Milestones in FLA: Modals

Yes, today Little Boy (2;11—22 days shy of his birthday) made a jump. Or at least the first time I heard him use it and made note of it. Today he made use of an English modal: could.

We were picking up Little Girl from school, and I asked him if he wanted to play at the playground. It was blustery and cold, so he said

I wish I could.

They grow up so fast. 

Semantics don't apply to me

A dialog at home:

Little Girl (to Little Boy): You're a child.
Little Boy: I'm not a child, I'm a <his name>.

I've also heard this which kid substituted for child. There are two interesting things here. One, Little Boy seems to have figured out that kid and child refer to the same set of people—and that set does not include him. I'm not sure if ego-centrism plays into this situation or if it is some odd generalization problem with the word. The other thing I noticed is that he is "a <his name>". I wonder why he's using an indefinite article there.

Building a crane to the vocabulary spurt

In the third chapter of Becoming a Word Learner, Linda Smith talks about how children build a crane (her term) to make themselves better word learners.

The notion is that when children learn their first words, they start to notice patterns about those words and create templates for future learning. Her main point is that children seem to fix on shape, rather than some other property, to signal an object's class. For example, chairs—prototypically anyway—have four legs, a seat and a back. This shape cues children in that a CHAIR is a chair. What's interesting is that when researchers cue very young children in on the shape bias by training them, their vocabularies grow faster.

So whatever the exact mechanism may be, children are learning how to learn words by—and this is truly shocking—learning words. Once they get to a certain point, the biases and patterns they've developed seem to take on a life of their own.

How might this relate to learning a second language? I'm not wholly sure, but allow me some speculation. One of the things that foreign language learning materials seem to focus on is inflectional morphology, which makes enough sense. You can't speak the language if you don't know how speakers expect things to be ordered. Latin wants case inflection on nouns. English wants word order. Spanish wants you to be clear about which object you are talking about via definite and indefinite articles. Russian couldn't care. And so on.

But one thing that foreign language materials, so far as I've seen anyway, don't worry too much about is derivational morphology. How do you get from civil to civility? And why can't you go from polite to politity? I'll be reading a paper—and thus blogging about it later—about this subject exactly.  I could be wrong, but I suspect that adult learners are given vocabulary lists that they then create a derivational morphology from. Or at least that's how it felt to me when I was learning Latin all those years ago. Civis became civitas. Aestus became aetstas. Could moralis become mortalitas? And the connection is made, though not without flaws. I think it was then that my grasp on Latin vocabulary started to really firm up from a list of words to memorize to things that behaved in similar way. In other words, I had made a derivational morphology crane for myself. 

Talking toys

Well, it's begun again. In the last week, I've been hearing some odd conversations around the house. My little guy has started talking on behalf of his toys. So I bring up all of that index and symbol stuff just in time for him to start having the words that come out of his mouth stand in for the words coming out of the toy's mouth. Ka-boom! So much for what I had written.

Tonight's conversation?

Little Guy (in the tub): I going potty!
Me (to myself): Oh, no you're not!
Little Guy: I going potty!
Me (getting up to see over the sink): *whew*
Little Guy (holding doll over the boat doing duty as a doll potty)

Icon, check. Index, check. Symbol, um.

So we're reading Becoming a Word Learner for class. And so far it's striking me as an extension of First Language Acquisition—everyone's got a different model.

The first chapter is "Word Learning: Icon, Index or Symbol?", which seems like a good place to start the discussion about learning words. After all, you need to show what it is that people are doing when they learn words. The way the authors, Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek, do that is by looking at attempts to teach non-humans human languages. (They say infrahuman, but I don't like the term. It smacks of chain of being, which I detest.) And to get to a human understanding of language, you need to be in possession of what they call symbol. Animals can, for the most part, only manage icon and index. But the part that bothers me is that I can't quite draw the distinction between index and symbol.

