How do children learn language?

Bálint Gábor

Stages/Milestones

Cooing: 1-4 months

Babbling: 4-20 months

One-word: 12-18 months

Two-word: 18-24 months

Multi-word: 24 months

One-word (12 months)

Dada (father enters the room) Down (child sits down) Door (father closes the door) Here (child points) Mama (child gives something to mother) Again (child watches lighting of a match again)

Two-word(1.5-2 years)

Few function words

No morphological or syntactic markers

Comprehension Precedes Production

Children in this stage respond better to grammatical utterances, even though they don’t necessarily produce them.

18 months

Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird.

*Cookie Monster can tickling Big Bird.

allgone sock hi Mommy byebye boat allgone sticky more wet it ball Katherine sock dirty sock here pretty

Multi-Word (2-2.5 years)

sentences 3 or more words in length

few function words

few, if any, morphological or syntactic markers

Cat stand up table. What that? He play little tune. Andrew want that. Cathy build house. No sit there. Chair broken. Daddy like book. What her name? Car make noise. Me wanna show Mommy.

•Adult Grammar•NP => Det N a pencil•NP => Poss N my pencil

•Child Grammar•NP => Det Det N a my pencil

Creative Morphology

Noun > Verb

Why didn’t you jam bread?

Why didn’t you jam my bread?

Let’s get brooming.

Creative affixation

I hate you and I’ll never unhate youǃ

Grammar Construction Hypothesis Children make systematic, not random, “errors”

Innateness Hypothesis

Children learn the language of their environment naturally until puberty.

Questions

One/Two word Stage:Intonation, no auxiliary verb, no wh

See hole?

I ride train?

Ball go?

Sit chair?

Two/Multi word Stage II: wh-word, no auxiliary verb

What he wants?

What he can ride in?

Where I should put it?

Where Ann pencil?

Why you smiling?

Multiword Stage: Inversion in yes/no questions

Did Mommy pinch her finger? Can’t you fix it? Do I have it? Will you help me? Is Mommy talking to Robin’s grandmother?

But not wh-questions

What I did yesterday?

Why Kitty can’t stand up?

Where I should put it?

Where I should sleep?

Why you are smiling?

Overgeneralization

Singular Plural

cat cats

toe toes

man mans

foot foots