originating from Bogoyvalenskiy, D

[Thora Tenbrink]

>work that way, but it just means to me when a child uses 'gooder' in a task
>and then 'better' immediately after, regardless of the context, you can't
>then reliably say that that child hasn't acquired the irregular
>'good-better' just because they say 'gooder' in an unnatural setting like a
>wug test. Who is to say that the child doesn't then use 'better' as a
>comparative to the same friend in the minibus on the way home?
You find this effect in many well-known concepts and contexts, e.g.
regarding the acquisition of before and after: children may use them
correctly in certain natural contexts as early as age 2, while
psycholinguistic experiments prove that a thorough, more or less
context-free knowledge of the (possible) meaning(s) of before and after is
not acquired before an age of seven years or so.
This is to say, natural language is acquired in many different ways and
always in certain contexts, and nearly always involving pieces of readily
available formats.
Thus, to me it does not really make sense to ask when exactly the child has
acquired the irregular 'good-better', it is more complicated than that.

>of the system. I don't believe to the child everything they have heard is
>readily available, if it was there would be no such thing as language
>acquisition and even if it was then who is to say that the child actually
>understands what they are saying?

I did not mean to say that everything was readily available. What I mean is
that some strings of words, or phonemes, or formats, are more available
than others. Such as "thank you", which is certainly not broken down into
verb and pronoun each time it is processed; it is acquired and used as a
ready-made expression to be used in certain contexts.
Similarly, while "I did better than you" must of course be understood
before it can be used correctly, this does not necessarily involve an
understanding of the irregular comparative. Rather, it may involve  an
understanding that this is the sentence to use when this particular meaning
should be expressed. "doing better than" might then be a format that can be
used involving varying participants.
To me, this is even more plausible because the German equivalent is no
exact translation of the English sentence. "Ich war besser als du" really
means "I was better than you", but it would most certainly be used in
contexts where English speaking people use "I did better than you". The
literal translation "Ich tat (es) besser als du" is, to my knowledge,
almost never used.

It could be that the question to ask really is, when do children understand
that "better" (which they may have used correctly in varying contexts for a
long time) is systematically related to "good" -- in the same way as
"worse" is to "bad", and "faster" is to "fast"? Then, a metalinguistic
knowledge about comparatives can be said to have been acquired.

-- Thora




http://www.spatial-cognition.de


---------------------------------------------

Thora Tenbrink		
Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV
Universitaet Hamburg
FB Informatik
Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30
D-22527 Hamburg

Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382
Fax:  +49/*40/42883-2385
e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de
http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm