Derided by Word’s grammar check, much loved by politicians, acquired late by children and processed slower than the alternative even by adults – the passive voice was put in the spotlight by the 2014 National Curriculum reforms and is considered a source of strife by primary teachers up and down England and Wales. But what is known by kids, and for that matter adults, about the passive voice?*
Hold on a second. What is “voice”?
Voice is a grammatical tool for marking the relationship between the verb and what we call ‘arguments’, phrases that the verb needs to be able to fully express its meaning. Here are a few examples of verbs and their arguments:
(1) I ran. (I = argument, ran = verb) (2) I ate the cake. (I, the cake = arguments, ate = verb) (3) I gave the present to my friend. (I, the present, to my friend = arguments, gave = verb)
All of the examples in (1-3) are in the active voice. This means that the agent of the verb – the ‘doer’, in all these cases – is the subject of the sentence.
What’s a subject?
If we’re totally honest, no-one has a good definition, and it’s not clear if ‘subject’ is a useful concept for all human languages anyway. But for our purposes, the subject is the argument that precedes the verb in active, declarative sentences in English (those that tend to express statements). If a subject is a pronoun, it looks like “I, he, she, they, we” rather than “me, him, her, them, us”.**
So what is the passive voice?
In English grammar, there’s an option to make other arguments, not just agents, the subject of the sentence (assuming there are other arguments to choose from!). This is called the passive voice, which you can see in (4-6), corresponding to (2-3):
(4) The cake was eaten by me. (5) The present was given to my friend by me. (6) My friend was given the present by me.***
In (4) and (5), the ‘theme’ or ‘patient’ arguments are made into the subject of the sentence (preceding the verb), and the agent argument, I is taken away and tagged on to the sentence as part of the phrase by me.**** In (6), the ‘recipient’ argument becomes the subject, and again, subject I has to make way.
This creates an alternation. The exact same event – for example, my eating a cake – can be expressed in two different ways grammatically. And you’ll notice that the passive voice has more grammatical machinery in it than the active voice does. So while I’m thinking about cake, let’s whip up a recipe for making the passive voice!
A recipe for the passive voice
Ingredients: 1 active sentence (with at least two arguments) 1 auxiliary verb be 1 passive participle ending -ed Optional: 1 preposition by
Recipe
Take your active sentence, e.g. Molly bakes a cake, and identify the arguments. Once you’ve found the agent, here Molly, chop it off and put it to one side for later.
Now find the theme, here the cake. Chop that off too, and stick it onto the front of the sentence to make the cake bakes.***** Now, the cake is the subject of your sentence.
Take your auxiliary verb be and mould it into the same tense as in your original sentence. Our original sentence was in present tense, so we need a form like am, are, is. We pick the one that matches the new subject the cake, so we choose is.
Pop your auxiliary is in between the new subject and the verb, to make the cake is bakes. Don’t worry if this looks a bit funny – we haven’t finished yet!
Chop any tense off your main verb bakes. Tense is now marked by your auxiliary is, so you don’t need it twice! Here, we chop off -s to make bake, and our whole sentence looks like the cake is bake.
Take your passive participle ending -ed and pop it onto the end of your main verb bake. Now you should have the cake is baked.
Hooray! You can stop at this point and you have a beautiful passive sentence, known as a “short” passive. But you can add in your optional extras in another step…
7. Take your preposition by, and the agent that you put to the side earlier, Molly. Stick these two together and pop them on the end of your short passive to make a long one: the cake was baked by Molly.
Other cooking notes
You may have noticed that the recipe doesn’t work so neatly for irregular verbs like ‘eat’. In this case, you need to put on irregular participle ending ‘-en’, to take you from Molly eats the cake to The cake is eaten by Molly. But everything else stays the same. For other irregular verbs, the form might be a bit different, like bought for buy.
You’ve got another option if you’re a Tyneside English speaker too. On Tyneside, you don’t have to use the participle form of a verb in the passive – you can just use the past tense (also known as the preterite) form. So Tyneside English speakers might say The cake is ate by Molly.****** See if your local dialect can also spice up the passive just like Tyneside English!
So you mentioned that kids acquire the passive late…
Indeed I did, and considering all the grammatical machinery laid out above, you can start to see why children don’t correctly understand some English passives until the age of 6.
However, work by my superb colleague Dr Emma Nguyen has shown that it’s not just about frequency of passives in the input – the verb also plays a big role in acquiring the passive. She showed that children understand earlier passives that contain certain verbs – namely those that express actions that are intentional and where the agent has a physical effect on the theme, like wash and fix. Passives using these verbs can be understood around the age of 3.
In contrast, children are latest to acquire the passive with verbs that express states of being where the agent experiences a feeling for the theme, like love and believe. Adult-like understanding of these verbs only develops around age 6. Emma suggests that children learn about the different types of events that verbs can express, then use that knowledge, along with their syntactic knowledge, to gradually expand their understanding of the passive voice.
I’m a teacher and I’m supposed to teach the passive voice to children aged around 9…
So, that is kind of rough on you (not to mention them) given that they’ve only had a couple of years of successfully interpreting passive sentences at this point. You can tell that the 2014 curriculum reformers didn’t consult acquisitionists!
What I’d advise here is making sure that your students know first all the key concepts that feed into the passive voice, e.g. auxiliary verbs, concepts of agent and theme, subject and object, and about verb endings, because as the recipe shows, you can’t really talk about constructing the passives without being able to identify your ingredients.
I’m also a big advocate for making grammar learning as much like a scientific adventure as possible. Children love spotting examples, matching patterns, using magnifying glasses and chopping things into pieces. I think you can do all of these things with language too, both “in the wild” and in controlled ways in the classroom.
I also think that grammar teaching is much more fun and engaging when variation is taken into account – that’s to say how structures look and sound different in different dialects and in different languages (see the Tyneside English cooking note). It’s true that taking non-standard English into account takes a lot of courage and confidence from you as a teacher, but if you can do it, there’s a 2-fer-1 to be had – interesting takes on a theme and validation of other ways of speaking that will make your students feel heard.
If you want a bit more support too, I’m going to put in a plug for a fabulous free resource from linguist colleagues at UCL – the Englicious site. Friendly explainers for non-linguists, lesson resources, and CPD days, it’s a great resource to have in the back pocket.
Notes
*If you spotted my little metalinguistic joke in the title and first paragraph…I’m sorry. I could not be helped by myself.
**Why no “it, you, that”? Because they look the same whether they are subjects or objects, and so wouldn’t make my point very clear here! If you want to know more about why pronouns look different in subject and object position, read up on grammatical case.
***Not all dialects of English allow examples like (6), so you might not find this grammatical. But my fabulously flexible North West England dialect allows it, so I’m including it, and you can’t make me do otherwise 😉
****Notice that “I” becomes “me” after ‘by’ because it’s not the subject any more. It’s all about case again!
***** “The cake bakes” isn’t such a bad sentence, right? Especially if you add an adverb like easily or quickly. This is known as middle voice, but we’ll save that for another day.
****** This preterite-for-participle switch is pretty common in Tyneside English – my excellent sociolinguist colleague Dr Dan Duncan has written about it, and also looked at the (less common) opposite, where the participle can sometimes be used for the past tense, e.g. in I seen her this morning (rather than I saw her). Notice that the preterite and participle forms are the same for regular verbs (I baked the cake and The cake was baked by me). Thanks also to the lovely Tynesider Beth Beveridge who brought the Tyneside variant to my attention in the first place!
A little over a year ago I hopped on a Transpennine Express train to Manchester, bound for Media City in Salford. After one of the most adrenaline-filled days of my life, I was lucky enough to be named part of the 2023 AHRC-BBC New Generation Thinker cohort.
In the last year I’ve not only picked up some writing tips and skills and enjoyed taking part in the three programmes that all New Gens will make in the first year – I’ve met nine incredibly talented, generous and inspiring people, worked with a whole bunch more, learned how to *teach* writing as well as do it, and pushed through so many barriers of discomfort, embarrassment and imposter syndrome that I’m not sure what my boundaries are any more.
Actually, that’s not true. I know that I won’t be able to listen to the final programme myself. But I *am* proud of it and so I’d love it if you’d listen on BBC Sounds right here, and if you’d rather read, I’ve attached the script below (the script will be slightly longer than the broadcast, but I’m reassured that all the content remains!). IF you do listen or read, please let me know what you think!
I plan to write about the New Gen application and training process in the summer when the next call opens. For now, though, I hope you enjoy a little “linguistics by stealth”, as my wonderful producer Ruth Watts puts it. (And if you read to the end, there are a couple of thoughts that didn’t make it into the studio for you to ponder).
The script
I am named after a wedding cake. My parents’ wedding cake, to be precise, which itself reflected the popularity of the name Rebecca in the late 1980s.
I am renamed thirty years later. On a windy autumnal Saturday, my first child makes a slightly earlier than expected arrival into the world. The midwife places his tiny body into my arms with words she has used and will use over and over again: “Here you are, Mum.”
Mum is a more common name by far than Rebecca, but in the first few months of motherhood, almost no-one calls me by it. In fact, my new name falls only from the lips of medical professionals – people that I certainly did not give birth to.
The person whose presence bestows this part-name, part-title on me does not pronounce it once. He does not yet have the linguistic, cognitive or cultural capacity to call me anything, but within a few short years – months, even – he will have mastered the physical manoeuvres and social knowledge necessary for calling me mother.
This process fascinates me as a parent, but also as a linguist. Not a linguist who learns to communicate in other languages, but one who studies the properties of the human communication system, in all its variety, and how people learn to use it. Though language has been studied for years in fields such as rhetoric, psychology and anthropology, the field of linguistics, which applies the scientific method to the study of language, is much younger. Growing out of philosophy and philology departments through the lectures of scholars like Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics gained traction as a field in its own right as late as the mid-20th century thanks to innovative and controversial thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff. My research focuses on child language acquisition, an area of interest with roots in psychology that was strongly shaped by 20th century thinkers – on which more later. So, having acquired a child, I couldn’t wait to see how he acquired the language he was surrounded by – in his case, English.
