Gems

[Susanne D=?ISO-8859-1?B?9g==?=pke]

I am heartened by the acknowledgement of ³gems² as an insight into language
processing. This has been much of my argument with respect to
cross-linguistic structures. Unusual structures do not show up often because
they are true creations and provide insight into the child¹s language
processing under cognitively challenging conditions. That does not
invalidate them.  Quite the opposite!

One of my favourites in terms of cross-language influences was the
following: 
A 3-year-old German-English bilingual child seemed to have overgeneralised
the VP[V_NP] structure in English as opposed to the German VP[NP_V] when he
analysed the components of "lawn mower". In interaction with his English
speaking father who had just asked him what a lawn mover does, he stated:
³it lawns the grass but doesn¹t lawn the flowers². Probably an attempt to
keep the 2 languages separate.
Mind you someone at work today told me that her monolingual English-speaking
son had talked about "lawning the mow" as well.

Susanne
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­
Dr Susanne Döpke
Consultant in Bilingualism
Speech Pathologist

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