New Patch Column Up

[gnomi]

In today's The Brookline Parent column, I discuss the ways in which Muffin and Squeaker's grasp of language has grown. Read it here: Language Explosion!

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Since I've just read Pinker's The Language Instinct, I find your news especially interesting. They're right on schedule for their language explosion. Pinker supports Chomsky's theory that there's a universal grammar built into our brains; I don't find this plausible, given the variation among languages. But we certainly have a lot of wiring for figuring out languages and complicated grammatical structures, especially during the early years.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Since my academic background is in linguistics, I have been following the girls' language development with great interest. And, yes, they are right on track, but it was still surprising when, seemingly overnight, they went from (for example) "want ball!" to "Muffin wants to play with the blue ball."

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing! We are taking great delight in H's rapidly-expanding vocabulary, but had been a bit confused by his saying "green car" for almost every car, regardless of color. I thought maybe he just liked the sound of it. It's good to know there's a logical reason for it (and something we can do to help him differentiate).

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I was so thrilled when stakebait linked to that Scientific American article a while ago. It answered my questions regarding why the girls couldn't figure out colors.

[seborn.livejournal.com]

hee! DangerBoy seems to have colors pretty solidly for his age, but a few of his initial color-thing confusions have persisted: we have a large blue exercise ball, and then got a red ball, and he still describes the red ball as the "big red blue-ball." I thought of "right keepy-lefty" with that.

I also want to point you at Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher, if you haven't read it already. We got it for allonymist's birthday and I'm halfway through it; it spends a good deal of time talking about language and color, and so far goes through spatial directions and gender too. Fun stuff.

Anecdotally, the girls are not alone on "sorry" difficulties. DangerBoy seems to initially associate saying politeness words with the action others say them in response to: he at first said "thank you" when giving an object, at first said "no" when doing a forbidden thing, says "bless you" when he sneezes, and says "sorry" when he gets hurt. We thought he was secretly Canadian, but there seems to be a pattern here. "Thank you" and "no" have mostly switched around to the correct usage with experience; I expect other phrases will do the same.

The politeness shift doesn't seem as important as the pronoun shift he's in the middle of; we can mostly filter his first- and second-person pronouns around to what he means from experience, but it's hard for the unaccustomed to tell what's going on.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

The pronoun thing is happening for Muffin and Squeaker, too. Muffin has switched from "Muffin wants _____" to "I want _______." Squeaker is doing it, too, though less so.

Me? I want to hear sentences from Muffin that don't start with "I want..."