Children learn to speak the language creatively

When children learn to speak, they do not just imitate their parents' speech. For the first time, a study showed that toddlers learn the language by literally fitting words together in grammatical terms.

03/04/2013

In his childhood, humans obviously learn the language much more creatively and more purposefully than scientists previously suspected. Children vary in speaking and combine words with each other. Children in their second year of life do this not simply because they imitate their parents' speeches, but in the free way, as research linguists at the National Academy of Sciences in the USA report in the journal Proceedings.

Various data archives examined
Is it [called „a dog“ or „the dog“? Both variants are grammatically unobjectionable. But the fact is that people prefer only one of two variants. This peculiarity came from the language expert Charles Yang of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his team, in which he analyzed how two-year-old children „Use combinations of articles plus nouns“. For this purpose, the researchers evaluated nine data archives of children who were currently in the state of speaking-learning. These were compared to the "Brown Corpus", the text corpus of linguists, which comprises about 500 texts. In this collection, only about every fourth noun was accompanied by a definite and sometimes an indefinite article.

The linguists stated: „The two-year-old children decided in the majority freely for an article“. It would indeed „It seems absurd to suggest that professional scribes use a less systematic grammar than two-year-olds, but the children's language is more suited to the profile of a grammatical rule in which individual words can be linked independently“, so Yang in his resuming section of the study report.

Children combine and imitate
To underpin the findings, Yang introduced another model of how children can combine articles and nouns by reciting only a few related words from their parents. To this end, the research team took 1.1 million word combinations that the parents said in the presence of the children. However, this model could not yield many rich word combinations, as the children did in fact use. The team concluded: "There is no doubt that memory plays a role when children learn a language, words and phrases are clearly identifiable examples, but the results show that memory can not replace the combinational power of grammar."

Current research opinion contradicted
The result contradicts the current research opinion that children learn the language by parroting, much like monkeys look up the sign language. To confirm this view, Yang examined videos by the scientist Nim Chimpsky, who learned about 125 applicable signs of sign language in 1970. The primates used less so-called „Two-character combinations“, as this would be purely statistically possible. As a result, Yang assumes that the monkeys „the characters just imitated and did not follow any real grammar“. (Sb)

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Image: Hans Baulig