At the very beginning, however, he was busy developing a set of cries to communicate his different needs and desires. The most memorable of these communicated hunger – a plaintive “niiiiiing”, with consonant “n” and the long, drawn-out vowel “i” evoking “need”. The final nasal “ng” required him to press the back of his tongue against the soft palate, completely closing off the mouth from the nose and the back of the throat. This is the same tongue posture that he would need to receive milk safely. That sound “ng”, then, was a figurative and literal demonstration that he was ready for food.
Given his propensity for nasal sounds like “n” and “ng”, I may have got my hopes up that these, and the other nasal consonant in English, “m”, might guide my child’s first words, and that my new moniker, mum, might be early among them. Indeed, as anthropologist George Peter Murdock demonstrated in the 1950s, maternal names across the globe overwhelmingly include nasal consonants, from Turkish anne to Arabic umm, Basque ama to Tagalog nanay. Linguist Roman Jakobson surmised that maternal names, especially the childlike so-called “nursery names”, are rooted in the nose for a very practical reason. When feeding, whether at breast or bottle, air can only pass through the nose, and so feedback from the child during this activity, which can take quite some time, is often expressed through nasal murmurs and mutterings. Jakobson also suggests that early utterances of “mamama” are not in fact utterances intended to refer specifically to the female caregiver, but rather an expression of the child’s general wants and needs of the kind that mothers might often attend to.
This idea emerged in part from diaries kept by one of the most famous fathers in linguistics, the father of child language studies, Werner Leopold. Leopold, working at Northwestern University in the 1930s and 40s, kept a diary of his daughter Hildegard’s earliest speech as she acquired both German, Leopold’s first language, and English, her mother Marguerite’s language and the language of her environment. Leopold was particularly interested in ensuring that Hildegard could indeed acquire German despite the dominance of English around her, and while some diary and observation studies of child language had been conducted by psychologists and educationalists, rare was the study that had analysed in detail the developing sound system and grammatical rules demonstrated in child speech. Leopold, however, was trained in the close transcription of sounds and fine-grained analysis of the structural interactions between parts of speech. He then applied this knowledge systematically to his observations of his daughter, later in life referring to her as his “ants and bees”, by analogy with the creatures studied in the hard sciences.
How did our ant under the microscope, Hildegard Leopold, refer to her parents? Leopold wrote that, for Hildegard, mama “has no intellectual meaning and cannot be considered to be a semantic alternative of papa, which was learned with real meaning at 1 year of age. Mama with the standard meaning,” he says, “was not learned until 1 year 3 months of age.” Another contemporary linguist, father and diarist, Antoine Grégoire, made a similar observation – his son used the sound sequence mama to express a need, particularly hunger, irrespective of his addressee, but used papa as a name to remark on the appearance of either mother or father. In the earliest stages, then, Mama is not mama by name, exactly, rather she is expected to respond to the needs expressed by those same sounds.
So the name on the tip of baby’s tongue is, quite literally, daddy. Place the tip of the tongue behind your teeth, close the rest of your tongue against your upper teeth, let air pressure build, and release it. Depending on whether or not your vocal cords were involved, you have just produced a /t/ or /d/ sound. These sounds, along with /p/ and /b/, predominate in paternal names across language families. Examples this time include Bulgarian tatko and Chichewa adadi, Kurdish bavo and Icelandic pabbi, all using the lips or the tongue, but not the nose, to push daddy’s name into the air.
/m,n,p,b,t,d/. These sounds are all made at the front of the mouth with complete closure of the lips, or the tongue to the teeth. They are preceded by brief silence, or muted murmuring, before their explosive release into a vowel like /a/ – open, noisy, resonant. Nursery names for parents, the mamas and nënës, babas and papás, are characterised by the repetition of vowels and consonants, repeated movements of the mouth from its most extreme open, resonant position to its most complete closure and near silence. This seems to me an allegory for parenting, where peace heralds chaos, which cedes to peace again. These movements between extreme postures are basic features of children’s earliest words, as they continue to practise and move towards mastery of their facial muscles.
Though designed, if unconsciously, to trip off the tongue, the names mummy and daddy are not equal. This became abundantly clear to me when I followed in Leopold and Grégoire’s footsteps, and many others since, in recording our family interactions, with a view to learning more about how a single child acquires language.
The diary of my child’s language journey comprises to date 414 audio recordings, an Excel spreadsheet of his first 500 words, an ever-growing file of notes in my phone, and scraps of paper stuffed in pockets, notebooks and bags. In this latter alone am I truly Leopoldian in my diary-keeping – but I am very grateful for the technology now available to me, that allows me to examine in fine detail the melodies of my child’s speech as he grows, and witness over and over again how he develops into a competent, clever conversationalist.
But though technology may develop rapidly, human change moves at a much slower pace. Leopold and Grégoire noted how daddy is used as a referring term, as a designation for some other person in the world, much earlier than mummy. Other linguists too have shown that children often overgeneralise Daddy as a name to refer to female parents, and even other caregivers and adults, while mummy arrives later, and is reserved for mothers alone.
In all these respects, my child is a textbook specimen. Daddy was his second recognisable word, uttered at 11 months old. /m:/ and /mə/ sounds soon followed…to represent mooing, of course. At 12 months, he started to refer to me using a word from British Sign Language, learned in a baby sign class. This word was produced manually, so he would tap the crown of his head with one hand, often looking in my direction. /m:/ then became his vocalisation for the moon, and after two more full passages of its waxing and waning, my inconstant child finally, at 14 months old, pronounced the word mummy. By this point, daddy and the BSL sign had become labels freely used for any caregiver in the space, and to this day I am still occasionally called on as daddy.
However, my guise as daddy has a specially limited application that illustrates the incredibly sophisticated abilities of small children to manage relationships and conversations, even before they are reliably out of nappies. Parental names, like any given names, can be used as vocatives, that is, to call on people for their attention. Children start out by using names as standalone calls – a cry of Mummy! or Daddy! To find out what happens next in children’s speech, I turned to modern child language diarists. This does not require a visit to a romantic library or archive – recall that child language acquisition is a young field of study. Instead, within a few clicks, I am scrolling through masses of child language recordings on the online database known as CHILDES, the Child Language Data Exchange System, and find that as early as 2 years of age, children start to use parental names in the middle of conversations, particularly at the end of a conversational turn, to invite a response from their conversational partner. In this way, they build and maintain a relationship with the people they’re speaking to, just as adults do. Turning again to my own notes and diaries, I noticed that I was daddyonly when my child wanted to attract my attention anew. There is no confusion here – once he has my attention, I am, utterance-finally, only mummy.
However, in other families, naming conventions are much less clear cut, and a negotiation process may be required to ascertain who, if anyone, bears the name mummy. In queer families, particularly those with two female-identifying parents, there are two equally obvious candidates for this title. And as we’ve already established, the person with the deciding vote, the child, will not cast it for quite some time. So who names who, and how?
The LGBTQ Parental Names Project, run by the website Mombian, surveyed queer families and uncovered a range of sources for parental names, as diverse as the families themselves. For some parents, their heritage provided a route to distinction. A family with one Geordie mother and one mother from the South of England, for example, might very naturally find itself with one mam and one mum. This route may not always bear fruit, however – in an English-Danish household, using Danish mor could confuse a cry for mum with a demand for, well, more!
Other parents really did wait for the child to have their say, and in some cases, the child chose to use the parents’ given names, perhaps in combination with a parental name. Some children clung to that all important nasal murmuring /m/ to mark their mothers as the same, with two different open vowels in mama and mummyto tease them apart, where others, like poet Maggie Nelson’s stepson, played with the placement of /m/ at the lips, with mommy becoming bombi, reflecting both her motherhood and their favourite shared game, Baby Bear.
No matter what the make-up of your family, parental and caregiver names reveal a fascinating process of redefining yourself relative to others: to the new person who has arrived in your life, to your partner, and to society’s expectations…or rather, being redefined, refashioned, redubbed, over and over.
Raising a child is a period of constant change, and I have found that my name has changed as my child has grown. A brief dalliance with my given name was toyed with and quickly dropped. Now that he has left the nursery and its babyish reduplication of consonants behind, I am less often called mummy. Despite this, play with the some of the sounds of mummy cannot be resisted, and every so often I am dubbed pumpy. Linguists here may note how, to move from /m/ to /p/, airflow through the nose stops and the vibrations of the vocal cords still. Native North Easterners, on the other hand, will note the childish humour in naming your parent after a dialect word for flatulence.
My most common appellation right now, however, is mother. Whence this formality? My schoolchild’s unwavering dedication, at least for now, to the short stories of Enid Blyton on audiobook, a world in which mothers’ strict interdictions and punishments provide a springboard for their children’s fantastical fairy-led adventures. Whether my new moniker is an indictment of my parenting techniques, I prefer not to know, but for now, my child, feel free to call me Mother.
Ideas left in drafts gone by…
You may have noticed that my title owes a debt to the fabulous art form of drag, in particular American forms of drag spearheaded by the global phenomenon RuPaul. I wanted to discuss the use of the term “mother” in Black and Latina New York drag houses, and latterly in internet speak, but it didn’t fit smoothly enough, and in any case, the wonderful sociolinguist Dr Christian Ilbury from the University of Edinburgh does it much better than I could in this brilliant article, written by Soaliha Iqbal.
I’d have also loved to discuss how parental names are acquired cross-linguistically, and how in some cultures, they aren’t in children’s earliest lexicons. Why? Lots of different reasons, but some cultures have very different approaches to addressing pre-linguistic babies than the culture I was raised and am raising my children in – some don’t address speech to babies at all, or wait for them to produce specific words before they can be considered to have the linguistic skills to converse with. These cultures tend to have a lot more child-to-child speech than Western cultures now do, which shifts the focus of what children hear, from whom, and with what intentions.
