Continuing Contributions to Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
(because they aren’t actually true)
gathered at great personal risk of
psycholinguistic harm from actual student papers
by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
This sixth collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.
Child Language—Caregiver Input
- The other family members beside the mothers give the child less responses or more ignorings in answer to the child’s linguistic ouvertures. They provide much lesser conversation-maintaining devices such as questions and turnabouts.
- As one matures, one will depend less on his parents. So the child spoke non-standard when out of her mothers earshots.
- Of course, language being the best means to the end and English being the most common means in so many countries, children learning English would obviously take on the same identity.
- In the area of syntax, also used in parental speech to children, parents use simpler grammatical structures of lesser pronouns.
- Caregivers can teach children new words by constantly pointing to an object and get children to say the name of the object. Children then say sentences that may be grammatical incorrect. For example, I have a twenty month niece who speaks incorrect grammar.
- Children learn nouns easily because nouns are all around them and parents point at them.
Child Language—Acquisition
- A child can acquire language because some say the child has an innate ability in them.
- The parent imitates, thus there arises the term motherese.
- Chomsky, a seeming father of innatist theory, specialises in the grammar language of English.
- The later syllables of words are usually acquired later.
- The strong-weak template is seen in the falling tune that the child is acquiring.
- Telegraphic speech is when the child wants to get his message and worldview across.
- In ‘want play’, the child has acquired knowledge of the imperative power of language.
- In telegraphic speech, ‘No mummy’ would be the absence of the presence of his mother.
More to come...
