As we’ve been learning about syntax, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about language acquisition--more of what is touched on in Chapter 8 of our books. I was never consistently around a young child as they learned their first language, so I’m rather unfamiliar with the stages of speaking. I was particularly curious how this pertained to syntax--when are words monosyllabic babble, and when do they become coherent sentences?
After doing some research (I’ve linked the website at the bottom of the post, if you’re curious to see more), I discovered that children use primarily one word phrases (“Da,” “food,” etc.) until they are about a year and a half old. Then, until they’re two or so, the single words become two-word phrases. It’s at this point, at age two, that syntactic structure really comes into play.
One thing I found particularly interesting was that in this stage of language acquisition, children tend to do quite a bit of sentence abbreviation. One of the examples this source offered included changing “Where does Daddy go?” to “Daddy go?” Similarly, “I can see a cow,” became “See cow.” These sentences are not technically correct--perhaps as a command, “Daddy, go” would pass, but as a question, as it is now, the sentence needs more. “Cow” needs a determiner, “the” or “a”. “See” needs “I” before it. Yet, the parents of these children had no trouble deciphering what their kids were trying to say. Like in the debate between descriptive and prescriptive grammar we had earlier in the quarter, there is meaning, if not flawless grammar, behind these children’s sentences. The kids are at a stage where they have developed the ability to convey a message, despite their flawed syntax.
After learning this information about first language acquisition, I started wondering about the differences that appeared in second language acquisition. Is there a distinct, different order that languages are learned in a classroom setting? Thinking back to my own days of learning Spanish in middle school and high school, it occurred to me that I could draw a conjugation chart for Spanish much more easily than my native English. I could recite “voy-vas-va-vamos-vais-van” without a second thought if I was told to conjugate “ir” in the present tense, but if someone instructed me to conjugate the English “to go,” it would probably take me a few moments longer--not because I don’t know the difference between “go” and “goes,” but because I’ve never had the need to reel off conjugations and tenses in English. Despite the best efforts of my teachers, however, I wasn’t able to use these conjugated Spanish words in actual conversation until I’d had much more practice. I imagine it worked the other way around when I was learning English--I would say one of the verb tenses because it simply sounded right, because it was what I had heard when listening to adults, without thinking, “Ah, precisely. The first-person present-tense.” I’m curious to hear from any of you who grew up bilingually. If you learned two languages with different syntactic structures from a young age, did you ever invert the orders of your sentences?
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2011/ling001/acquisition.html
I agree that it is fascinating how differently we learn language naturally vs. in the classroom. I, too, grew up with just English and learned Spanish in the classroom later in life. However, if I were to speculate what it were like to learn additional languages as a baby, I would assume the process is no different. However, I do wonder if languages with more complicated grammars would result in babies abbreviating their sentences in a different way. In other words - does a baby learning English abbreviate “I can see a cow” to “see cow” because the baby is somehow aware that the two most important words in the sentence are the operator “see” and the function “cow”? If in some other strange language the words “can” and “a” were somehow vastly more important, would the baby adjust his/her abbreviation accordingly?
ReplyDeleteI have always found language acquisition to be a fascinating topic, and the example you give shows an important distinction between syntax, the structure of sentences, and semantics, the understanding of their meanings. The two-year-old’s utterance “see cow” is syntactically unsound: it lacks any sort of subject or determiner and therefore lacks a verb phrase, thus having neither requirement for an English sentence. However, listeners can easily figure out that “see cow” means “I see a cow” in spite of its syntactical deficiencies, due to their understandings of the words see and cow as well as their understanding of the context. This example suggests that the understanding of a sentence or phrase is based on more than just the sum of the meanings of the words, and that in natural language acquisition people generally learn the semantics of a language before its syntax. I think this is the difference between natural and classroom language learning: in natural acquisition syntax is inferred after learning the meanings of individual words, but in classroom learning syntax is explicitly taught before the meanings of most words are acquired.
