5 What can I say?
OK, so we know where the words are and what they mean. Now infants want to use language to say something. Here is the next challenge, which is the focus of Activity 3.
Activity 3 Zorpie, feets and sheeps
Imagine you are an infant learning a language and in this language you have learned that if you want to talk about more than one of something you add a ‘ie’ sound at the end of the word. Here is a ‘zorp’.
Here is another. Now you have two …
Discussion
Based on your experience you might guess ‘two zorpie’ but all the other adults around you say ‘two zorp’. What is going on here? This situation is similar to the pattern in English of adding an ‘s’ to form a plural: walk→walks, see→sees. But occasionally the singular form is the same as the plural, like sheep→sheep, feet→feet. Children are paying very close attention to these kinds of patterns throughout their language and occasionally overgeneralise them, for example they say ‘sheeps’ and ‘feets’ (Goldberg, 2019).
Why don’t children just copy what adults say? The problem is what adults say is only a small proportion of what is possible to say or what children want to say. It would take two million lifetimes just to learn all the possible three-word combinations in English, assuming you could remember them at the rate of one new combination every minute! This many combinations gives language its creative power, but it also makes it a challenge to learn.
The situation is a bit like learning chess. There are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the universe, far too many for anyone to remember. Players learning chess need to form some general rules to guide them. They rely on those rules when they encounter positions they haven’t experienced before. In a similar way, children form some generalisations to help them understand and produce language they haven’t heard before. Sometimes the generalisations children make are not shared by other speakers, such as ‘don’t giggle me’ and ‘I disappeared the rabbit’.
Children use a variety of smart strategies to home in on the conventional use of language while still being creative with what they say (Tomaselllo, 2005). When children say things like ‘I go-ed to the shops’ it is a great example that they cannot just be parroting back what adults say, as adults don’t talk like this. These slips reveal the powerful pattern-detection skills use to generate new language. It is a reminder that children don’t passively experience language but actively create it for themselves.
This need to generalise, but not overgeneralise, turns out to be fundamental trade-off in language development, and one that you will return to throughout the course.
So, you have looked at several challenges children face and some of the strategies they use to overcome them. One response to these challenges is to say ‘infants just do it naturally’. That’s true, they do, but the question is how. It doesn’t come naturally to other species and when we try to replicate the process with artificial intelligence it has taken decades of intense research to make any progress.
These are just some of the learning challenges infants face. There are of course many more. At a really basic level, infants need grasp that the noise coming out of someone else’s mouth is language, designed to steer their attention to a certain idea, attitude or belief, and not just any other kind of noise they could be making like whistling or sighing.