[Possible SPAM] [ILAT] Native language acquisition

[Mona Smith]

Pidamaya.  We are planning to use nature sounds as opposed to actual 
language, but I had been toying with the idea of including words or 
phrases, if it made sense.  Your comments will help me hold off on using 
language in the ambient audio at this point anyway....

Rudy Troike wrote:
> Bill Poser is right -- it is particularly sad that so much effort is
> expended on the study of the acquisition of well-known and accessible
> languages, while the potential for our understanding of the acquisition
> of typologically distinct and even unique languages is allowed to slip
> away as they cease to be learned by children. Bill's reference to the
> one study of Navajo L1 acquisition is probably that of Muriel Saville-
> Troike, who found, in agreement with native-speaker intuition that
> Navajo is a verb-centered language, that children somehow extracted
> verb stems from the prefixed forms they commonly heard and used these
> before nouns. Older children in preschool who were asked to describe
> pictures (which English and Spanish speaking children had described in
> terms of names for the objects represented) by constructing action/event
> scenarios using verbs (e.g. a picture of a boy and a wagon: the boy is
> pulling the wagon).
>
>    Contra the studies that Bill references on the convergence of babbling
> with the phonological/phonotactic structure of the ambient language(s),
> our twins, now 21 months old, have consistently produced very distinct
> "babbling" (as we adults call it, because we don't understand it -- it
> is presumably meaningful to them), neither sounding like either English
> or Spanish, both of which they are regularly exposed to. One of their
> earliest common "pre-words" was [nga] (velar nasal + vowel), and this
> week they began pronouncing their word for triangle, "ga", as [gah],
> sounding very much like the Navajo word for "rabbit", although neither
> English nor Spanish (at least not the variety they are exposed to) uses
> syllable-final [h].
>
>    It would be particularly valuable to see how children might acquire
> Cheyenne, since computationally the possible combinations of sets of
> interrelated suffixes is a huge number, which was successfully mastered
> by many generations of children in the past. This would be one of the
> most interesting potential studies for child language acquisition, given
> the particular morphological structure of the language, and could resolve
> some major theoretical issues, if it could be engineered somehow.
>
>    Some years ago one of my students discovered a girl from a Spanish-
> speaking home in a first-grade classroom who had been labeled a "learning
> problem", since for six weeks she had wandered around the classroom
> paying no attention to the teacher, who spoke entirely in English and
> knew no Spanish. When my student (Caroline Willard) spoke to the girl
> in Spanish, she was perfectly fluent in her responses. Further inquiry
> revealed that when her parents went to work, not having money for a
> baby-sitter, they left the TV on tuned to a local channel which was
> entirely in English. The girl had apparently learned to ignore the English
> she heard on the TV as "background ambient noise", and so continued to
> ignore it when she heard the teacher producing English with other students.
> Only after Caroline showed her the equivalence between Spanish and English
> terms did she begin to pay attention to the teacher's language, and within
> six weeks was ahead of all the children in the class. So it would appear
> that introducing a language as "background ambient noise" would be the
> best way to insure that it would NOT be learned.
>
>     Rudy Troike
>
>