ReplyDeleteThanks for an awesome post, Laura! I grew up semi-bilingual (does learning English at the age of 9 count?) and Korean and English are syntactically very different. I learned English in an ELD classroom in 3rd grade (some may know ELD as ESL), and looking back on it now, I think the class was taught very... first-language learning style. To be more precise, we didn’t learn the complexities of English grammar and syntax, but rather, we learned how to speak, how to interact, and how to phrase basic sentences meaningfully. When we got something wrong, we were told to say it differently, kind of like when toddlers learn a language for the first time!
ReplyDeleteI think that’s why, to this day, I don’t really know English grammar and syntax rules very well. (And I don’t really know Korean grammar rules either.) Maybe that’s because I’ve never sat down and really tried to formalize the rules— I think it also has something to do with the fact that I never had to really think about rules and complexities before speaking or writing. I still get confused between what the subject and object of a sentence are; if you ask me to conjugate verbs, I wouldn’t know what to do; I’m also not familiar with terms such as articles, determiners, etc. Now that I think about it, it’s quite fascinating how little I know about the complexities of English and Korean grammar/syntax!
Language acquisition is a very interesting phenomenon. When learning about language acquisition in Psych 1, we generalized the process in infants and toddlers. At one year, a child is in the “babbling” stage when they say what appear to be random phonetic sounds. Perhaps they might be trying to communicate ideas but just haven’t figured out how to put those sounds together to make intelligible words. At 1.5 years-old, children use single-word phrases, and by the age of 2, produce what is known as telegraphic speech, similar to the examples you gave above with “Daddy go?” and “See cow.” At age 4, children can use complete and grammatically correct sentences; however, they make over-generalization errors such as saying “When I comed home from school,” instead of “When I came home from school.” This illustrates that children can learn to recognize and generalize syntactic and grammatical patterns in language.
ReplyDeleteAs for learning a second language, I didn’t grow up bilingual but like you took Spanish in middle and high school. I too am fascinated by how automatically I know about Spanish syntax and grammar and how much thought I have to give to explaining English grammar.
Austyn I definitely had the same experience! English is my first language. I then learned Spanish through formal Spanish class. And then I picked up Amharic just through hearing it around me. I definitely think a speaker's understanding of syntax has lot to do with how they learned a language. Spanish is the only language I've learned formally and thus syntax was stressed. English and Amharic however, were languages I acquired through my surroundings. Even though I hear English and Amharic ten times as much as I do Spanish, my understanding of the syntax of both was never as strong.
DeleteI think the role syntax plays in language acquisition is really interesting As the comment above pointed out, one commonality in the basic sentence examples you gave is that the most important words for meaning are included in the sentence. For example, in the sentence "I can see a cow", "see" and "cow" are the two most important words and are the two words preserved in the basic sentence. Further, they are used in the basic child sentence in the same order in which they would appear in the more complex "grammatically correct sentence". Thus, these two word phrases demonstrate a certain level of syntactic and linguistic competence as well. I think second language acquisition is different because you are normally at an age when you think more consciously about grammer and about how a sentence sounds in translation. Thus you are less likely to leave out the word "the" or the subject "I" because in your mental translation of the sentence that would be wrong.
ReplyDeleteNot only does syntax play a huge role in language acquisition, but also the relationship between morphology and syntax. There is a very interesting talk by our very own Michael Frank, in the Psychology Department, where he illustrates how children can intuitively pluralize and verbalize and change the tense of made-up words. What's really interesting to me is that there is a huge cognitive component that just analyzes the structure of a word, or in the case of syntax, a sentence. And only after being able to parse different morphemes can the brain start to analyze the interplay between word roles in a sentence. In a very Chomsky-like fashion, it seems to bring up the semantic-less side of language, in which the structure can stand on its own without any meaning at all! Of course, the interesting thing with language acquisition, is that we not only learn how to construct sentences properly, but also to discern whether the content is meaningful or not.
