Re: First language acquisition


Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

In the attachment, I am reproducing part of my post of 11.9.06,
containing what you wrote earlier. I specifically asked you
whether Brown's book contains materials that directly answer
my questions and to recommend another book if that's not the case.

Are you a mathematician, like Allan "Ignorantly" Adler? These are his
sort of question.

I am not a mathematician and I don't understand your above
comment.

Then maybe you should look up Allan "Ignorantly" Adler's
thread-initiating postings, to discover exactly what sort of question
is utterly unproductive.

If someone recommends me a book, I naturally suppose
that he knows that book fairly well. Is there anything wrong,
if I ask him to "re-assure" me that the book does in fact
contain the materials that I am seeking?

Why can you not grasp that "the materials that [you are] seeking" do
not exist? That your questions make absolutely no sense whatsoever?

Note that it does
normally take some effort/time first to get from some library
a book (if at all available) and then to look through the book
to find the materials,

If all you are going to do is "look through the book to find the
materials," which do not exist, instead of actually reading the book to
find out what _is_ known about the topic, then there is no point
whatsoever in continuing to try to talk to you.

while on the other hand for the person
who already knows well the book it's only a matter of typing
"yes/no" in 2 seconds which could eventually (i.e. in case
Brown's book doesn't have the material that I need) save
comparatively much more time of mine. (Had I been asking
in this sense too much from you with my request concerned?)

Since you are asking incoherent questions, no yes/no is possible.

I don't understand at all why my questions are "incoherent".
When a child starts to learn his native language, he certainly
is "taught" by his mother (or other caretakers) in some way,


Absolutely not. As I know I did mention in this thread, every infant
around the world (barring brain damage, of course) learns their native
language(s) exactly the same way as every other: by hearing the
language(s) spoken around them, by hearing the language addressed to
them in context, and finally by interacting verbally with its
surroundings.

Sorry for not properly understanding your "absolutely not" above.
Did you thereby refute my sentence above containing the word
"taught"?

Please learn what "refute" means.

"Teach" is a deliberate, conscious activity. Mothers (and everyone
else) do not "teach" their children to speak. Children _automatically_
learn to speak, and it's impossible, short of severe abuse and
extremely severe brain damage, to prevent them from learning to speak.

(In that case I think I'll argue with you.) Or does
that refer to what I wrote further below (see the quote below)

Why would I comment above on a passage below?

where I said that the pedagogy presumably could be be somewhat
different in nature from that in school? In that case let me
say that in schools there are books that a child (and his
teachers) couldn't make use of in his early learning process.
Isn't that a quite essential difference? So your "absolutely"
doesn't seem to be justified here anyway.

There is no "pedagogy" in the home. As is well documented (as you would
know if you would simply _read_ any book on first-language
acquisition), a child will not start using some construction its mother
tries to "teach" it before it's ready to do so -- in English, for
example, it does not start to use strong verb forms (sang for singed,
for instance) no matter how many times it's corrected, until it's ready
to do so -- but it can _understand_ the strong forms long before it
starts to use them.

Vocabulary acquisition proceeds so rapidly once it has begun that
there's no hope of keeping track of when/where every single word is
learned; suffice it to say, as soon as the baby, toddler, or child is
able to understand a concept, it can attach the appropriate word to the
concept and use it appropriately. In literate societies, some of those
concepts aren't talked about in ordinary societies, and the student
learns them perhaps first from books, and then discusses them in class.
(But vocabulary acquisition is qualitatively different from language
acquisition; it proceeds throughout one's lifetime and without known
limit.)

May be I misunderstand you. But it seems that you are in the
above denying that vocabulary acquisition is "part" of language
aquisition. Is that true? (If that's the case, I would say
that's evidently (by definition) false!)

Vocabulay-learning and grammar-learning are very different processes.
Grammar-learning is finished by age 10 or 12 (Lenneberg's "critical
period"), but vocabulary-learning continues until the end of life.

Now whether a child learns fast or slow, it's a worthwhile
scientific endeavour to understand actually "how" he in his
very early stage of learning learns some words and some grammar,
isn't it? (This is trivially clear from the fact that there
exists enormous literature on first language acquisiton.)

If you want to know "how" learning works, then you should be pestering
the psychologists and the neuroscientists, not the linguists.

What I want is to understand a tiny little aspect of the
child's learning process, namely how does he, starting from
a small vocabulary that initially contains only words that
refer to concrete objects or actions etc. acquire words that
denote abstract concepts like "love", "think", "tomorrow" etc.

