<Language> mama and papa and reruns

[H. Mark Hubey]

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One of the problems with the comparative method, which I listed
on one of my previous posts is the fact that a particular set of
words which satisfy phonetic resemblance to a set of the type
{ana, ama, anna, amma, atta, ....} is not used in the comparisons.

The reason for this is that these words are said to be 'infant
talk', or 'baby talk'. This point of view is further justified
by a kind of a back-compatibility argument of finding such words
in many languages.

Of course, the fact that words satisfying such phonetic resemblance
criteria occur in so many languages is the strongest evidence yet
for various "lumper" theories. I should mention that similar
"lumper" vs "splitter" arguments also rage in paleontology, especially
the paleontology of hominids.

I want to present very strong evidence that this argument (that infant
talk creates phonetic resemblances accross language families and that
these words should not be used in comparisons) has no
merit other than to work against lumper programs and to make the
splitter's work look much better than it really is.

I will only post snippets from this article: "Baby Talk", USN & WR,
15 June, 1998. I know that USN&WR is a newsweekly and not a scientific
journal. That makes the anti-lumper baby-talk arguments even more'
useless; after all, if this knowledge has now spread to the masses,
what purpose does it serve to continue in linguistics?

======================snippets=================================
p.50
Within a few months of birth, children have already begun memorizing
words without knowing their meaning. The question that has absorbed--
and sometimes divided--linguists is whether children need a special
language faculty to do this or instead can infer the abstract rules
of grammar from the sentences they hear, using the same mental skills
that allow them to recognize faces or master arithmetic.
...
An infant's brain, it turns out, is capable of taking in enormous
amounts of information and finding the regular patterns contained within
it.
...
Infants can perceive the entire range of phonemes, according to Janet
Werker and Richard Tees, psychologists...

...
Yet children begin to note word boundaries by the time they are 8
months old, even they though they have no concept of what most words
mean.

p. 52
[Saffran and Aslin] reported that babies can remember words by listening
for patterns of syllables that occur together with statistical
regularity.
...
In the past, psychologists never imagined that young infants had the
mental capacity to make these sorts of inferences.

p.53
Findings like Newport's are suggesting to some researchers that perhaps
children can use statistical regularities to extract not only individual
words from what they hear but also the rules for cobbling words together
into sentences.

=======================end snippets===============================

What this means is that infants learn the so-called "baby-talk" words
which are not allowed in comparisons of languages long before they
begin to talk. This means that the baby-talk arguments have it
backwards. Infants learn to babble what they hear from parents. So if
infants are babbling "dadda", "dad", "daddi", "mommi", etc they
are not making them up but most likely have already heard them often
and are trying to imitate their parents.

There are mailing lists in which people are still repeating the same old
falsehoods.


--
Best Regards,
Mark
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hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey
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