ReplyDeleteGreat post. I think that second language acquisition is probably separable from first language acquisition, though. As you point out, the learning of the second language is frequently framed in terms of the first language, and for this reason is different from the acquisition of a baby that has to begin from scratch. I might argue that baby uttering “Daddy, go” has an internal understanding of the necessary syntactic structure in order to communicate, but lacks the higher order functioning (and lack of input) in order to produce consistent results. Syntax does more than just help us organize words; it also helps us organize our thoughts. As executive control increases over time, babies become better at producing reliable syntactic structures as language.
ReplyDeleteI remember that all the classes I took to learn English placed great stress on syntax, and that we could only talk to the teacher in "complete sentences". This focus makes learning a second language more formulaic than exploratory, it seems, with specific guidelines on how one should convey a message instead of the freedom to construct it through observation of one's linguistic world. It's probably because of this way in which we construct our second languages that we can easily pinpoint when and where we use certain conjugations or articles, whereas natural languages just "sound right" because they are models that fit what we have generally observed in the world around us. These two different methods of learning a language make me wonder how it came to be that we as a society don't really pressure children to speak with correct syntax from the get-go as classrooms tend to do.
ReplyDeleteBuilding off of the end of Elana’s comment:
ReplyDeleteWhen I was learning Spanish in high school, my teacher had to repeatedly remind us that pronouns preceding verbs are unnecessary. In Spanish, verb suffixes and context are often sufficient to indicate the subject because conjugation changes depending on the subject. Spanish sentences must have a subject, but that subject can be encoded into the verb. However, when I translated a sentence from English to Spanish, I had the habit of attaching a subject pronoun, even when it was unnecessary. This is likely because—as someone who only used English for their whole life—deviating from the rules of English syntax seemed to unconsciously equate incorrect syntax, even though I knew, consciously, that the two languages have different rules.
I think it's really interesting to hear a non-native speaker's thoughts on subject pronoun omission in Spanish. When I speak Spanish, I almost never use subject pronouns, even with tenses that do not distinguish between yo and él. In French, while conjugations are written differently, they are pronounced pretty much the same. French requires subject pronouns for its verbs. When I was first learning French, I often omitted the subject pronouns! How interesting it is that we have the same hang up on these languages, they're just the inversion of each other!
DeleteLanguage acquisition is kind of an eerie experience to exactly summarized. I learned English as a second language. In the beginning, my mother would force me to read through a book, take down all the words I don't understand, and memorize them with a dictionary. This was how I learned to put words together, having had basic knowledge of the English grammar.
ReplyDeleteEventually, after listening to so much English everyday in school and in my free time, I think there were a couple moments when my words just came out, without my consciously thinking about it. I was even surprised at myself for it. I guess when I'm watching TV or hearing people talk, some phrases became imprinted in my subconscious and came out verbally at the right time. These moments were long before I was completely fluent.
These bouts are analogous to clear flashes in vision-impaired people (being able to see 20/20 temporarily despite being severely short-sighted), both of which I have experienced. I don't know if there is any literature out there on this topic but I'm curious to hear if people have read about, or experience, these linguistic "clear flashes".
I am just going to echo with what other have mentioned about how fascinating language acquisition can become when you start to think about bilingualism and how different languages are introduced into people's live. I grew up in a bilingual household. I learned Spanish first but English through my sister. In other words, I spoke strictly Spanish with both parents and English with my sister. When I started taking formal Spanish classes that covered syntactical rule, I realized how it sometimes slowed down my Spanish speaking skills. I would get confused as to when to use what kind of verb, when if you had just been talking to me I would have probably used the correct one. For some reason, being introduced syntax after having spoken at home all my life was difficult.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post, Laura! I, like Sophia, grew up “semi-bilingual” after moving from Brazil at the age of ten to the United States. Although not as different as Korean is to English, Portuguese does have its own share of contrasting syntactic structures. As in Spanish, subjects are not necessary to make grammatical sense in Portuguese sentences. I remember being very confused whenever I heard someone say “It is raining.” I used to think to myself, what does “it” mean? In Portuguese, a simple “está chovendo” (literally, “is raining”) does the trick. Also, it is very common to put the predicate before the subject in Portuguese. I cannot remember how many times I mistakenly inverted the orders of my sentences in English because of these differences.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Laura. I have had the same experience of learning a language in later life, in that I felt I had a superior grasp over some component of a foreign language's grammar than I did of the same component in English. I do consider myself to have a very fine tuned English grammar, but it is interesting to note that many common forms of speech contain multiple grammatical errors, and as such through natural language acquisition we obtain a stilted version of what the language actually should be. Interestingly enough when I started studying for the SAT I realized I had been making many common grammatical errors that I was unaware of, and I think addressing those has improved the coherency of my overall cognition.
