So let’s talk about questions. When you want to ask somebody something, it’s
not always easy to find the right way to approach it.
And the right way doesn’t just depend on the topic – who you’re addressing also
matters. Kids are very different from adults, in more
than just size, and so you can’t look at them the same way.
So how do we bend our linguistics techniques to suit the way kids do things?
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
Kids may be really great at language learning, but compared to adults, it’s much harder
to get at what they know. We’ve talked about this before when it comes to
babies and their linguistic knowledge, and that does present some special problems.
But you’d figure, once kids get talking,
it’d be a piece of cake to work out what they can do. You just ply them with questions,
and then they would let loose with everything that they know.
But, no. Testing non-baby kids and testing adults is still really different.
Part of this is just that kids don’t have the same ability to think about what
they’re thinking that adults have. So you can’t just ask them whether a sentence is good or not,
or whether a combination of sounds is a possible word for their language.
Their brains can’t really handle that yet,
so you’ll probably just get blank stares. And maybe some crying?
So that gets rid of grammaticality judgments and rating systems as experimental techniques.
But even accounting for that inability to think about their own language use, some
linguistic tests are still not appropriate to use with kids. They generally just have lower attention
spans and memory capabilities than adults do. You might be able to sit a 25-year-old down
with a battery of boring tests and just expect them to plow through, but try that with a 5-year-old, and
they’ll just blow all of your papers around the room. Tests for kids have to be fun and engaging,
or you won’t get anywhere.
Challenges like these aren’t going to stop enterprising linguists, though, and we’ve
come up with a bunch of different approaches that can get at what exactly kids can do.
One easy way to keep kids engaged is to get them to play,
and what easier way to get them to play than just to have them start
moving things around? That’s the idea behind the Act-Out Task:
put out some toys for the kids to play with, and then have them show you exactly
how they understand their sentences by literally showing you.
So for example, let’s say that you want know how children understand passive constructions.
Maybe you already know what a passive is, but just for a quick reminder: in a normal, active
sentence, the subject comes before the object, so like “The monk rides the bison.”
But in the passive, you flip the object over to the beginning, adjust the verb, and if you
feel like it, you can stick the subject down by the end, so like: “The bison is ridden by the monk."
If you process that right, you should get out pretty much the same meaning. Now, since
active sentences are more common, and their word order is more frequent, we might
expect that they're easier for kids to pick up. But how could we show that?
Well, you could just try getting the kids to act out the sentences for you.
If they’ve got passives down, and they know they have to flip the order of who’s
doing what to whom, then they should be able to act everything out right.
So here, if you give kids a little toy monk and a toy bison, they should do the same
thing for both: the monk goes on the bison, and then flies away. Exciting!
But when you think about it, maybe that sentence isn’t really the best way to test whether kids
know how the passive works. Kids already know a good amount about the world,
beyond whatever their language capabilities are.
And they know that while a monk might be able to ride on something big like
a bison, a bison isn’t exactly likely to hop on the shoulders of a human monk,
no matter how powerful that monk might be. So even if they don’t really have a grasp on
the passive, they may still be able to work things out.
That’s why linguists also make use of reversible passives. Reversible passives are sentences
where both the subject and the object are totally capable of performing that verb.
So take for example, “The pilot was kissed by the detective."
Now, detectives can kiss pilots, and pilots can kiss detectives, and so
real world knowledge can’t help you if you don’t know how the passive really works.
For an irreversible passive, like our sentence with the monk and the bison, you could work these
things out on your own, but for a reversible passive, if you don’t have a grasp on the
grammar, you’ll probably have the pilot do the kissing. And you’d be wrong.
So what do kids do with these sentences? Well, in one study, linguists had 5- and 6-year-olds
use toys to act out active sentences, as well as reversible and irreversible passives.
Now, kids didn’t really have any trouble with the active sentences, even if they could get
a bit silly. But for the passive sentences, their acting
skills turned out to be significantly better when you had monks riding on bison, rather
than detectives kissing pilots. So reversible passives are definitely harder than irreversible
ones. But that one year is an important amount of
time. By 6, the kids were really starting to get the hang of the passive, and they did well with both kinds.
