Re: Do Children Learn Languages at Different Rates?

On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 04:33:01 +0100, Helmut Weber wrote:

>
> I don't believe it, and if I did, it wouldn't mean much to me.
> It's like a race. Doesn't matter where you are after the first round.
>

And Joe Murphy said:

I suppose some nationalists might want to see it as a race.

> What is it all about?
> A proof that Turkish is simpler than other languages?
> A proof that Turkish children are smarter?
> A proof that Turkish society takes more care of children then others?

I think it might be more than that. I pulled the following from a work on
Japanese language acquisition by a linguist named Daniel I. Slobin:


"About a decade ago ( Slobin, 1973) I noted that postpositions and suffixes
tend to be acquired earlier than prepositions and prefixes for the
expression of particular locative notions and grammatical cases, suggesting
that children pay special attention to the ends of words. Such comparisons
can only be carried out crosslinguistically, since one must try to hold
meaning and frequency of use constant. Thus, for example, the emergence of
the first morphological marking of simple locatives like 'in' and 'on' is
earlier in postpositional and inflectional languages like Hungarian and
Turkish than in prepositional languages like English and Serbo-Croatian.
Peters ( 1985) reports additional data on the salience of postposed over
preposed grammatical markers. To cite another type of example, it appears
that case inflections are acquired earlier than word-order regularities for
the expression of comparable semantic relations such as agent-patient (
Ammon & Slobin, 1979; Slobin, 1973, 1982; Slobin & Bever, 1982). Ammon and
Slobin suggest that it is easier for children to attend to "local cues" on
individual words than to process and store patterned configurations of
words in clauses. Crosslingulstic comparison thus reveals general language
acquisition strategies which have different effects on the course of
acquisition of particular languages."

>
> In one child families like in Germany it may be harder to develop
> communicative skills.

German kids (and I was stationed there a soldier there for around 2 1/2
years after I got out of my university) never struck me as particularly
uncommunicative or backward in their language skills in any way. Quite the
opposite.
>
> The study may have found something out,
> but it fails in interpreting it.
>
> Lets say it is a fact, but what does it mean?

It might mean that there are some languages that children find easier to
learn than others.

If Slobin is right, a kid might pick up Turkish a little quicker than
English because there is something about kids that makes them naturally pay
more attention to the ends of words as they are learning a language.
Turkish, being a language that structures much of its grammar on
"postpositions" or "suffixing", might simply be an easier language for a
kid to naturally acquire than say some other language that employs a
different grammatical structuring scheme -- like pre-positioning or word
order -- to convey or portray the same ideas embodied in Turkish
postpositions.

I'm not saying this is so. I don't know enough about it. But as far as I
know, it might be this way. Slobin (who seems to have studied
cross-linguistic language acquisition more than most) seems to think so.


Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist (who, as a soldier, was stationed near Eschwege in Hessen and
loved every minute of it)
.

Relevant Pages