Re: Do Children Learn Languages at Different Rates?

>>>>> "Joseph" == Joseph W Murphy <jwmurphy700@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Joseph> Example: A common English kid mistake is referring to
Joseph> oneself in the third person.

Joseph> Jimmy says: "Daddy, not give Jimmy ball.

Joseph> A more advanced Jimmy says: Daddy, give me the ball.

How come the is a "not" in the first sentence, without changing the
meaning?
?

Joseph> I would imagine there are similar such mistakes even in
Joseph> Turkish or Chinese that kids make as they are learning
Joseph> these languages.

With Chinese, there are fewer SUCH mistakes. We don't have articles.
Personal pronouns may be omitted. No tense. No plural. Even 4 year
olds can speak quite fluently without grammatical mistakes. (They
just lack vocabulary and idioms to express themselves more concisely
and precisely.) With Chinese, one (native speaker or not) spends more
time learning words and phrases than on grammar.

There is one kind of mistake that a very young child can made when
speaking Chinese: using the wrong classifier. I seldom see children
leave out the classifiers or put them in the wrong place. The
difficulty is in selecting the appropriate one. But there is a trick:
there is a universal classifier that may be used for everything. So,
when unsure which classifier should be used, a speaker (adult or
child) would use that universal classifier. It can't be considered a
mistake. It's at most a tolearable imperfection.


Joseph> Couldn't the ages be calibrated and averaged and rough
Joseph> comparisons be made? If the resultant differences are
Joseph> startling enough, one might start to think...Hmmm, maybe
Joseph> one language is a little harder to learn than another?

No, how about lexicon? Learning a language is not just learning the
grammar. Without words, grammar is useless.

I've met a few *native* speakers who *don't* know that "inflammable"
is not an antonym of "flammable" and "invaluable" isn't the opposite
of "valuable". I, a non-native speaker, have to teach them back.

Can I say that they don't know English well, then?


Joseph> If you got enough Turkish kids and enough English kids and
Joseph> then measured their relative learning progress in their
Joseph> respective languages,
>> HOW??????????????

Joseph> See above.

I can't see how. You gave one example, but that example doesn't have
to have an equivalent version in another language. So, how can you
compare objectively? It's just like comparing apples with oranges.


>> Can you compare the relative deliciousness when a bag of apples
>> and a bag of oranges and a bar of chocolate vs. a jar of tea?

Joseph> "Deliciousness" is pretty subjective. But grammatical
Joseph> mistakes are more objective than that.

If children of age A usually commit mistake X in language P, and
children of age B usually commit mistake Y in language Q, how can you
do the comparison? And what if X has no equivalent in Q (because of
the intrinsic properties of the grammar) and Y has no equivalent in P?
How are you going to compare?


Joseph> They can be recorded and quantified.

The quantification can involve a lot of subjectivity, such as weighing
certain grammatical features more than others.


Joseph> Well, I like to think I speak fairly grammatical English.
Joseph> I'd say I'm probably in the high 90% range, with all
Joseph> modesty.

And what percentage would you give for my German? How can you get
such figures which are fair and objective enough, and meaningful for
comparison?


>> Relatively high means HOW MANY PERCENT? Any objective
>> measurements possible?

Joseph> I'd think we could dispute whether I was 90% or 95%. But
Joseph> the disputes might be less if one kid was clearly worse
Joseph> than another. Say one is at 60% and another at 95%, for
Joseph> example.

How do you evaluate who gets 60% and who gets 95%? And how can you do
the evaluation for another language? Does your 60% for English mean
the same thing as 60% for Spanish? Or your 60% for English should
equate 80% for Arabic? How are you going to make a fair comparison?


>> And what if you think you're 100% good in English, but the
>> next day, I should you a word that you don't know, or a idiom
>> that you don't know and can't interpret using normal grammar
>> and semantics (akin to "long time no see")? Would you tend to
>> lower it to 99% or even lower?

Joseph> Well, if I don't know a vocabulary word or an idiom, it
Joseph> doesn't mean my English is ungrammatical.

Language != Grammar

Language learning != Grammar learning


Joseph> It only means I don't know what "soporific" means or I
Joseph> don't understand what a "rolling stone gathers no moss"
Joseph> means. Lots of grammatical English speakers here might
Joseph> not be able to tell you what those terms mean. Does that
Joseph> mean they speak poor English?

No. But if A knows more words than B, and both A and B know as much
grammar as one another, I'd say B's English is poorER. So, if you
gave A 100%, you shouldn't give B also 100%. You should give B less.

The point is: there is no absolute scale. And it's even hard to
devise a linear scale. And the scales can vary significantly from
language to language. It's just impossible to make a fair comparison.




--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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