Children's language reflects cultural shifts

In a gift to all ENGA3 (and ENGB3) students everywhere, today's Guardian runs a story about the changing language of Britain's tweenagers, and it includes references to not only change but gender and age-related variation and the influence of American English.

Read more about it here.

Edited on 29.05.12 to add:

When posting this I didn't realise that the Daily Mail had also covered the story in a much less nuanced way. Their feature- by Matthew Engel, a man with anti-American form - can be found here and is a great (as in deranged and crap) example of prescriptivist griping. It doesn't bode well that the headline uses the verb "swamping" to describe the supposed spread of American English into the UK.

Child Language research updates and summaries

We've started Language Development in my AS classes and - snow permitting - will carry on with it this week and up to Easter.

Here are some useful links to clips of TV programmes, You Tube presentations and research  papers that should complement your class work on the topic.

One of the most handy links is this You Tube presentation (powerpoint plus handy voiceover) outlining the key arguments about child language.

Then you'll find the impressively-mustachioed Robert Winston presenting this short extract from his series, The Human Body a good intro to the main developmental stages of child language acquisition. 

The Horizon documentary Why Do We Talk which we watched in class a week or two back is split into five separate You Tube clips which can be found here.

Did you shed a little tear at the plight of the lickle baby Zebra Finches? I did, but I weep when I hear Black Eyed Peas lyrics, so ignore me. If you want to find out more about the impressively-consonanted OferTchernichovski and his work on the fluffy birds, have a look here. Or here.

If you're ready for some hard stuff, then go to these clips from the big daddy of language acquisition, the living man-god that is Noam Chomsky. In this clip he talks about his theories of language acqusition (Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device) while in this one (only for the hardcore ravers, it has to be said) he talks in more detail about how his ideas on UG have changed.

I've just found this Patricia Kuhl lecture about the critical period hypothesis on TED, which is a very clear explanation about what goes on in the first year of a child's language development.

If all of that is too much for you (or you are from Ipswich and struggle with anything beyond grunts) then check out this clip of cute twins talking to each other.

Edited to add Kuhl lecture link on 09.02.12

Variety is the spice of language acquisition

Some new research into children's acquisition of language, reported here, suggests that children who are presented with more diverse objects of a similar type are quicker at developing their grasp of nouns than those who are shown a smaller range. The report explains further:

Two toddlers are learning the word "cup." One sees three nearly identical cups; the other sees a tea cup, a sippy cup and a Styrofoam cup. Chances are, the second child will have a better sense of what a cup is and -- according to a new University of Iowa study -- may even have an advantage as he learns new words.

This might not strike you as such a great surprise, but it's a study that sheds a bit of light on the processes children go through as they develop a sense of what a word means and the limits to which they can stretch that word's range of meanings. The linguist and child language expert, Jean Aitchison, talks about children acquiring words and their meanings as going through a process of labelling, packaging and network building. As you can probably see from this research, showing children a range of different objects, all with similar characteristics, seems to help them with the packaging and network building elements of their language acquisition.

The research goes on to suggest that a knock-on effect of this early boost to lexico-semantic acquisition is an enhanced ability to generalise. So, when children were later asked to identify objects that they hadn't seen before (or types of objects that they had seen in slightly different forms) they were better able to label them:

When tested on unfamiliar objects that fit into the categories they'd been taught -- such as a bucket they'd never seen before -- kids in the variable group performed better. This showed an ability to generalize the knowledge. "We believe the variable training gave them a better idea of what a bucket was. They discovered that the buckets were all alike in general shape, but that having a handle or being a particular texture didn't matter," Perry said. "In contrast, the children exposed to a tightly organized group of objects developed such strict criteria for what constitutes a bucket that they were reluctant to call it a bucket if it was different from what they'd learned."

An adapting language

Today's Independent celebrates the forthcoming World Languages Day by running a fascinating article about world languages and the "discovery" of a previously unknown language from the Himalayas. The article is well worth a read for its overview of the decline of world languages - it is estimated that about half of the world's 7,000 languages will be extinct by 2100 - but also because of the light it sheds on new theories of language acquisition.

One of the most striking bits of the article (for me, at least) is the suggestion from evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel that language is not a product of an inbuilt language acquisition device or language instinct, but should be viewed as similar to an organism in its own right, adapting to the human brain in order to survive:

All humans have the same brain, which is why successful languages tend to resemble one another, giving the illusion of a universal grammar. But, Pagel says, they may have arrived at that similarity via different routes, and solved the problem of being easy to learn in different ways. 

I'm not much an evolutionary linguist (or much of any sort of linguist, if truth be told) but this is a weird and rather wonderful idea that really appeals. There's some more about Pagel's research here and here, if you want to look further.

edited to add:
A colleague at UCL (thanks, Jill) tells me that Simon Kirby at Edinburgh is also interested in this language evolution approach. For those of you who have seen the excellent Why Do We Talk? Horizon documentary on language acquisition from last year (and available here last time I looked), Simon Kirby appears towards the end to talk about the experiment in which students are asked to name different coloured fruits. One of his papers is available here.