This may seem a very strange question. Surely children can only know about language that which they hear, see or experience from the language users around them? After all, a child only learns the language(s) they are exposed to. No child in the UK, for example, grows up learning Auslan, unless they are exposed to it by an Auslan-signing parent.
But this question is a (less provocative!) rendering of one of the biggest open research questions in child language, and one which has split child language researchers, sometimes acrimoniously, since the mid 20th century.
You may be more familiar with this question framed as the “nature vs. nurture” debate, or the innateness debate. Both of these framings I find very weird. When you drill down, all child language researchers believe that both nature and nurture play roles in the acquisition of language by children. The real debates are around the nature of nature and the nature of the nurture. So let’s dive into exploring the two main approaches to these issues, starting with the group that proposes language-specific innate knowledge.
(Full disclosure first: I was trained and now work in the generativist tradition, I know it better, and I think it is more often misunderstood than the constructivist tradition, so I spend quite a bit more time on what follows describing the generativist point of view. Even so, I hope you find it interesting, and somewhat balanced in terms of critique.)
The Domain-Specific approach (a.k.a. the Generativists)
These are the scholars typically positioned as the “nativists”. They’re responsible for creating All the Acronyms (LAD, UG, PLD MMM*…) and are often accused of not taking the other side seriously, mostly because they don’t engage with their work very often (which is, of course, not good scholarship).
But generativists are very serious about their main claim: that human beings are born with some knowledge about language that they use to make sense of the bewilderingly complex language input they receive. This is known as domain-specificknowledge because, quite simply, it’s knowledge that pertains only to the domain of language, and no other cognitive domain. You may have also heard of it referred to as Universal Grammar – some language knowledge, even rules, that all children can use from birth.
Why make such a claim? Well, in part it is because it’s striking that children learning different languages actually pass through very similar developmental stages – adults do the same too when learning artificial languages, irrespective of their first language. This suggests that we don’t just have general learning biases or preferences, but that some biases exist that apply specifically to linguistic information.
The birth of a language: Nicaraguan Sign Language
One of the most compelling examples of this can be seen in the development of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). NSL grew out of the opening of the first state-run school for deaf people in Nicaragua in the 1970s. Students came from all over the country and did not share a language, using instead a range of “home signs”. But as they interacted in the playground, conventions of use developed among the students – a lexicon with some rules. These rules, however, didn’t really resemble other languages. They did the job, and the children communicated and flourished. But a lot of the signs and structures relied heavily on representing events and things in the world fairly literally, and didn’t make use of many abstract markers in the way that full natural languages typically do (things like tense, aspect, person agreement, etc.).
When new, younger students arrived, they took this fledgling system and (entirely subconsciously) generated a true language grammar for it. The younger students used their innate compulsion to build a linguistic system, using highly arbitrary features like space and handshapes to create a complex system that could express more efficiently complex, abstract idea. This system – NSL – has a grammar that is fully recognisable as a natural language grammar. That’s to say that it is hierarchically structured, it doesn’t “count” (there isn’t a specific type of word that must be the third word in the sentence, for example) and its rules are regular in many of the same ways as any other language.
This brings us to another motivation for the generativist approach to understanding language acquisition: for all the logically possible ways in which languages *could* differ, they tend to structure their constituent parts along very similar lines.
What about the Poverty of…
Note that I haven’t mentioned (directly) a theory often cited as a motivation for a generativist approach: the Poverty of the Stimulus. It’s an idea that grew out of “Plato’s Problem” – the question of how humans extract so much information from limited evidence in their environment. With respect to language specifically, it is used to suggest that children simply don’t get enough linguistic evidence to be able to build a language grammar as quickly and as accurately as they do.
And for sure, it’s amazing that by the age of three, small children can engage in long narratives, ask questions, follow complex instructions and reason about the world, even though they can’t tie their shoelaces and some may still be in nappies. However, linguists who made (and make) this kind of argument are often only interested in syntactic strings, which don’t take into account all the *other* cues and pieces of information that actually accompany those strings when spoken or signed in context – intonation, gesture, context, growing world knowledge. Moreover, if we don’t have theories about children’s ability to reason, remember and recognise patterns across the information they receive, then the Poverty of the Stimulus is pretty vague. How much information is enough, and what information are children actually capable of using?
Speaking of vagueness, I will admit, as a card-carrying generativist, that claims about the content of possible domain-specific knowledge remain bafflingly vague. So let’s examine a couple of the more worked-out versions of Universal Grammar in more detail. Note that I’m skipping over quite a lot of historical detail here to focus in on just two approaches to understanding domain-specific knowledge – if you want to know more, come and do a degree with us in linguistics ;).
Rich UG: Principles and Parameters
In the past, some scholars assumed that Universal Grammar consisted of a very rich store of innate knowledge made up of universal linguistic principles and parameters – possible “settings” for those universals in different languages.
A famous example is the pro-drop parameter. Some languages allow users to “drop” the subject of the sentence (that is, not say it out loud). These languages include Italian, Spanish, American Sign Language, Mandarin Chinese, and many more – around two-thirds of the world’s languages, as far as we know. The exact rules that determine when you can drop a subject might differ, but the fact that you can drop a subject is what links them. Take examples (1-2) from Italian, and compare them with the English translations.
(Io) sono felice. “I am happy.”
Piove. “It rains.”
In (1), the Italian first person pronominal subject “Io” is optional – “Sono felice” is itself a perfectly grammatical sentence in Italian. But in English, “I” is obligatory – “Am happy” would be considered ungrammatical most of the time. In sentences like (2), there is no subject in Italian, because weather verbs like piovere (‘to rain’) just don’t need subjects at all. But in English, we insert the expletive or pleonastic pronoun “it” to get “it rains”, because the grammar’s need for a subject is so strong that it doesn’t matter whether it actually refers to anything or not. It’s a purely grammatical requirement. Other languages that require the subject to be overt, like English, include French, Indonesian and Mupun, to name a few.**
How does this relate to acquisition? According to a theory that assumes principles and parameters, children will be (subconsciously!) listening out for how their language expresses subjects because they’ll ‘know’ it’s an important point of variation for grammar with a roughly binary set of values – either you can drop your subjects, or you can’t.
A theory like this is useful because it helps make predictions about what children might or might not be doing during language acquisition, which you can then test by looking at language corpora (sets of recordings of children) or by running experiments. Taking pro-drop as an example again, it is a common observation that English children drop subjects in their early speech, until around age 3. A theory like principles and parameters provokes an interesting research question – do English-acquiring children drop subjects because that’s grammatical for them to start with, because pro-drop is a default setting (a language-internal explanation), or for some other reason, like reduced processing ability (a language-external explanation)?
So what are English-acquiring children doing? They seem to be just missing out the very edge of their utterance, or in full linguistic parlance, the top-most part of the structure (given that sentences actually have hierarchical, not linear structures. More on that another time). Why might they do this? Linguist Luigi Rizzi made an influential proposal in the early 1990s, refined in the 2020s with colleagues Naama Friedmann and Adriana Belletti, that children learn sentence structure from the ‘bottom up’, with layers of information emerging in sequence, which may be “truncated” if their processing capacities become overwhelmed. According to Friedmann, Rizzi and Belletti’s “growing trees” hypothesis, children learn the structure of a sentence’s verb phrase (with any objects) first, then grow into marking tense and aspect, then into marking the subject, followed by things that mark how the sentence fits into a discourse, for example the wh-word in a question.*** The claim goes that at the point at which English-acquiring children are dropping subjects, they know that they are needed in English, but they’re still working out exactly what they look like and how they relate to the rest of the structure. All this work sometimes leads to truncation of the sentence – or in tree-surgeon parlance, the subject gets lopped off.
Though Principles and Parameters provided interesting ways to approach language acquisition (and language description more generally), it’s long been clear that it’s not a psychologically valid proposal for the domain-specific knowledge children might be born with – it is quite improbable that children’s innate tools for making sense of language would take such a highly specified form.
Parsimonious UG: Merge and Agree
A newer approach to domain-specific knowledge, deriving from an article by Noam Chomsky in 2005, proposes two processes (rather than a number of principles) that drive how children unpick their language input. Those processes are Merge and Agree.
Merge is, briefly, the process of taking two things (words, phrases, clauses…) and combining them to create a new linguistic object. Merge builds hierarchical structures, and we already have plenty of evidence that language is hierarchical, not linear. Grammatical rules reflect this, processing reflects this, and acquisition respects hierarchical structure.
An ‘syntax tree’ capturing hierarchical relationships in the statement “The boy who was tired watched cartoons.” For cool work on how even young children know that the relative clause is contained within the subject, take a read of Crain and Nakayama (1987)
Combining objects means that some relationship is formed between those objects – that they come to share or express some feature that we can use as language users to make meaning. So the language user needs to be able to recognise what features drive the combination of specific objects, as this will help them parse structure accurately (understand) and build new structures (produce language). The process of forming relationships between language objects is called Agree. To apply Agree, the language user also needs to form a set of features that are relevant in their language that can be recognised in the language objects, and which they could use again and again to parse any of the infinitely many sentences they might be exposed to in their input.
Let’s (try to!) get a bit less abstract now and return to the issue of pro-drop, with help from linguist Theresa Biberauer, who looked at pro-drop from the point of view of Merge and Agree in 2018. She argued that children acquiring their first language will be constantly looking for patterns across their language and looking for features – some abstract, some maybe less so – that link the structures in their input. As English-acquiring children very rarely hear sentences without subjects, and receive evidence for subjects that carry no independent meaning (expletive “it”), she argues that they won’t look for features that explain subject patterns because, quite simply, there’s no need to. There’s no ‘pattern’ to explain in that sense – you just need to have a subject, and English-acquiring children will pick this up early on, leaving their subject-dropping in production to be explained by other factors such as processing, or still needing to build the parts of the grammar that will connect up the subject with the main verb, such as auxiliary verbs.
