Native language acquisition

[Richard Smith]

This discussion of background sound has been really interesting to follow

I wonder how "continual TV presence" works on a young mind as well?
Does the continual mist of sprayed information/entertainment eventually
harden minds so that listening and even seeing requires "conscious effort?"
I notice a strange lethargy in kids before a TV screen,
Rarely laughing at jokes,rarely even smiling at what is obviously funny.
There seems to be no expression of reaction or interaction.
But when I tell/act out traditional stories in a class full of kiddos
MOST of the kids are right with me...snickering,laughing at silly parts
And just a few remain with those glazed over eyes.

Richard
Wyandotte Oklahoma


On 7/11/07 1:50 AM, "Rudy Troike" <rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU> 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