ReplyDeleteI’ve also wondered whether first language acquisition and second language acquisition are stored and processed by different regions of the brain. I learned English and Cebuano (a Filipino dialect in the same Austronesian family we learned about during James Collins’s lecture) as a young child, then French in high school, and then German in college. Now, I am not fluent in the latter two, so I don’t think I passed all the phases required for complete second language acquisition. However, what I did find peculiar was that when I was learning German, I felt this extremely strong impulse to say things in French. It was peculiar because I did not experience such a strong impulse to say things in English or Cebuano during German class. In other words, there seemed to be much more interference between German and the other second language I’d learned (French) than between German and the first languages I’d learned (English and Cebuano). On a neurological level, is this interference between second languages mnemonic or linguistic? That is, is this interference simply due to the fact that I learned German in a context that was similar to the context in which I learned French (i.e. in a classroom), so contextual cues present in the German-language classroom triggered memories of learning French, which then triggered memories of actual French phrases, which then competed with the German phrases? Or is the interference I experienced due to some linguistic module in the brain that is (more or less) independent of memory modules?
ReplyDeleteAs for your question on bilinguals inverting sentences, I can’t answer that for myself, since I don’t remember the syntactic errors I made as a child. However, I think I’ve probably tried to use English syntax on Cebuano words as an adolescent and later as an adult. If you recall the guest lecture on Austronesian syntax, many Austronesian languages, Cebuano included, are verb-initial. When I’m talking to my parents and grandparents, I’ve probably strung Cebuano words in a subject-initial order, for example, when I’m trying to translate into Cebuano a thought that comes to me in English first. It’s hard for me to tell though, whether I’m making a syntactic error or not in Cebuano, since I’ve never studied Cebuano extensively, in a formal classroom setting.
Having studied Mandarin as my second language, I find your discussion of learning Spanish conjugation techniques very interesting. Mandarin uses very few morphological processes. For example, there is no conjugation of verbs or pronoun case. As a result, clear syntax in Chinese is crucial to conveying meaning. My challenges when I first began learning Chinese did not stem from figuring out how to make my verb correspond to a subject, but rather from learning the sentence structure, which was often different from that of English. I think my Chinese-learning experience relates to the language acquisition process of a young child because it reveals that one can learn a language and convey meaning without conjugating verbs. This may explain why sentences like "see cow" and "daddy go" make sense, even though they are not grammatical.
ReplyDeleteI found the same happened for me when I was learning Spanish, in that I could learn the grammar more easily than I was learning grammar in my English class, being a native English speaker. But as you mentioned, when it came to using my second language in conversation, it did not feel natural, in the beginning I would just parrot phrases. Which seemed strange, because I knew the grammatical structure better than I knew English, but when I would just parrot sentences that I already knew or hear from my teacher, it's as if I had no clue what that sentence was actually saying, unable to break down the vocabulary and grammar into a meaningful sentence in my head. What I find funny about learning a second language is that no matter what, I still find myself thinking in English. Even when I became fairly fluent in Spanish and I could "think" in that language, after I thought in Spanish I would still translate it back to English in order to understand what I was saying. But I've always wondered what it would be like for me to master another language and not have translate it into another language, but rather appreciate the language as a separate symbolic system from my native tongue in its own. I think that's also part of being emerged in the second language's culture and beliefs, because their language has a history and context separate from the one we are used to.
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