Re: History of French

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 09/17/04 

Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:13:37 GMT

John Atkinson wrote:
>
> "Peter Dy" <peterdy@sbcglobal.net> wrote...
> >
> > "Mxsmanic" <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> wrote
> >
> > > Children learn by practicing a sound thousands and thousands of times,
> > > until others stop ridiculing the way they say it.
> >
> > Where do you come up with this stuff?! Lol.
>
> Yeah. I've seen evidence in the child-language-learning literature that
> whether or not care-givers bother to correct children when they say
> something "wrong" is very culture dependent. And that it makes absolutely
> no difference to the speed at which they learn not to make errors in their
> native language whether they are ever corrected or not.
>
> The only difference they found is that kids whose speech is continually
> corrected get cranky.

I think that might be Bambi Schieffelin's work? in Melanesia? She used
to come to CLS ... haven't seen her in years.

> Peter: you've no doubt had experience both with German and
> traditionally-reared Chinese kids. Does the above make sense to you? 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net