The input to Italian- and Mandarin-acquiring children, however, leads them to pose a question – under what circumstances should I drop subjects? They then need to work out what features correlate with dropped subjects. For Mandarin, children will work out that what really matters are discourse features – subjects (and objects) can be dropped when they are topics that are somehow familiar in the conversation already. For Italian, children must realise that discourse matters – familiar subjects can be dropped – but grammatical agreement matters too. Subjects can be dropped because the verb is marked according to the person and number of the subject in Italian – in example (1) above, the verb form sono is the first person singular form of essere (‘to be’). But verbs aren’t marked for the person and number of the object, so objects can’t be dropped.
Noticing these features isn’t just useful for pro-drop, however! Being able to recognise topichood, subjecthood, person and number is also useful in both Mandarin and Italian for other aspects of grammar, like word order, and also for learning how intonation works. So having an innate compulsion to look for relationships between language objects really will speed acquisition along, because the features that characterise those relationships will pop up again and again in the broader language system.
Just because it ain’t language specific, doesn’t mean it ain’t innate…
You’ll note that, in the case of “parsimonious” UG particularly, there are implicit references to cognitive processes that aren’t domain-specific, like pattern-spotting, pattern-matching, awareness of frequency, and more. This is because generativists also make room in their theories for domain-general learning mechanisms – in other words, cognitive processes that aren’t specialised for language but that are used to learn language. We’ll talk more about these below, as they are the key tools in the theoretical arsenal of “the other side”, but they are crucial for the application of Merge and Agree, and are included in generativist theories as “third factors” – factors that aren’t domain-specific knowledge or the input itself.
This label gives you a bit of a clue – these ‘factors’ aren’t the things that generativists are, generally, most interested in. But lack of interest doesn’t mean they’re ignored altogether. Indeed, some generativists take the interaction between general cognitive and language-specific processes very seriously. Linguists like Jeff Lidz and Annie Gagliardi build domain-general processes into their models of language acquisition in just the way described above – noting that general cognitive processes must apply to language input before language-specific processes, to provide filtered input that children could plausibly assess for where Merge applies, and what Agree processes are at work. They map their model in the diagram below, taken from their 2015 paper:
Figure 1 from Lidz and Gagliardi (2015). The processes in the yellow block are basically domain-general processes. ‘Universal Grammar’ would, according to Chomsky, Biberauer etc. refer to Merge, Agree and a template for linguistic features.
Theresa Biberauer also takes seriously the idea of “maximising minimal means”, that is, using and reusing features and observations you’ve already made. This is a domain-general process that would be useful for making sense of lots of different types of input. But with respect to language acquisition, she argues that it is a crucial third-factor used by children as they apply Merge and Agree to their input, and that it also drives some of the restrictions on variation that we see in natural language.
You’ve mentioned input a lot. I thought generativists weren’t too bothered about it…?
I think the most misunderstood aspect of the generativist approach to language acquisition is generativists’ stance on input. It is true that some generativists will take the “target” for acquisition to be the grammatical rules of the relevant language at a general, population level (i.e. what is generally considered to be grammatical in that language). Generativists are also often interested in comparing acquisition trajectories across languages so, again, they generalise across individuals and consider acquisition at a population level. This is in contrast to constructivists, who typically take into account only the kind of language that the individual child experiences – that is, the language used by their families and caregivers.
It’s pretty obvious how the two ‘targets’ here might differ, and how that would affect predictions that you would make. But input is always important, and generativists don’t assume or predict otherwise.
Given that we’re thinking about input, let’s turn now to our other set of players, for whom input drives not only acquisition, but much of their theorising and reasoning.
The Domain-General crew (a.k.a, amongst other things, usage-based researchers or Constructivists)
It’s a little harder to define a “main” claim of researchers for whom domain-general knowledge is the child’s only tool for making sense of their language input. That’s because there are a lot of different types of domain-general process to investigate – working memory, long-term memory, statistical generalisation, sensitivity to frequency, and so on. But something that is key for constructivists like Ben Ambridge and Elena Lieven, which differentiates them from generativists, is that children go from specific observations about their individual language input – e.g. storing particular phrases that they have heard/seen – to gradually generalising abstract rules. Memory, therefore, plays a major role in a constructivist account, whereas even the “third-factor”-interested generativists rarely, if ever, mention it.
What children can plausibly add to memory, of course, depends on what *exactly* they are exposed to. Sensitivity to frequency is a core theme in constructivist theories – children will appear more adult-like when they can use a stored phrase or string from memory, and less adult-like when the task they’re performing can’t be addressed using stored material. That frequency is important in language development is well established – it plays a role in language change in many levels of language, as well as language use, language processing, and patterns that emerge across languages (recall, this was an argument for domain-specific knowledge too…)
Given their focus on individualised input, constructivists also insist on the importance of understanding language acquisition as happening in interaction. As such, studies of the acquisition of pragmatics are dominated by constructivists, with Catherine Snow and Thea Cameron-Faulkner leading the charge****.
Right. So…null subjects from a usage-based POV?
Sorry lads. That’s what I wanted to write about here, but I cannot find an account of English-acquiring children’s null subjects from the constructivist side of things. I did find an account for Spanish, a pro-drop language like Italian. Hannah Forsythe and colleagues argued that the frequency in input of different types of pronoun affects when they begin to be dropped in adult-like ways – first and second person subjects are more frequent than third person subjects, and children achieve adult-like rates of dropped and overt subjects in first/second person cases first, before abstracting the same rules to third person subjects.
As for English null subjects, my guess, but this is only a guess, is that there are three routes to take to explain them using a constructivist lens.
One is to put all the blame on processing limitations of various types – which is of course, ultimately where we landed in the generativist approach too. Reading around a bit, and talking to colleagues of a constructivist persuasion, this seems like a bit of a cop out.
My excellent colleague Dr Nick Riches suggested a second take: subjects don’t add much grammatical information to an utterance – especially when first and second person subjects are so much more common in child speech than third person ones. This is in contrast with objects, which are important for indicating the argument structure of verbs (and, of course, the less obvious identity of the object). So if children are going to drop any information (because of gradual acquisition, or processing pressures), the subject is the least informationally dense element.
The third route is to assume (as constructivists do) that the child’s grammar is very different from an adults, and then go looking at the rate of utterances that have no subjects in the input *regardless* of the morphological form of the verb. Key here are imperative verbs – these are very frequent in child input and *don’t* require a subject but, in English, are not overtly marked as imperative. They look superficially exactly the same as most verbs in the present tense, and infinitives too. I guess a constructivist could argue that imperative verbs could provide sufficient evidence for certain verbs not needing a subject, at least in very early child language. To argue this you’d have to have a story about how children ignore the specific pragmatic use of imperatives, but maybe that’s doable.
It’s also important to note that usage-based approaches tend to focus, perfectly legitimately, on children’s production in terms of evidence for their grammar. This is of interest to generativists, of course, but generativists are also interested in children’s comprehension. So while both approaches will look at production in their accounts, generativists are also likely to probe children’s grammar by looking experimentally at how they react to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.*****
What all this illustrates, though, is how the “two sides” here are not two sides of the same coin. At best, we’re looking at the head of a pound coin and the tails of a 50p. The two approaches work within the same field, but often look to answer quite different questions – and they’ll make use of different data to support their own arguments. As it turns out, those data don’t necessarily overlap all that much, *even* in a language as heavily studied as English.
I’m doing my A-levels. How can I make sense of all of this for the exam?
I have a few ideas here, but this is a topic I’m probably going to return to in more depth in a future blog post too. Also, bear in mind that I’m pretty well acquainted with the specifications for some of the large exam boards (particularly AQA and OCR), but I’m still not as steeped in them as trained teachers are! But if you’re interested to know my initial thoughts, then please continue…
Key to the exam first and foremost (and to linguistics in general) is the ability to accurately *describe* children’s production, so above all else, ensure that you are confident in labelling parts of speech and morphemes and that you can spot and describe features like person and number, both for the adult target and the child’s production. Also, don’t focus just on children’s non-adult-like production – give them ‘credit’ for what they *can* do in an adult-like way too, whether that’s producing subjects, using relevant auxiliary verbs, and so on.
Given the direct link that constructivists make between the child’s individualised input and their production, it’s a little easier to see how you could zoom out from transcripts of child language to talk about constructivist approaches to language acquisition. Even then, the role of frequency is hard to address from fragments of transcripts, so to be true to constructivist techniques, you’d have to talk about what you would look for if you had more examples of dialogue from the same child-caregiver pair.
With respect to linking from transcripts to generativist claims, the “growing trees” hypothesis is interesting to link to in terms of evaluating why verb phrase syntax is adult-like earlier than tense and subjects. You can also think about what grammatical features a child needs to work out for different linguistic items that are in the transcript and what interim features they might propose – features are a good way of thinking about and comparing linguistic complexity. As an example, determiners like “the” and “a” differ in terms of definiteness, but “a” is even more complex because it can be used both with specific and non-specific nouns, and is also specified for number (singular only). So there are three features that a child has to learn when trying to pick a determiner, and the determiner options differ in their featural complexity. Imagine what effect that could have on the acquisition of determiners in English.
Notes
*Language Acquisition Device (see ******), Universal Grammar (described in text), Primary Linguistic Data (=input!), Maximising Minimal Means (described in text)…and many more!
**If you’d like to know more about how languages express subjects, take a look at the World Atlas of Language Structures. You can also find lots more information about the structures of hundreds of languages all over the world on this fantastic website.
***There’s a competing hypothesis under development by Martina Wiltschko and my very good colleague Johannes Heim, called the “Inward Growing Spine Hypothesis“, which suggests that structure grows inward from the bottom (the verb phrase) and the very top (discourse-related phrases that call on the addressee to respond, like vocatives). I’m not sure either approach is *quite* right, but Wiltschko and Heim’s idea that some of the very topmost structure does come in early is clear from early child utterances. The question is – which parts of the topmost structure? I’m working on my own contribution to this question – watch this space 😉
****Generativists, it should be noted, have spilled a lot of digital ink on one particular aspect of pragmatic acquisition, namely the topic of scalar implicatures. But that’s a topic for another day.