ONE MORE TIME.

The child learns the concepts FIRST, and THEN the words for them; the
child can UNDERSTAND the words before it can USE them.

For I don't see how one could in some way (and above all in
ways corresponding to the limited capacities of a child)
"define" such abstract words in terms of the concrete words

When did you ever (outside studying a rather poorly organized textbook)
learn a word by hearing its definition first, before it was used in a
context?

so that the child understands and adds these words to his
vocabulary. (The point is that this sort of "logical" barrier
seems to be difficult to pass.) I like to know from literature
an explanation of this (to clear up my said doubts) based on
"concrete" materials of discourse between mother and child,
i.e. a small piece of record of their utterances. (For otherwise
mere "theories" without practical supporting evidence would
have the deficiency of "gedankenexperiment" which you yourself
condemned in your very first post in this thread.) Am I herewith
asking/expecting too much from the state of the art of research
in first language acquisition?

No. You are asking a ridiculous question, based on total ignorance of
mother-child interaction and of cognitive development.

I suppose that with the current
hightech of recording of speech, it shouldn't be a big problem
for researchers to obtain sufficient materials that well
illuminate the fundamental process of child's language acquistion
(which includes both vocabulary and grammer). Let me note, once
again, that my original question concerns only a tiny particular,
thought apparently non-trivial, point of the entire whole. (That's
why I originally thought that I would be provided by some experts
of the group with a relevant pointer of literature "right away".)

What you think is a "tiny particular" is (a) nonexistent because (b)
counterfactual.

though that presumably could be somewhat (or rather) different
in nature from the pedagogy practiced in schools. Now I want
simply to know through what kind of stuff in the discourse
between a child and his mother (i.e. though what kind of exchanges
of utterances, eventually with additional non-linguistic helps)
the child learns words that express abstract concepts like
"love", "think", "tomorrow" etc. (Anything "incoherent" here?)

The infant (by the time it's a "child," it has long, long since
mastered all such words) hears such words used, and eventually starts
using them.

Ok, subsitute "ignorance" for "incoherence."

One relevant "concrete" protocol of such discourse would satisfy
me perfectly. I suspect though that it would be very hard
to begin to teach a child abstract concepts. In fact I don't
see how one could proceed at all, if all what a child has learnt
till the present are denotations of concrete objects or concrete
actions etc. (even assuming that he has captured quite some
rudiments of the grammar).

LOOK IN THE FUCKING BOOKS.

Get a child, and watch the process; or read the diaries of linguists
who have recorded their children's progress. They do not "teach"
concepts or anything else.

Sorry to say this, but the first part of your above comment
seems to me fairly analogous to the following scenario: Someone
asks another person about literature that explains certain
nuclear phenomenon in physics and gets the answer that he should
build a private laboratory to actually carry out the relevant
experiments himself in order to understand the matter. (It's
absurd, isn't it?)

Once again, your "seemer" is malfunctioning.

Human development isn't remotely like nuclear physics.

To your last sentence above: Do the researchers look at and
understand the learning process as such of a child at all?

How do you "look at" a learning process?

All you can "look at" is the learner and its behavior.

If yes, there should be good explanations of how a child
actually acquires the first few abstract words, I presume.

READ THE FUCKING DIARIES.

As for learning about things like "tomorrow," presumably Piaget is a
better place to start than many.

As should be very clear from my past posts, I don't desire
mere theories but need practical supporting evidence of
child's learning the abstract words.

Have you ever even heard of Piaget? For most of the 20th century, he
devised clever experiments to determine what children of various ages
could and could not understand, and if he himself didn't investigate
the concept of linear time, you can be sure someone following in his
footsteps did do so. You are free to search the child development
literature for the relevant publications.

As I worte earlier, I did
read two books on first language acquisition but was disappointed
to find that these don't contain the specific materials that
I need.

Wasn't that at least a hint that what you "need" does not exist,
BECAUSE YOU ARE ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS? Once you learn how children
_do_ learn language, your questions will cease to exist.

I am sorry to say that for that reason your "presumably
Piaget ..." doesn't help me really much. If Piaget's book (or
books) "really" (not "presumably") contains the sort of
materials that I have mentioned above (and in earlier posts),
then please kindly say so. (Otherwise I don't think it's generally
a good idea to follow uncertain "presumable" suggestions.)

Yup, you've never heard of Piaget.

If there were Nobel prizes for social sciences, he'd have been one of
the first in line.

.

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