Children learning their L1 (fuit: Creating conlang grammars using prototypes)

Lars Finsen skrev:
> Den 5. okt. 2006 kl. 17.02 skrev R A Brown:
>
>> Exactly! They are not rules in the way that, say, the
>> rules of a club or society are rules. In other words,
>> they are not prescriptive.
>
> Uhmmmm, not sure of that either. The way I see it,
> language for children is a game in which you get along by
> learning the rules, like any other game. If you don't know
> the rules, you just stumble and falter along the way, just
> like in chess or football. Mastery requires very good
> knowledge of the rules, but like in all games, flair comes
> into it as well, and rule-bending. Some bits of language
> evolution (far from all) is caused by the tendency for
> bending the rules that's so inherent in human nature.
>
> LEF
I read the other day that a big part of phone*ic language
change is that as children learn to speak they mimic the
sounds that adults make as well as they can with their
smaller and differently proportioned articulatory organs. As
people grow up and their articulatory organs grow and change
in shape the articulatory movements acquired in childhood
don't cahange accordingly, and so subtle articulatory are
introduced from generation to generation. Some of them no
doubt get 'corrected' as people modify their pronunciation
in order to be better understood, or due to social and/or
geographical mobility, but there is also a part which
remains 'uncorrected' and so change accumulates over
generations.

Change in other aspects of language is probably subject to
similar effects -- not only is there no such thing as '*the*
rules' for a language, but also whatever rules, subject to
social, geographical and individual variation, there are
must be guessed at by children. In extrapolating their own
set of rules from the utterances of their elders small
children are not only conditioned by the quality and
quantity of the input, but also by how their perceptions and
mental processes differ from those of adults. There
certainly is an aspect of rule- bending and play with 'the
rules', but this enters the picture only with older children
and adults.

An example of how children's linguistic perception differs
is the fact that my 8-year-old uses the Swedish word
_knappt_ in the meaning 'not at all' or even 'not'. My
telling him that it really means 'almost not' or 'just
barely' (for which there are other, parallell expressions
which he uses correctly) doesn't cause him to change his
usage. Apparently he has encountered the word without
knowing its meaning, but assumed that its meaning was akin
to _knappast_ 'hardly, not likely', whereafter he's formed
the hypothesis that it was a negation and then stuck to this
hypothesis because of apparently succeeding in making sense
of the utterances and situations where he encountered the
word. There probably enters a measure of obstinacy into the
fact that he won't change his usage in spite of correction,
but it may also be a proportion of immature semantic
perception involved. Every parent has moments when they
realize that children are not merely under-sized or immature
adults; they are fundamentaly *other* in many respects.



--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)