*****Obviously, you can’t just ask a small child whether they find an utterance grammatical or not – in fact you can’t do this until they’re about 6 or 7 years old (and even then, we’d use more child-friendly wording!). But you can interpret children’s behaviour in response to stimuli in lots of clever ways to probe what they do and don’t know about the adult grammar.
******LAD – Language Acquisition Device. A term from Noam Chomsky’s early work to represent an (unspecified) process or set of processes and knowledge that the child is born with and that specifically concern and work over language input. Not in use by generative linguists today.
And a postscript…
I may have become a bit delirious when initially planning this post (I was at a soft play centre too early on a Sunday morning. It does strange things to you) and I ended up casting the two competing approaches as the Capulets and Montagues in a terrible rewriting of the prologue from Romeo and Juliet. Trigger warning: what follows might constitute cultural vandalism…
Two (main) factions, both alike in indignancy In Academia, where we set our scene From old grudges break to new strawmen Where wilful snubs make wilful claims quite mean. From forth the messy output of these groups This messy cross-referenced blog takes shape; Whose well-intentioned overview does aim To make clear where their paths each other trace. Generativists from LAD****** through UG Move, while constructivist claims also persist. I cannot claim to end the feud – not me! – Just reveal of what the arguments consist. The which, if you with patient thumbs scroll through What here I’ve missed, I toil now to construe.
Strange things are happening in the world of education. To the benefit of absolutely no-one, STEM subjects are frequently held up as the only ones worth studying, while technological advances (and misadventures) demonstrate the need, time and time again, for a nuanced understanding of human beings, how they think, and how they move through the world. In short, we all need more of the arts and humanities.
As a discipline that straddles both STEM and arts and humanities, we have a unique opportunity in linguistics to disrupt the current binary discourse (STEM or bust) and muddy the waters wherever possible. Linguists frequently apply the scientific method to that most human of behaviours, language, but just recently, my fabulous colleague Dr Emma Nguyen and I had the chance to squeeze some awareness of being human into a science space.
The scene: STEAM week at a very lovely local primary school. The brief: chatting to year 3 (ages 8-9) about muscles. The topic? Well, as linguists, we were duty bound to present the group of muscles that gave our field its name* – the tongue. The tongue is crucial for spoken language, but what did our 8 year olds already know about how it shapes language sounds?
By year 3, children in English schools have had a few years of instruction in phonics – a system that teaches the most common associations between sounds (phones) and letters (graphs) to help children ‘decode’ written words. The principle is that by sounding out a word’s constituent graphs and blending the corresponding phones, children can break into written English without needing to rely (too heavily) on memorising full word forms.
However, the phonics schemes we’ve come across as parents or in conversation with schools spend very little time on explicitly describing how, where and with what body parts sounds are made. Some schemes even include mascots that make speech sounds despite having no lips or teeth. Teachers say that the sounds made at the very front of the mouth like /p,b,m/ might elicit some discussion about the lips, and sounds like /f,v/ are talked about in terms of lips and teeth. But sounds at the back of the mouth like /k,g,ŋ/? No-one is sure how to talk about how these sounds come into being.
So the tongue and the back of the mouth are as foreign to our year 3s as the Moon. But unlike the Moon, we don’t need a rocket to find out more about them. Instead, we used a little trick sometimes employed in first year university phonetics classes (that would also buy us a bit of notoriety – more on that later).
That’s how the tongue makes sounds? Sweet!
We ran a little experiment, turning Willy Wonka by handing out lollipops** (or lollipop sticks to anyone who didn’t fancy a sweet). We instructed the children to put the lollipop toward the back of their tongue, then we all read together words with different vowel sounds in them.
Lolly stick demo from me… Photo credit: Hotspur Primary School
Emma directs the sweet chorus Photo credit: Hotspur Primary School
This helped demonstrate how open front vowels like /a/, where the lolly (and tongue!) move down and forward in the mouth, differ from closed back vowels like /i/, where the highest point of the tongue is right close to the back part of the hard palate (resulting in a few lollipops stuck to the roofs of mouths).
Sweets in, tongues out Photo credit: Hotspur Primary School
Surprising level of patience and resisting of temptation… Photo credit: Hotspur Primary School
The kids were amazed at how mobile their tongues were, while we were amazed at how disciplined they were at not chomping the lollipops at the first opportunity. NB: the sweets were not a gratuitous choice! They stick beautifully to your tongue to allow you to focus on how your tongue moves without actually inhibiting it from doing so normally. Until it gets stuck to your palate after a close sound, of course, which will happen if you’re (a) eight years old or (b) narrow-of-mouth, like me.
The experiment demonstrated how place of articulation, or the point at which the tongue, teeth, or lips close or come close together, is a really useful way of distinguishing between sounds, and helps us differentiate words like tap and cap. Tap’s initial /t/ sound is made by the tip of the tongue closing up against the alveolar ridge, just behind the teeth. In contrast, cap’s initial /k/ is made by pushing the back of the tongue right up against the velum, or soft palate. It is the position of the tongue alone*** that prevents misunderstandings about wearing bathroom furniture as a hat.
We also showed the kids some MRI videos from the fabulous website Seeing Speech. These give a fantastic insight into the flexibility and precision of the tongue from a side-on view (pretty hard to achieve any other way), with the added gross-out value of demonstrating just how enormous your tongue actually is.
What other muscles affect how sounds are made?
Some children noticed, though, that place of articulation is not the only thing that differentiates sounds. This led to discussion of another set of muscles and tissues that help us produce speech – the vocal folds. We placed our hands on our throats and made the sounds /s/ and /z/ on repeat. The buzzy feeling of /z/ is due to vibrations in the vocal folds as air is forced between them, and this is called voicing.
Experiencing voicing first hand Photo credit: Hotspur Primary School
To get a sense of what voicing really looks like, we played another video, this time of vocal folds in action from above, and then we got creative. Using a paper cup and elastic bands, we created our own voice boxes, using straws to blow across the elastic-band-vocal folds to cause them to vibrate, and even stretching them with our fingers to create higher pitched sounds. This activity was inspired by one described on howtosmile.org.
Building larynxes! Photo credit: Hotspur Primary School
One of the year 3 form teachers is also the school’s music teacher, so we compared out paper cup larynxes to his guitar collection, and I also brought a kazoo along to demonstrate how voicing changes airwaves. But it was the *other* form who gave us an amazing demo of one of their favourite assembly songs to demonstrate pitch changes – a really glorious moment.
Kazoos are a great way of demonstrating how voicing affects the sound waves that we can produce Photo credit: Hotspur Primary School
Did it all work well?
We thought so! The children took part with enthusiasm, asking great questions about how the vocal cords seemed to change shape and about how speech sounds differ across languages. We taught the sessions on two different days, so we knew we’d had an impact on the first group, as the second already knew some of what we were going to talk about (plus they were well primed for the sweets). We will happily take playground chat as evidence of successful learning!
As for the teachers, they thought that increasing awareness of tongue movements could really help some of the children with language delay. Of course, speech and language therapists employ plenty of exercises that do just this, but we reckon there’s a benefit to be had by sharing all this information with children earlier and more generally, embedding it into phonics learning.
Want to know a bit more?
As you might imagine, we couldn’t do much more than that in a 45-minute session, and we didn’t even get onto mannerof articulation****, a third factor in classifying sounds. We didn’t really demonstrate the International Phonetic Alphabet as a method for representing speech sounds, and we’d have loved to hand round kazoos to all (the teachers may have been less pleased with this). If you’re interested in thinking a bit more about place, manner and voicing and how we use these to describe sounds, here are some resources that might be useful (and spoiler: we’re in the process of trying to develop some that will complement traditional phonics programmes too!).
seeingspeech.ac.uk – the IPA chart is organised by place, manner and voice, so have a play with the videos and audio recordings
*From lingua, Latin for ‘tongue’, came the 16th century coinage ‘linguist’, meaning “master of languages” or “one who uses their tongue freely”. ‘Linguistic’, meaning “pertaining to language(s)” was an early 19th century innovation from German linguistisch, fabulously described by the OED as “hardly justifiable etymologically [… but] has arisen because lingual suggests irrelevant associations.” The term ‘linguistics’ for the field of study followed in the mid 19th century, but only really took off (and overtook its main competitor, ‘philology’) in the late 1940s. All info in this note, apart from the Google Ngram, is taken from the wonderful resource etymonline.com: linguist, linguistic, linguistics.
**Maoam Joystixx were far and away the best sweet for this experiment, with Swizzles Matlow Drumsticks as a decent runner-up as a vegetarian/halal option. No, this isn’t an #Ad. Yes, there was an extensive testing period one afternoon ;).
***Yes, OK, context helps too. But sometimes that is absent, and sometimes terrible analogies happen too.
****This is to do with how the articulators (lips, tongue, teeth, etc.) relate to each other, mostly in terms of how close they are. For example, the initial sounds in both tap and sap are unvoiced and made by placing the tip of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, but where there is complete closure of the tongue against the alveolar ridge for /t/, it’s just close to the ridge for /s/, allowing air to hiss through that small gap.
This blog post is part reminisce, part information about children’s earliest language experience, and part reflection on an event I ran in November 2023 as part of the Being Human festival. If any of this sounds interesting to you, please read on…
My eldest’s first poem was composed shortly before he turned three.
Now, proud parent I may be, but let’s be clear – I’m not claiming that he pulled his mini IKEA chair up to a tiny bureau, called for his quill, and committed his thoughts to parchment with an inky flourish (in fact, now five years of age, Smidge is still largely a pen-refuser).
Rather, he had discovered the pleasure of pairing words like “dog” and “cot” as part of a developing awareness of assonance – vowels that are shared across words, even if their consonants differ.
