So let’s talk about saying no. It’s a pretty simple concept; in fact, it’s
one of the first words that we usually learn as kids. And so you might figure that kids use the
power of “no” to fix their mistakes and learn how language really works.
But it turns out, kids accentuate the positive when it comes to honing their linguistic skills.
There’s no room for negative thinking. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
From the moment they pop into the world, and even before then, kids get exposed to
language. They hear full sound systems, they have complete, beautiful sentences lobbed
at them, and there are just words everywhere. And all of this data, for whatever language
that they’re learning, is positive evidence of how that language works.
For example, when they hear an English word like “apples,” it’s telling them lots
of things – like, you can have syllables that don’t start with consonants, but you can also have
ones that end with them.
Or look at a sentence: a question like “Which airplane did Emily fly?” tells you that
to make a question in English, you need to move the question word to the beginning of the sentence,
as well as the tense marker, did. Every piece of data that a kid hears is just one
more little push towards working out all the different parameters of their future linguistic playground.
So all of that positive proof, all the data that kids gather from around them, forms the backbone
of their linguistic knowledge. They hear something, they know that it works
in their language, and they use this information to form their hypotheses about how
everything comes together. But there’s another obvious kind of information that kids could
be using to solve linguistic mysteries, and that’s being told they’re doing things wrong.
Getting corrected, and being given the right response, seems like an easy path to greater
linguistic glory. After all, adult speakers of your language are telling you to do this
thing! Not that other terrible faulty thing! What could possibly go wrong?
Well… turns out, a whoooole lot. First, we’re actually kind of bad at telling kids
when they’ve gotten things wrong. Think about this actual attested exchange between a parent and child:
“Me want more!” “You want more? More what?”
“Want more milk!” “You want more milk?”
“More milk!” “Sure, I’ll get that for you.”
So we can agree this is a successful communication – the kid gets their point
across, and can triumphantly drink some milk. But is this a successful language lesson?
The parent may be providing good examples of English, but there’s no direct correction
of anything that the child is saying. So there’s no way for the kid to know that they were
wrong. And yet, if the parent did stop to correct them like this, we probably wouldn’t
be like, wow, good child-rearing skills, dude:
“Me want more!” “That’s not grammatical English.”
“Want more milk!” “Still not grammatical English.”
“More milk!” “Also not grammatical English.”
“WAAAAH!” “Try “I want more milk, please.”
So we prize good, accurate communication over correcting children’s linguistic mistakes straight-up.
We’ll often accept grammatical errors, as long as the sentences they’re in are true.
This is the point of a classic study by Brown and Hanlon.
So take a look at this exchange. The child says, “Mama isn’t a boy, he’s a girl!”
Now, this is clearly wrong – the pronoun "he" doesn’t match girl. It should be "she",
instead. But there’s no correction: the mother just responds, “That’s right.”
The information was correct, and that’s what mattered.
And we see the opposite happening in this study, as well, where the sentence was grammatically
correct, but the parent rejected it. Take a sentence where a child looking at a lighthouse says,
“That’s the animal farmhouse.” Now, that’s a grammatical sentence, but it isn't
a very good description of a lighthouse. And sure enough, the mother says, “No, that’s
a lighthouse.” And there’s no congratulations for getting out a grammatical sentence. There’s
just a sweeping away of the incorrect meaning.
These aren’t isolated examples, either. Brown and Hanlon found that parents were able
to understand roughly the same number of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences produced
by children in the study, roughly 45% of each type.
And when the parent explicitly said that something was good or bad, it had nothing
to do with whether the grammar was good or not. It was due to either the meaning
or the pronunciation not being up to standards.
To quote the paper, the study found “not even a shred of evidence that approval and
disapproval are contingent on syntactic correctness”. And when that kind of categorical language is showing
up in academic papers, you know that the researchers are really, really sure. And this result has
been proven a whole bunch of times since then, in a lot of different research papers. But if you think
back to our first exchange, about the milk, you might notice something.
Whenever the kid is saying something that’s a syntactic mistake, the parent is correcting
them with a good, grammatical sentence. And it turns out, this kind of repetition
is more common with grammatically incorrect sentences than with good ones.
So maybe recasting the sentences into a correct form is the way to get the point across about
grammatical wrongness. Except this turns out not really to work either. Just because it’s
more common for ungrammatical sentences doesn’t mean that it happens all of the time.
In fact, it doesn’t happen anywhere near all of the time. It doesn’t even happen regularly!
73% of child utterances that are constructed wrong one way or another don’t get corrected.
And almost 14% of sentences that are totally beautiful get repeated, too.
So these kinds of corrections are just noisy feedback - if kids really relied on adult speakers
to show them the route to linguistic mastery this way, they’d just end up making a different
set of mistakes than the ones they started out with. They wouldn’t work out the language. So
this isn’t enough.
But here’s the thing - even when adults do reach out to kids and tell them “no, you’re
doing it wrong, do it like this”, kids often don’t listen. Take a look at my favourite
exchange in all of linguistics, first reported in 1966. Here, a mom is trying to get her
kid to say this unfortunate sentence correctly:
"Nobody don’t like me." "No, say 'Nobody likes me.'”
"Nobody don’t like me."
And this happens eight times! Until finally, it ends with...
"Now listen carefully, say 'Nobody likes me.'”
"Oh! Nobody don’t likes me."
So this mom has decided to really carefully try to get her kid to say this English
sentence correctly, with only one negation and with a third-person singular -s. But the child totally
resists this correction for a long time, and even when they do it, they still don't get it to
come out like it should. Why is that? What’s making this kid so stubborn? The
problem is that when a child is making these mistakes, they don’t see them as mistakes.
To a child, this is the their best guess of how English works right now.
They’re outputted from the kid’s grammar, which is built from all the English
sentences they’ve heard over the time they’ve been alive.
The grammar in their head is a work in progress, as far as adult English goes, but it’s internally
consistent for them at the time! And an adult giving them an extra example
or two isn’t enough for them to override the conclusions that they’ve come to so far.
They know how their language works, thank you very much. And they don’t take this
kind of feedback well. They’re not rebelling; they’re just sticking to their guns.
So that’s the deal with direct negative evidence. However you look at it, corrections
of whatever type are too irregular to be helpful, and even when it happens, kids just ignore it.
This kind of negative evidence is a total bust for helping kids learn language.But then,
how do kids work it out? Well, getting more positive data about how the language works
is a big strategy. The more data that you have for your language, the
more examples you have to compare your rules to, and the more that you can refine your hypotheses,
until your system works pretty much the same as the rest of the people around you.
But the bottom line is, telling kids how to do language, much like telling kids how
to do anything they’re set on doing their own way, isn’t really likely to be successful.
We here at the Ling Space say, just say no to negative evidence.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week.
If you were accepting our positive evidence, you learned that kids mostly use word and
sentence input to decide how their language works;
that we don’t really provide negative evidence consistently, and when we do, it’s not usually
about the grammar, but whether or not the sentence is true and accurate;
that repeating a sentence without the mistake in it in the hopes of giving correction isn’t
done strictly enough to be helpful; and that even when we give corrections, kids
ignore them in favour of what they think the language does at the time.
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. Dang e ngo!