But trying to get kids to do things, whether it’s act something out or say a
sentence or whatever, has a real problem: performance factors. Maybe you’ve noticed
when you learn a new language that trying to express yourself is a lot harder than just understanding
what’s going on. Well, it’s even harder when you’re a little
kid! They don’t have a complete grasp on the language, and testing is stressful, and
they don’t have as many cognitive resources to draw on.
Maybe they mishear part of the instructions, or there are too many things to keep track
of, or the sentence structure just got too complicated. But there are a lot of reasons
why if you just look at what kids say and do, you can’t get a complete picture of what their
linguistic abilities are, no matter how many toys you give them to play with.
So instead of looking at their production, acquisition researchers have tried to get a look
at how they comprehend sentences. If we try to gauge their understanding, we won’t
have to worry about the pressure to produce things right. But there’s still one
big thing to think about when we're designing our experiments: adults are scary. And kids, when they
get uncomfortable, just want to say yes to all the scary researcher’s questions
so that they can get the thing over with and just go home. But if they just say yes to get out of disappointing
the linguist, then that’s not going to tell you much about what exactly kids can do.
So you give them cases where they have to say no.
That’s the idea behind the Truth Value Judgment Task. Here, the experimenter will perform
a little skit for the kids, using toys or puppets.
And then, you have someone else describe what happened in the skit, with the
sentence construction that you’re interested in. Often this’ll be another puppet, because
seriously, a cute little fire ferret puppet is way less scary than an adult. And then the
kid has to say whether they agree with the puppet, and why.
Let’s make this more concrete using an example, looking at how kids interpret
pronouns. Here’s a story you could use for this kind of task.
Three people, Korra, Lin, and Sue decide to have a contest to see who is the best at bending
metal. They ask their friend Asami to judge. All three do their metal bending, and Asami
starts with checking on Korra. After looking at Korra’s results, Asami says sadly,
she’s not the winner. Then Asami moves on to Lin.
Asami looks at it closely and says, hmmm. This is very nice, and you might be good enough
to win, but I need to see Sue's first. So Asami goes on to Sue’s metal.
She examines it, and says, okay, Sue, yours is a bit better than Lin’s, and so you win the
competition. But Lin gets angry and says that hers was definitely
better than Sue’s, and so she takes a second ribbon for herself.
Okay! That’s our story. And now, we want to know whether kids will
agree with our puppet when it says “I know what happened! She thinks that Lin is the
best metal bender.” Is this a good description? Take a second to think about it. Ready? So
let’s unpack this. The only way that this sentence could be true
is if “she” is Lin, since Lin is the one who called herself the best. But that’s
not actually a possible interpretation; the syntax doesn’t let you have “she” and
“Lin” be the same person.
So the sentence has to be false - she should be Asami, who was the judge here.
And Asami thought that Sue was the champion. If the kid's syntax is the same as the adult
syntax, then, they should reject this sentence, and say NO! She thought Sue
was the best metal-bender. But if it's possible for the kid to accept the sentence, then they
should - after all, then they get to say yes, and not disappoint any grown-ups.
Some of the early results about whether kids interpreted pronouns the same as adults were murky,
and so there were a lot of hypotheses that maybe they didn’t, maybe they just had to grow
into their grammar. But once linguists hit upon this task, that cleared right
up. When using Truth Value Judgment, kids don’t behave significantly differently from
adults. They know that "she" can’t be Lin there, and so they reject those sentences.
We’ll stick some links to relevant papers down in the description, if you want more
details. But this is a good example of needing the right task to tease out what kids really know.
And that’s just some of the challenges we find when testing children’s language.
There are a lot of other tests we’ve developed, and we’ll be talking about
one of them, elicited production, back on our website.
Kids do differ from adults in a lot of ways, and the way that they use language is affected
by factors that grown-ups just shrug off. But the core of their grammar, the way that they
use language, is the same as adults. Which we can see, if we just ask the right questions.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week.
If you judged my truth values properly, you learned that testing kids can be
easier than testing babies, but presents its own challenges; that we can access kids’
knowledge about sentence structures by getting them to act out what they hear;
and that examining comprehension can give us a clearer picture of child grammar than
just looking at production.
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
website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter,
and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe.
And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Heetce’noohobe3en!