An icon of fire

Icon seems pretty straightforward. An icon is a representation of the thing itself. Here's an icon of fire.

See? It's not a fire, but it looks like fire. There seems to be some dispute as to just how much resemblance is necessary, but I'm going to ignore that.

An index of fire

The next remove is index. An index is either something that is correlated with or points to something. So for fire, smoke is an index. Other indexes of fire might be: heat, wood, camping, cooking, matches. So here's a picture of smoke, which is an index of fire.

One symbol for fire
(according to Wiktionary)

The problem comes in with symbol. At this page (a somewhat less in-depth discussion than in G and H-P), symbols are "easily removed from context" and "associated with large sets of other words". Ok, so far so good. I can talk about fire with none being present, as well as knowing that it as an association with other words like smoke, heat, wood, camping, cooking, and matches.

Here's the problem, which strikes me as a father of young children. We talk a lot about the here and now at home, which means that we are talking about things that are not removed from context—particularly with my son (2;5). My daughter has made the leap to things that aren't present, i.e. her upcoming birthday party. So we're kind of defeating the benefit of a symbol. In fact, we're treating words like indexes. We don't say MILK unless there is milk somewhere nearby: or we are trying to get the milk from the fridge into a cup or something very concrete. The other thing is that while we are indexing MILK to milk, we are also indexing it to such things as cups, lunch, cold, cereal, spoons, fridge and the like. So we're somewhat taking advantage of the association with other words, but they too are indexed in the here and now. 

Anyway. What I'm trying to get at is that I'm not seeing a clear line between index and symbol. Maybe at the ends of the index/symbol spectrum of goodness, it's clear. (Oooo, could it be a spectrum relationship?) Maybe as a child's ability to use language apart from the here and now develops, the child develops cognitive ability to make symbols out of indexes.

But there seems to be a lot of messy could-go-this-way or could-go-that-way and begging the question involved with indexes and symbols. If words are symbols, why are they so indexy early on? If words start their mental existence as indexes, then what transforms them into symbols? Do we even need to draw a distinction between index and symbol other than to say that a symbol is an index plus displacement? Or is this just another way that we're trying to separate man from beast without pointing at the actual neurological difference between what humans and, say, language-trained chimps are doing? I don't know. As usual here, more questions than answers. I absolutely promise interesting tools for learning new words in a second language before the end of summer. Cross my heart.

If you're curious, you can browse the book here. Why not? It's pretty interesting so far.

Spring semester 2013

I'm taking First Language Acquisition and Morphology. Excitement. Well, maybe not, but I've got small children so I'll have informants at hand. In fact, I administered the one and only Wug Test to Little Girl. Even though I explained what she was supposed to do, some items were really vexing. Others were "Daddy, why are you asking such obviously easy questions?" sorts of questions.

So anyway. Get ready for me to blather on about those two fields. I'm still somewhat stumped by the whole v-deletion thing in Latin, so maybe I'll do more with that. I've also got a student project I want to work up for the research symposium in April. Fun times.

Baby talk nonsense words

I checked out David Crystal's A Little Book of Language from the library the other day. In one of the early chapters he talks about how babies pick up the cadence of a language first (p. 10). He mentions the iambic stress pattern that English tends to fall into. ti-TUM-ti-TUM-ti-TUM.

Which made me think about the patterns of how I speak around the kids. I would say that I speak Latin with the music of English, which is to say that I follow Latin's stress patterns with English intonation. Questions rise at the end. Statements are usually flat, maybe falling off a bit at the end. And so on. But I hit the stress where it's supposed to go. LUdere VIS. TIbi LIcet. (Usually. Some accents get misplaced accidentally.) Otherwise I sound like a fairly typical American.

Well, maybe not when I get upset with the kids. It can sound pretty Italian, to my ears anyway. Just take my word for it.

Which brings me to the nonsense words I like to say to the kids. I remember saying these to Little Girl before she spoke too much. I'm saying them again to Little Boy. I don't know why I say these, but I do. They aren't quite as constrained in sense as gitchy-gitchy-goo—you can't say that when getting cereal, just when tickling. I can say my nonsense words whenever I like.

After reading that bit by Crystal, I realized that the words I use fit Latin's stress pattern on individual words. ti-TUM-ti or TUM-ti-ti. I really am partial to [haj'baba] and ['wibubu]. I know they sound ridiculous, but they're what I say. I didn't mean to do them that way, but I did.

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout?

That is what we got last night. We were out walking as a family and saw a neighbor and his dog. When one is out walking with a small child, dogs are of great interest. So of course we pointed the dog out. The following conversation broke out.

My wife: Look, a doggie.
Me: Recte, canis.

So far, pretty normal. After all, we are doing our part to revive a multi-lingual America. What happened next was a developmental milestone.

Wife: Doggie.
Me: Canis.
Wife: Doggie.
Me: Canis.
Wife: Doggie.
Me: Canis.

Then, LittleBoy turns around and gives each of us the most puzzled look. A look that we agreed said that he knew we were talking about the same thing with different words. He's not quite fifteen months. So much for linguistic innocence.

You down with 3PP?

Little Girl: Daddy, what are they doin'?
Me: Fodiunt.
Little Girl (to Little Boy): They're fodiunt our yard.

"They're fodiunt"? Something seems wrong about that. To me anyway. Maybe not to you since you don't speak Latin. I would've been ok with "they fodiunt our yard", but that's not what she said. I find that really puzzling. (Well, probably only because I don't know much about code switching.)

Here's why I thought "they're fodiunt" was badly formed, but "they fodiunt" would be ok.

fodiu-nt
dig-3PP

Yeah, we're down with 3PP—3rd person Plural Present. Yeah, you know me. Sorry. My point is that fodiunt is complete as is. I understand why Little Girl wanted to add a they to fodiunt: you need an explicit subject. They fits the bill. But she didn't stop there. She added 're to they.

Now, I'm aware that we really like our present progressive in English. In fact, it can be difficult to avoid it. I suspect that's what Little Girl was falling victim to. Before you jump and say that she doesn't understand Latin, you can be sure she knows how the present tense works. There may be some light confusion about some contrafactual conditions or tricky participles, but the present tense is well understood.

If I knew some Spanish speakers who readily code switched, I might be able to see how they say it and not be so curious. Which would be better?

They excavan our yard.
They're excavan our yard.

I probably ought to add this, since Spanish also has a present progressive.

They estan excavando our yard.

So, if you're a native Spanish-speaker who code switches with English, which do you prefer? Could you tell me why? 

First word: caught in the act

Videos or it didn't happen? Here's the video.

First word

Little Boy's first word on the road to language appears to be "kitty." Mom and Dad are great, but the cat hauls in first again. Truth be told, he's been saying "ma" and "da" in various permutations as part of his babble for some time now, but I don't think he's got it right enough to call it a word. His repetition of "ma" around my wife indicates that he's correlated the sound with her, but it's not a stable "mama." Sometimes "ma" or "mamama." So I'm not calling it. Same goes for me and "da."


But he's definitely saying "kitty." He says [Idi] or [Iti] in turn. When he hears us say "kitty" it really sounds like he tries to correct with [ɣIdi] or [kIdi]. Depending on what he's feeling like doing. Of course, he won't say it on command. Only when he feels like it. 


So mark it. 23 Dec: Kitty. First word for the second child (and first child as well).

Sibling Discourse

Before I forget, I want to write what the kids said to each other. Sadly, the camera wasn't handy.

Little Boy: Ga ga ga ga ga ga!
Little Girl: Gaga [the kids' name for my mother] is in heaven.

Even though Little Boy didn't mean to mean anything with his babble (I don't think), Little Girl interpreted it as such anyway. She interpreted, placed context on it and responded. Astonishing.