Underestimating Language

Mikael Parkvall parkvall at LING.SU.SE
Tue Dec 10 00:15:16 UTC 2002


Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro wrote:

>Can you offer some empirical evidence showing, for example, that German
>children master their language later and/or worse than Jamaican ones?

No, I cannot, and it was for that very reason I wrote "whether or not this
corresponds to an additional burden in acquisition or processing is
another, albeit related, matter" in the part of my message you cited.

Not only am I unable to come up with such data, but I would also suspect
that German children in fact do not have more difficulties than Jamaican
children in acquiring their mother tongue. Children seem to be able to
absorb even the silliest features of human language. If complexity in my
sense (i.e. the addition of yet another rule to a system) at all
corresponds to increased difficulties in acquisition, I would expect that
to be in SLA rather than in first language acquisition.


Mikael Parkvall



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