the
structure is underneath the surface words being put out. Only then will kids feel comfortable
spontaneously using a construction for themselves.
Let's take a look at some examples. English has so-called verb-particle constructions,
where a verb combines with a preposition to create a new meaning, like in “Gary turned
on his stereo”. And we have some leeway about where that particle “on” should
go – we can also put it down at the end, like in “Gary turned his stereo on.” But
this variation goes away when we change “his stereo” to a pronoun. We can still say “Gary
turned it on”, but we can't say “Gary turned on it”. And that should be a tempting
mistake for an English-learning child to make, right? All that happened was that the full
noun phrase became a pronoun.
But in practice, those mistakes don't appear in the daylight. A case study was carried
out in 2004, looking at all the sentences produced by one girl, Sarah, over the course
of 7 months when she was 2 years old. The researcher found 102 verb-particle constructions,
and yes, she made 32 mistakes. But 29 of them were omission errors, and only one of them had her
using the construction straight-up wrong. By the end of the study, she was using it
in an adult-like way, without really having made overt errors where she used the parts
wrong. She was behaving conservatively.
Or, let's look at a case from Spanish, for when you use “a” to mark your object.
When the object is inanimate, “a” doesn't show up: in a sentence like “Busca un batido,”
or “she's looking for a milkshake,” you can't slot that “a” between the verb “busca”
and the article “un”. But when the object is animate, you can use it, as in “Busca
a una bruja”, or “she's looking for a witch.” But here's the thing: that's only
true if our subject here wants to meet a specific witch. If any old witch will do, then you
get “Busca una bruja” - without an “a”. So that pattern makes it look like “a”
marks for specificity. And yet, what happens when we have “She isn't looking for anyone”?
That turns up as “No busca a nadie”. We need the “a” marker, even though “nobody”
can't be a specific individual.
The deployment of this object marker “a” is pretty subtle, and adult L2 learners of
Spanish often make mistakes with how exactly to use it. But not 2-year-old Spanish kids!
A 2008 study looked at spontaneous speech samples from Spanish children. They found
that kids don't use the object marker when they shouldn't, and when they do use
it, it's appropriate. They don't go through a stage where they're getting it wrong, because
they're conservative – which means they don't start using it at all until they know they're right.
And these are just a couple of examples of this pattern – there's been a lot of research
about this phenomenon, way more than we could talk about in just one episode. Linguists
have looked at children's acquisition of number and tense marking in richly inflected languages
like Georgian, Polish, and Turkish, or where and how to use words like "any" in English,
or when to use overt subject pronouns in Spanish. And the pattern is the same: kids pretty much
either make mistakes by leaving things out, or they get things correct when they say them.
They just don't go around putting their words together wrong and then saying them out loud.
But what's maybe the coolest thing about this is how deep it goes. There are some properties
in language that pattern together underlyingly, but on the surface, they don't obviously line
up. Let's take a look at the Compounding Parameter, which covers a few different syntactic setups.
One of them is that verb-particle construction we looked at before, like “Rose turned her
car off.” Some languages let you split the particle off like that, and others don't – the
equivalent sentence in Spanish is just terribly bad.
And on the face of it, your language being able to split off particles shouldn't have
anything to do with something like whether it can just cram together any nouns you feel
like into a giant monster compound. Like, in English, I can string up a stretch of four
words like “road ghost danger zone”, and even though you've never heard it and it gets
zero hits on Google, you still can easily work out what it means. But in Spanish, you
can't just compound stuff up like that. The equivalent Spanish set of four words is a
terrible linguistic slag pile. English lets you make up compound nouns out of whatever you
want; Spanish has some set compounds, and you can't just make up new ones.
It turns out that when you look across languages, you find a pattern: if you can split up the
verb-particle construction, then you have the ability to compound up any nouns you want, too.
Dutch, Estonian, Thai, etc., they let you do both. And Arabic, Javanese, Serbo-Croatian and
more allow neither. So naturally, you have to learn what group your language falls in.
For English kids, around the same time as we see them starting to use one construction,
we also see them starting to use the other, as reported in a 2007 study – the correlation
is about as strong as it could possibly be, and they show the expected pattern right off the bat.
But here's the kicker: that pattern only goes one way. You can have the big, novel compounds
without having sentences like “Emma set the hamburger out”, but not vice-versa.
We can find languages, like Japanese or American Sign Language, that let you build up compounds,
but don't let you split off particles. But big compounds like that are fairly rare, and
so it takes Japanese kids a while to work it out. They don't start using them spontaneously
until they're 3-4 years old.
But English-learning kids? They have it easy on this one. Verb-particle constructions are
all over the place, and learning them means they get compounds for free - they know they
have to be okay. And that means they can start using compounds earlier: they start doing
these between 2-2.5 years of age, which is way younger than the Japanese kids. And we
don't see them using them incorrectly more just because they start younger. They nail
both from the start, in grand conservative fashion.
Grammatical conservatism in kids is actually great for linguists – it means that spontaneous
speech is a reliable sign of what can be allowed in a kid's grammar. It can't show you all
of their hypotheses about how their language works at the time, but it does show you what
they're sure of. And that spares us a lot of guessing.
So we've reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If we weren’t at cross purposes,
you learned that kids' linguistic mistakes are way more about leaving things out than
putting the wrong things in; that spontaneous speech gives us different insights into child
grammar than experimental data does; and that deep links between different properties
of language allow kids to be conservative and still work things out early.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Bayerteh!