From there, he started to exclaim over his breakfast – “Mummy! “Spoon” and “moon” rhyme!” We were then just a hop, skip and a jump from his first couplet, gleefully stitched together and bellowed as we puddle-jumped our way to the bus one autumn morning –
Cosy wosey, Rosy nosy!
A very cheerful rendition of autumn from a fledgling poet wrapped up in fleece and mittens.
Smidge’s increasingly conscious play with vowels also reminded me of one of my odder teaching moments. I was in my fourth year teaching Child Language Acquisition at the University of Huddersfield. It was always one of my favourite courses to teach, with a different group each year of enthusiastic, thoughtful, funny final year students.
I started from the beginning, presenting some pretty incredible work showing how children in utero can perceive some vowel sounds and tell them apart about 10 weeks before they are due to be born.
The class started looking at me a little strangely. One or two even giggled.
Of course. I was standing (well, perching) in front of them, about 30 weeks pregnant. As I was passing on degree-level knowledge to my students, I was simultaneously passing on foundational knowledge about English intonation and vowels to Smidge there on the inside, invisible and yet very much present on the room with us. Largely silent, but very much listening in.
Me, not stood in front of my Child Language Acquisition class. Smidge at about 32 weeks gestation, still listening.
Jump now to late 2023. Inspired by my academic knowledge and my experiences as a parent, I’m standing in front of a room full of preschoolers and their parents, at an event called I’ve designed with two colleagues, a linguist (the superb Dr Emma Nguyen) and a poet (the horribly talented Harry Man).
The audience includes nursery friends of Smidge. I ask the children when they learned their first sound. Quick as a flash, Friend-of-Smidge calls out, “Alphablocks!” A gorgeously guileless answer from someone becoming much more consciously aware of the world of sounds around him as he becomes immersed in primary school phonics schemes (on which more another time…)
Two acquisitionists and a poet walk into a children’s story centre… Photo credit: Luke Waddington
I near blow Friend-of-Smidge’s mind when I tell him that he learned his first sounds from inside his mum’s tummy. But this is mostly just set up: for the rest of the hour with the preschoolers, my colleagues and I play on the children’s earliest linguistic experiences – distinguishing vowels – to create poetry with them. 1960s experimental French poetry, no less.
Univocalisms are poems written using just one of the five (orthographic) vowels – A, E, I, O or U. Of course, each of these letters can represent a range of different phonemes (tall, pan, saga, agar)*, and sometimes different orthographic vowels can represent the same phoneme (feet, mini)**. We also played very fast and loose (for linguists) by allowing Y in all cases. But we only had an hour to work with here, so we felt justified!
We provided some worksheets and some envelopes of words for each vowel and encouraged the children to come up with sentences consisting of two noun phrases (containing an adjective and a noun), linked by a verb – so introducing a little extra linguistic vocabulary along the way. The only other instruction was to go as crazy as possible – we wanted as many fancy prawns to scan Granny’s pants as possible!
A fab “A” creation by Brianna, with some sea creatures for extra pizzazz
And they did an amazing job! Our fantastic student assistant Lainie created a zine of their best efforts, which we sent around to all the participating families and you can view here (spot also my own effort, as well as poems by Emma, Harry and Lainie). Huge thanks to the AHRC and the Being Human Festival for funding our event. We now hope to take it around primary schools in the area to encourage slightly older children, around 5-7 years old, to keep playing with their languages and to sneak a bit of early linguistics into their consciousness too.
Here’s a bit of play with U and O (we weren’t going to be too strict about the “uni” part of the univocalism… This poet, Sam, was only three…
What did we learn from the event? That there’s a lot of mileage in just getting children to make funny sounds (even more so if funny faces are involved), that there are few things funnier than the idea of an eggy bee stretching smelly jelly (I mean, genius) and that we have so, so much more to learn about what children know, implicitly and explicitly, about language in the preschool years.
*t[ɔː]ll, p[æ]n, sag[ə], [eɪ]gar **f[iː]t, min[i] – give or take a bit of lengthening of the vowel, indicated by “ː”
It’s 7.30pm on a July evening. I’m lying in the dark, small shafts of light filtering into the room between the blackout blinds and the curtains. I can’t move and I’m trying not to breathe too loudly.
I’m trying to get child #2 (we’ll call him Squidge) to sleep. Squidge, not quite 2-and-a-half, is lying next to me and having none of it. He just wants to try out his new linguistic skills.
His eyes are still open and my arm is going numb, so I decide there’s no harm in getting more comfortable. As I shift in his narrow bed, a strand of my hair falls across Squidge’s face.
“Put my hair on your nose,” he says. “Put your hair on your nose. Put your hair on my nose.”
I make an immediate mental note of this pronominal poetry for later.
I’m particularly interested in the move from third-person to first-person speech in early childhood: primarily (it seems, as a non-expert) structured and modelled by the parent. There’s a move from “where’s Peter’s nose?” and “it’s mummy’s turn…now it’s Peter’s turn”, to “my” and “your” with the timing of the move possibly(?) led by the child.
Do you know if there’s been much research into this phenomenon and what it reflects and depends on?
There are two slightly different questions here, which meet each other in their interest in how children learn pronouns, which are indexical parts of speech; that is, items in language that shift their meaning depending on context.
You and me always…
Let’s take Squidge’s linguistic musings first, because there’s quite a bit more work been done on this than on the second question. Let’s describe what Squidge does first.
In commenting on the scene, Squidge intended to say “You put your hair on my nose.” Abstracting away from the dropping of the first “you” (a common process in early speech), he ‘reverses’ the second-person possessive pronoun “your”, using first-person possessive “my” instead, in reference to the noun “hair”. He then repeats the trick in the opposite direction with reference to the noun “nose”. This is not an isolated incident either – though this moment stood out because of the way in which he noticed his own “error”*, I was quite used by now to him referring to himself using second-person pronouns.
It’s unclear how common reversal of pronouns is in child language. It’s typically associated with children who are autistic, blind, or hard-of-hearing, though very early talkers also seem to reverse pronouns with some frequency, and eldest children seem more prone to do so too.
Squidge doesn’t fall into any of these categories (as far as we know), but there are also plenty of case-studies of typically developing children reversing pronouns, especially swapping out first- for second-person pronouns (the “nose” case), around two years of age. One other way in which he does align with other children in the literature, including some children with autism, is that he is quite an imitative child – impressionistically, he’s a much more enthusiastic (usually immediate) repeater of what he hears than, say, his older brother. So what’s going on?
I am me, so are you…
In general, pronouns present a fascinating example of the difference between children’s production of language (their performance) and their comprehension of it (their competence). While most children use first person pronouns very accurately early on, followed by second and third person pronouns (e.g. he, she, they), they tend to interpret second person pronouns more accurately to start with, followed by first and third person pronouns. In short, they appear to be using first-person pronouns before they’ve fully grasped the full meaning and use-conditions of them.
It’s easy to see why it could be tricky to interpret the difference between “you” and “me/I”, precisely because they shift their referent with each new speaker. Well, sort of. Though the only person who will use “I” to refer to me is me,** I am “you” to a whole range of people. So, plausibly, “you” is just another name for me – at least, this is a hypothesis that a child could make.
That said, that doesn’t seem to be what Squidge is doing, because he’s reversing possessive pronouns (i.e. your and my) as well. Another theory is that some children might understand that there’s a perspective shift involved in pronouns, but not when and how that works. This is also a plausible attempt to make sense of pronouns, given how other parts of language like go and come are more or less acceptable based on perspective.
Whatever a child’s initial hypothesis about you and me, they’ll be “you” to others throughout their life. So what makes a child, especially one who has been prone to pronoun reversal, shift like an adult?
When two become three
The early talker studies suggest a couple of triggers that might lead children out of the pronoun jungle. One is based on the observation that many of the reported pronoun-reversers in the literature are eldest children, who won’t necessarily have been exposed to many “triadic discourses” – that is, conversations involving three (or more) people.
Triadic conversations not only have multiple Is, they will also involve at least two yous that aren’t your own self. It might be a coincidence to share a name with one other person in the room, but add another and it starts to look like something else is going on (unless, like me, that name is Rebecca and you were born in the late 1980s. Then, you’re never alone).
Given that triadic conversations become more of a common experience for children when they experience childcare outside the home, or a family holiday, these things could constitute an external trigger that would make a child rethink how they interpret you. Indeed, Yuriko Oshima-Takane and her colleagues showed that second-born children, who are often in triadic situations from birth, are generally more adult-like in their pronoun use from an earlier age than firstborn children.
Pronouns? They’re child’s play!
Another trigger proposed by Evans and Demuth is a cognitive one. They noticed that a number of the neurotypical pronoun-reversers in the literature stopped reversing pronouns around 2;4 (that’s 2 years 4 months of age). In the case of the child they studied, the shift was very abrupt – she went from reversing nearly 100% of her first-person pronouns to none at all between recording sessions (that’s to say, within about a week).
As a result, they suggest that some internal process of cognitive maturation taking place at around age 2;4 might contribute to the child’s ability to use different linguistic terms to refer to different participants in a conversation. Naomi B. Schiff-Myers, in her observation of her own young pronoun-reverser, Lauren, noticed that Lauren stopped reversing pronouns around the same time that she started to role-play with dolls and invite more imaginative play.
Indeed, two months on from that long evening with Squidge, I can report that he doesn’t pronoun-reverse any more. It’s hard to say exactly when he stopped, but we have also noticed a huge uptick in playing imaginative games, where he takes on a range of roles and interacts more with other ‘players’ than he might have done previously. He seems, at least, to be one more anecdotal brick to add to the ‘cognitive maturation’ wall.
Naming the issue
And so to the second question about self-reference, or more precisely, referring to yourself by your own name. When children do this, effectively referring to themselves in the third-person, how do they switch to more adult-like first person pronouns?
Let’s give an example first. A friend of mine came round for a cup of tea and I witnessed the following exchange between her and her two-year-old daughter Jane (all names are changed):
Friend: Mummy’s drinking her water. Can Jane drink her water? [hands Jane her water bottle] Child: Jane’s bottle.
My friend was very consistent in referring to herself as Mummy and her child as Jane at first mention in an utterance, and using third person pronouns thereafter. Jane was similarly consistent in using full names and didn’t produce a single personal pronoun during that visit (though now aged three, she uses them as accurately as any other child).
Interestingly, it seems that the consistent full-namers, like Jane, may be a completely different group of children than the pronoun-reversers like Squidge. Schiff-Myers (mum of pronoun-reverser Lauren) notes, based on another study by Rosalind Charney, that children use their own names to avoid pronoun confusion (a claim corroborated in another, later study), but that this is not a route available to Lauren as she does not refer to herself using her own name (though she demonstrably knows it). I should note here that neither Squidge nor we as caregivers frequently use full names for self-reference either.
Schiff-Myers even goes on to suggest that using a child’s name instead of pronouns might be of clinical use for children who have delayed language, though this ignores the fact that using a personal name in place of pronouns consistently is marked in typical adult speech and might not come naturally to some caregivers.
How common is it for caregivers to use personal names in place of pronouns? It has been reported that personal names are used much more frequently in child-directed speech than in adult-directed speech – Adi-Bensaid and colleagues report this for caregiver and child names in Hebrew child-directed speech. It is likely that at least some of this uptick in personal name use is in place of pronouns, though other studies find that personal names lag behind far pronouns when used as subjects and objects of sentences in child-directed speech.
Essentially, not much work has been done on how caregivers refer to themselves and to their children, and whether idiosyncratic differences in self-naming affect how children acquire pronouns. We also don’t know much about how full-namer children transition out of full-naming themselves, as this route to pronoun acquisition hasn’t really been studied.
That said, I would expect the triggers that nudge pronoun-reversers towards adult-like pronoun use to have a similar effect on full-namers. As full-namers experience triadic conversations with new conversational partners, they will likely be exposed to people who don’t use personal names in place of pronouns. They will therefore, like the pronoun-reversers, gain more evidence that “you” shifts with the addressee and “I” with the speaker.
The effect of a step in cognitive development is harder to hypothesise about, as we might expect full-namers to continue role-playing with full names. But perhaps, again, role-play with other players would likely lead them to be exposed to different ways of speaking than the child-directed speech they’re used to.
At least now I know what to propose to this year’s students by way of dissertation topics!
Notes
*I don’t really like to refer to children’s non-target-like utterances as “errors”, because according to their grammar at the time, it might not be an error at all. However, “error” is a lot shorter, quicker to read and more transparent than “non-target-like utterance”, so I will scare-quote it instead.
** Forgive me this tortuous locution – I was trying to avoid saying “Only I can call myself “I”. While on one reading (the referential reading), this much shorter statement is true, it’s also untrue on another reading, the bound variable reading, which garnered much attention in formal linguistics following an influential article by the legendary Angelika Kratzer in 2009. They say formal linguists are nerdy…they’re not wrong.
References
Charney, Rosalind. 1980. Speech roles and the development of personal pronouns. Journal of Child Language 7, 509-528. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900002816
Dale, Philip & Catherine Crain-Thoreson. 1993. Pronoun reversals: Who, when, and why? Journal of Child Language,20(3), 573-589. doi:10.1017/S0305000900008485
Evans, Karen E. and Katherine Demuth. 2012. Individual differences in pronoun reversal: evidence from two longitudinal case studies. Journal of Child Language 39(1), 162-191. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000911000043
Kratzer, Angelika. 2009. Making a Pronoun: Fake Indexicals as Windows into the Properties of Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 40(2), 187–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2009.40.2.187
Laakso, Aarre, & Linda B. Smith. 2007. Pronouns and verbs in adult speech to children: A corpus analysis. Journal of Child Language,34(4), 725-763. doi:10.1017/S0305000907008136
Oshima-Takane, Yuriko, Elizabeth Goodz and Jeffrey L. Derevensky. 1996. Birth order effects on early language development: do secondborn children learn from overheard speech? Child Development 67(2), 621-634. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1131836
Schiff-Myers, Naomi. B. 1983. From pronoun reversals to correct pronoun usage: A case study of a normally developing child. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 48, 385–94. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1044/jshd.4804.394
A funny thing happened in a work meeting yesterday and it really threw into relief some of the core qualities I think you need to be a linguist, both for me and for some of my non-linguist colleagues (I work in a school of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, which also incorporates Creative Writing).
The meeting was the long kind that involves a lunch laid on to ensure you don’t just crash for the afternoon (I mean, I still did…) On one platter was a label, perched on top of carrot sticks and chopped pepper, that read “Crudets and dips”. I asked a colleague who is from the region whether crudet was a North East dialect word for crudité, which is what I’d call strips of veg at a buffet. Turns out not – it’s a Newcastle University catering creation, as far as we can tell.
Another colleague, who like me, is not from the area, began to expound on how a linguist had told him that he was a prescriptivist, because he’d have seen crudet and deemed it to be “wrong”. He was interested that I’d first entertained the idea that this could be a case of linguistic variation – essentially that I was looking to describe what I was seeing.
Prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is part of A-level English Language syllabi, and we also cover in it explicitly in the first couple of weeks of a first year English Language/Linguistics degree. However, it’s easy to preach descriptivism and even easier to forget to deploy it. We all carry around linguistic prejudices from our life experience to date, and we may have aesthetic preferences about words, sounds, shapes, phrases – it’d be silly to deny that these exist and persist.
What’s important as a linguist, then, is to learn to identify and actively suppress these when confronted with a new language phenomenon, because they can cause us to miss something potentially interesting.
Relatedly, we need to continually question what we know, especially when faced with our first or dominant languages. Just because we think we know what’s being said doesn’t mean we’re right about it – so, when appropriate*, ask the question.
I’m going to carry this forward into my first year teaching, which starts in two weeks’ time. SEL1008 Nature of Language – a real breakdown of what it is to be a descriptivist is coming your way, so park your linguistic judgmentsand get curious.
*This is a blog post to follow in the future – specifically, when the question might not be appropriate to ask.
One of the things I was most excited about when moving to Newcastle was being surrounded by the fabulous, famous, accent (indeed, accents) that you hear on the banks of the Tyne.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a massive amount of affection for the variety of Yorkshire accents that had been my soundtrack for over a decade, and I was learning so much more about the nuances of West Yorkshire accents living and playing in Leeds. But the Geordie accent was part of my childhood – my dad’s family are from North Tyneside – and I was so intrigued to see what our then 10-month-old would pick up from the local accent, which differs in so many ways from my generic Northern and his dad’s generic Midlands.
The result was, and continues to be, fascinating. At nursery three days a week with carers principally from Newcastle and South Tyneside, our wee one (we’ll call him Smidge here) developed a weekday vs weekend split, particularly with respect to the vowel in words like “book”.
What would you call these? Image credit: CC-BY-SA 2010 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML
Not so in Tyneside English, especially south of the river in South Tyneside, where [bu:ks]* are enjoyed. The vowel [u:] is a close back rounded lengthened vowel, so the tongue is very close** to the very back of the roof of the mouth, near the soft palate, the lips are rounded and the sound lasts a little longer.
Back to Smidge and his reading matter. He’s about 22 months old and he’s been at nursery Monday to Wednesday for about 2 months since it reopened after the first Covid lockdown (he’d managed all of about 6 weeks at nursery prior to it). Despite this brief and relatively late exposure to Tyneside English, he’s asking for [bu:ks] at the start of the week and [bʊks] by the end of the weekend…just in time to read [bu:ks] again with his carers the next week.
One of my colleagues in theoretical phonetics and phonology was quite surprised that such a young child had two such clear variants for the same vowel with, apparently, set days of the week for the use of each.
But for an acquisitionist it’s not quite so surprising, especially as it’s not really to do with the days of the week.
So children know a *lot* more about language, and how we all use it, than they’re often given credit for.
Back to Smidge: what does he do now? He’s starting school in September and he is most commonly a [buk] reader – his vowel may be slightly shorter than that of a true Tynesider, but he’s definitely backer and closer than me and his dad. Of course, this isn’t “inappropriate” use or use of the “wrong” dialect, because the change in the vowel doesn’t obscure the meaning of the word for us [bʊk]-lovers. Moreover, we would *never* correct his pronunciation of a word like this, because we both believe that all accents and dialects are valid, and we want Smidge to develop his own style and to use it confidently. Ach, maybe that sounds very worthy, but it’s true – kids are aware enough to know when your corrections are based on understanding and when they’re based on prejudice. They’ve been around the block far too long to be hoodwinked.
* The lengthening diacritic in [u:] isn’t quite as we’d write it in the IPA – rather than a colon with two dots, it looks more like two triangles stacked on top of each other, pointing towards each other. But WordPress’s typefaces won’t play today – take a look at Watt and Allen’s (2003) illustration of Tyneside English for the accurate diacritics.
** Obviously the tongue in [u] isn’t fully closed against the roof of the mouth – a defining characteristic of a vowel is that there is no full closure between any articulators. If the tongue fully met the roof of the mouth here, you’d end up with a /k/ or /g/ (if you discount the lip rounding!).
A Bender-style note: The studies cited in the multilingualism paragraph concern communities using English/French and Light Warlpiri/Warlpiri/English. In the multidialectal paragraph studies concern communities using Buckie English/Standard Scots English, Dutch/Limburgish, and Yorkshire/Standard Southern British English.
And an Easter Egg: If you read the dialect-grouping study (Jeffries 2019), you’ll know that “[s]timuli for the experiment were recorded from one bidialectal speaker, a 25-year-old female, who was able to switch between two different accents and produce vowel pronunciations typical of both Yorkshire and the South East of England.” It was me!
As I mentioned a week or so ago, we were lucky enough to be back in schools running language experiments with Real Children in July. We visited 4 settings over 5 days, running experiments with 21 preschool-aged children – a fair marathon.
