Grammar
The grammars that characterize different human languages are relatively complicated. Because grammatical constructions are complex, it was believed for a long time that there was something unique about language acquisition.
In fact, it was thought (for example, by the linguist Noam Chomsky) that babies were born with a special language acquisition device, or innateuniversal grammar. This special device meant that babies were biologically prepared to acquire grammatical structures, while other species were not.
More recently, it has been argued that cultural learning and the general learning processes (such as statistical learning and learning by analogy) are sufficient to support the development of grammaticallearning.
By hearing the unique utterances produced by the speakers around them, babies use their general learning mechanisms to extract the underlying structural conventions for word combination that we call grammar.
Hence infantsconstructgrammar from their listening experiences, supported by feedback from those around them.
As children begin to combine more and more words together, they test out different grammatical possibilities, occasionally making obvious errors (‘We goed to the park’; ‘It’s very nighty!’ [looking out at the dark]).
Research suggests that adults correct these errors as part of natural conversation. They do not use direct correction (they do not say ‘No, we saywe wentto the park’).
In natural conversation with their young children, mothers and fathers will re-frame orre-formulatethe child’s utterance into the correct grammatical format (‘That’s right, we went to the park yesterday’).
Between the ages of 2 and 3 years, more and more abstract constructions appear in children’s everyday conversations. Children show increasing awareness of the correctconventionsregarding word order and syntax in the language/s that they are learning. Children learn grammar through languageuse.
Michael Tomasello, an important theorist in language acquisition, calls their grammatical learning ‘pattern-finding’. Children will learn a pattern (like [agent] [verb] [object]) and repeat it over and over (‘Daddy cut the grass’, ‘Mummy did the shopping’, ‘The big dog chased the cat’). Indeed, observational research has shown that toddlers hear certain grammatical constructions literally hundreds of times a day.
Constructions such as ‘Look at x’, ‘Here’s x’ and ‘Are you x?’ make up approximately a third of the 5,000–7,000 utterances that (middle class) toddlers hear every day. As children get older, the abstract grammatical patterns that they notice and use get more and more complex (‘I know she hit him’, ‘I think I can do it’, ‘That’s the girl who gave me the bike’).
So grammatical learning emerges naturally from extensivelanguage experience(of the utterances of others) and fromlanguage use(the novelutterances of the child, which are re-formulated by conversational partners if they are grammatically incorrect).
Can babies learn the key sound elements of language from the TV?
Social interactions with caretakers appear to be very important in determining categorical learning. Babies cannot learn the key sound elements of language from the TV.
This was shown in a clever experiment that paired Mandarin Chinese graduate students with American English babies. The students played with toys with the babies, speaking all the time in Chinese.
Usually, babies who do not hear Mandarin Chinese lose their sensitivity to Mandarin sound categories that are not used in English. However, as these babies were playing daily with Mandarin Chinese speakers, they retained these contrasts.
The play sessions were also filmed, and new babies were then shown the Mandarin Chinese graduate students on TV. The films were taken from the babies’ point of view, so that the students appeared to be handing toys to infants from inside the TV, etc.
While the babies were fascinated by the videos and were highly attentive, frequently touching the screen, the ‘TV babies’ did not retain the Mandarin sound categories. So eventhough the ‘TV babies’ were exposed to thesame amountof auditory and visual input, learning did not occur without the live presence of the adult.