It’s a total privilege to be able to do this because it takes a lot of organising on the part of the childcare providers on top of everything they already do (and, as we’re increasingly aware, early years practitioners get nowhere near the wages they deserve). Children’s time is also, quite rightly, protected, and we can’t simply waltz into their space and take it up.
This means that experimenters have to plan our experiments incredibly carefully to make sure we don’t waste anyone’s time or energy (including our own). That said, no experiment *ever* goes to plan first time, whether you’re working with children, chemicals, or quarks. This means we spent a good part of the week adjusting and refining our experiment. It was a week of *much* reflection so I thought it might be worth sharing our story and some of those reflections here.
What were we trying to do?
As I explained in my previous post, we wanted to get some information about how children produce tag questions (You like flowers, don’t you?) and negative questions (Don’t you like flowers?). These questions are really hard to elicit (that means, to get kids to produce them), so we planned an imitation experiment where we would feed children the question and then see how faithfully they reproduce it. This reveals a certain amount of their linguistic knowledge as they’re more likely to accurately reproduce grammatical constructions they have already learned than ones they haven’t yet mastered, which they will tend to amend or rephrase.
Our original experiment involved using puppets to act out a scene, then asking a child to take one of the roles on. It was based on a study involving 4-6 year old Cantonese speakers and we piloted it with children we knew well.
But when we went into our childcare settings, it was a dismal failure! Children aged 4-5 got distracted by operating the puppet, didn’t want to join in the scene or just got bored halfway through – even the really chatty, outgoing ones. Plus, when they went back into their usual class spaces, they struggled to tell their teachers what they’d been doing. Why did it go so wrong?
Lesson #1: Piloting experiments – don’t keep it too close to home
As I mentioned, we had done a dry run – a pilot – of the study with a child at the bottom end of the age range we were interested in (3 years 11 months, or 3;11) and a child at the top end (6;1). Both children completed the experiment successfully and without getting bored. But we knew both children very well and ran the pilots in their homes.
Of course, we spent a lot of time before running our experiments just playing with our child helpers, and their classmates, and making ourselves familiar. But we had still massively underestimated how much a break from routine, with someone you don’t really know, would affect children’s confidence in taking part in this (admittedly complicated) task.
Lesson #2: All the small details count
A related problem was that in the original study, this act-out task was one of just many tasks that an individual child would take part in, across a series of weeks. The children in the original study were also likely used to meeting strangers and engaging in language tasks, as they were all receiving interventions following a diagnosis of autism (thought the study was a bit skimpy on details about children’s prior experience). In contrast, our children most likely had no experience of this kind of interaction with language specialists, making the background for our respective studies fundamentally very different. We should have taken this into account more seriously from the start.
What we did next; or, lesson #3: Get advice from the other experts in the room!
We had a chat to the nursery teachers about our struggles – they were the ones that told us about the children’s difficulties in describing the task – and ran some new ideas by them. This was invaluable in directing our efforts for the next design.
It was clear that we needed to get children involved in the experiment earlier, rather than making them wait to watch a whole scene before getting involved. We also needed to motivate them a little bit more. There wasn’t really a *reason* to play an act out game with us so they were struggling to understand why they were doing it.
Out of this grew experiment #2 – still an imitation experiment with a puppet – where the puppet became a robot that was learning English. The robot would say sentences in a robot voice (flat, even intonation) and the child would be asked to repeat it back “like a human”. The robot would then say the sentence again, either more human-like or still like a robot, and the child would reward it if it was more human-like (with a strawberry) or give it broccoli to make it “cleverer” if it still sounded robot-like. The teachers we spoke to thought that the robot sounded engaging and that giving the children a clear job to do from the start would help.
And it did… ish.
Our puppet, RoboBen! It’s helpful being handy with a pair of scissors when you need to whip up a robot puppet on the fly (see also Lesson #6 below…)
Lesson #4: Keep it *even* simpler
Experiment #2 worked a lot better – children as young as 4;3 could complete it, they found it entertaining (the robot generated a lot of giggles) and they could describe the experiment back to their caregivers. However, for younger children who weren’t quite 4 yet, there were still too many steps involved – they couldn’t quite connect up the reward system with all the repetition of the sentences.
We were also finding a fundamental problem with the imitation task. As well as the children’s grammar, we were interested in seeing what intonation children would produce these questions with. But rather than “asking” the questions back to the puppet, the children seemed to be repeating them as if they were embedded in a silent “You say it like this…” structure, with the question-ness of the sentence stripped out. This shouldn’t have been surprising – the questions were not connected up by context and there was no real questioner-answerer relationship to support their question-ness either.
So back to the drawing board, via a chat with the teachers, we went…
Lesson #5: Context is everything
I covered this to some extent in lesson #3, but context was key for setting up our third (and final) experimental design. We kept the robot and binned the strawberry/broccoli. We introduced a second puppet, a “human” puppet, who couldn’t understand the robot puppet when he talked. The role of the child now was to be the expert interpreter. As the child could understand the robot when he talked, they had to relay his questions to the “human” puppet so the two puppets could get to know each other.
Now we had set up a questioner-answerer relationship, and this even helped provide context for the questions themselves, which is important for tag and biased questions, which are not used “out of the blue”. The child now had just *one* task to focus on and it was clear and motivated by the context.
Et voilà! Seven children, aged between 3;6 and 5;1, *all* successfully completed the task (with, again, plenty of laughter along the way).
The experiment is still a fragile one – individual children can still choose to take a “You should say…” type approach, where they’re not really re-asking the question, but this just means that we need to ensure we work with plenty of children to be able to group children by individual differences and still be able to say something about the ones who really get into the spirit of re-asking the question. To some extent this is unavoidable: the questions we’re interested in are such a natural part of normal conversation that to shine a light on them at all creates an artificiality that some people just won’t be able to get past. But others can and will, and we can still learn something from them.
What an instructive, humbling, enjoyable, frustrating, spellbinding week. Thanks to all the children that welcomed us into their spaces at Childsplay Cooperative Nursery, Hotspur Primary School, Northumbria University Nursery, and West Jesmond Primary School, and the wonderful staff at all four providers who were so generous and accommodating. We hope to see some of you again in September to run our experiment with some older children!
Oh, and lesson #6: Never forget to pack your puppet…
Sounds like an amazing combo, right? It’s a reality for a friend of mine. A native German speaker raising two children in Newcastle, she noted that her older child – we’ll call her Viktoria – used to produce certain German words with a strikingly Geordie accent.
Before we kick off, a couple of notes on notation that follows. When I talk in this post about sounds, I won’t use the Roman alphabet to represent them (e.g. ‘k’), but I’ll be using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I’ll put example sounds from the IPA in between slashes like this: /k/. So in the word kick, there are two /k/ sounds: one spelled ‘k’, and one spelled ‘ck’. In reality, that second /k/ sound is often pronounced a little differently in spoken English because it’s at the end of the word, – the last ‘kick’ of the /k/ isn’t fully released, so we might represent it like this: [k ̚]. Notice the brackets have changed: because I’m now representing a sound not in its ‘ideal’ form, but as it’s *actually* pronounced, I’m using square brackets.
Back to Geordie German!
In a typical Tyneside English accent (that’s academic for Geordie), intervocalic (between-vowels) /k/ is often pronounced with glottal reinforcement – that is, at roughly the same time as a glottal stop [ʔk]. A glottal stop occurs when the the glottis – the opening between the vocal folds – is completely closed, stopping airflow from the lungs. Glottal stops are pretty common in contemporary British English in place of final consonant /t/. That means words like ticket are pronounced roughly like /tɪkɪt/ or /tɪkɪʔ/ in many British Englishes, but are pronounced more like [tɪʔkɪʔ] in Geordie – it’s one of the most recognisable features of the dialect.
A “workie ticket” is a classic piece of North East slang featuring two intervocalic /k/s… Copyright: Mordue Brewery
So if you’re two-and-half year old Viktoria and learning both German and English in Newcastle, maybe it’s not surprising that German Socken (socks) and Jacke (coat), which also have an intervocalic /k/, morph from /zɔkn/ and /jakə/ to [zɔʔkn] and [jaʔkə]. It’s even more likely given that German-acquiring children can take a while to accurately acquire intervocalic /k/ compared with word-initial and word-final /k/, and some even pronounce it further back in the mouth, albeit not as far as the glottis. As a bilingual learner, Viktoria will hear fewer examples of German intervocalic /k/ from only a couple of speakers, and will hear plenty of Tyneside intervocalic /k/ from her nursery carers, the general population, and probably even her nursery peers – intervocalic /k/ is acquired pretty early in (US) English (there’s no work out there on intervocalic [ʔk] in Tyneside English specifically).
What do you get when you cross German, English, and a pair of socks…? Copyright: GeogDesigns onRedBubble.com
Two years down the road, Viktoria has gained a lot more experience of both German and English and has dropped [ʔk] from her inventory of German sounds. However, her mother notes another feature of Tyneside English in Viktoria’s German which is hanging on more stubbornly: rising intonation outside of questions. This one could endure a wee while – bilingual children often only settle on different rhythmic patterns for each of their languages around age 11, as Whitworth shows for German-British English bilingual children growing up in West Yorkshire.
Postscript: It was *way* harder in writing this post to find the literature on English acquisition compared with German or bilingual literature. Why? Because the paper I eventually found on acquisition of intervocalic consonants in English doesn’t mention the word “English” in the title, abstract, keywords…in fact, *anywhere in the article*. So we can only infer that the language at issue is English because the children were recorded in a lab for work that included the author, and the author is at the University of Washington. So this is a good time to introduce the (ironically also born of the University of Washington) Bender rule: always name the language you’re working on, because language =/= English.
Kehoe, Margaret M. and Conxita Lleó. 2002. Intervocalic consonants in the acquisition of German: onsets, codas or something else? Clinical linguistics and phonetics 16(3), 169-182. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02699200110112213
Stoel-Gammon, Carol. 2002. Intervocalic consonants in the speech of typically developing children: emergence and early use, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 16(3), 155-168. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02699200110112204
