The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (45 page)
Read The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
Around eighteen months, language takes off. Vocabulary growth jumps to the new-word-every-two-hours minimum rate that the child will maintain through adolescence. And syntax begins, with strings of the minimum length that allows it: two. Here are some examples:
All dry.
I sit.
No pee.
More cereal.
Other pocket.
Mail come.
Our car.
All messy.
I shut.
See baby.
More hot.
Boot off.
Airplane allgone.
Papa away.
All wet.
No bed.
See pretty.
Hi Calico.
Siren by.
Bye-bye car.
Dry pants.
Children’s two-word combinations are so similar in meaning the world over that they read as translations of one another. Children announce when objects appear, disappear, and move about, point out their properties and owners, comment on people doing things and seeing things, reject and request objects and activities, and ask about who, what, and where. These microsentences already reflect the language being acquired: in ninety-five percent of them, the words are properly ordered.
There is more going on in children’s minds than in what comes out of their mouths. Even before they put two words together, babies can comprehend a sentence using its syntax. For example, in one experiment, babies who spoke only in single words were seated in front of two television screens, each of which featured a pair of adults improbably dressed up as Cookie Monster and Big Bird from
Sesame Street
. One screen showed Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird; the other showed Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster. A voiceover said, “OH LOOK!!! BIG BIRD IS TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!! FIND BIG BIRD TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!!” (or vice versa). The children must have understood the meaning of the ordering of subject, verb, and object—they looked more at the screen that depicted the sentence in the voiceover.
When children do put words together, the words seem to meet up with a bottleneck at the output end. Children’s two-and-three-word utterances look like samples drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea. For example, the psychologist Roger Brown noted that although the children he studied never produced a sentence as complicated as
Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen
, they did produce strings containing all of its components, and in the correct order:
AGENT
: (Mother
ACTION
: gave
RECIPIENT
: John
OBJECT
: lunch
LOCATION
: in the kitchen.)
AGENT
: Mommy
ACTION
: fix.
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
:
LOCATION
:
AGENT
: Mommy
ACTION
:
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
: pumpkin.
LOCATION
:
AGENT
: Baby
ACTION
:
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
:
LOCATION
: table
AGENT
: Give
ACTION
:
RECIPIENT
: doggie.
OBJECT
:
LOCATION
:
AGENT
:
ACTION
: Put
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
: light.
LOCATION
:
AGENT
:
ACTION
: Put
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
:
LOCATION
: floor.
AGENT
: I
ACTION
: ride
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
: horsie.
LOCATION
:
AGENT
: Tractor
ACTION
: go
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
:
LOCATION
: floor.
AGENT
:
ACTION
: Give
RECIPIENT
: doggie
OBJECT
: paper.
LOCATION
:
AGENT
:
ACTION
: Put
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
: truck
LOCATION
: window.
AGENT
: Adam
ACTION
: put
RECIPIENT
:
OBJECT
: it
LOCATION
: box.
If we divide language development into somewhat arbitrary stages, like Syllable Babbling, Gibberish Babbling, One-Word Utterances, and Two-Word Strings, the next stage would have to be called All Hell Breaks Loose. Between the late twos and the mid-threes, children’s language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it, and no one has worked out the exact sequence. Sentence length increases steadily, and because grammar is a discrete combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday. You can get a feel for this explosion by seeing how the speech of a little boy called Adam grows in sophistication over the period of a year, starting with his early word combinations at the age of two years and three months (“2;3”):
2;3: Play checkers. Big drum. I got horn. A bunny-rabbit walk.
2;4: See marching bear go? Screw part machine. That busy bulldozer truck.
2;5: Now put boots on. Where wrench go? Mommy talking bout lady. What that paper clip doing?
2;6: Write a piece a paper. What that egg doing? I lost a shoe. No, I don’t want to sit seat.
2;7 Where piece a paper go? Ursula has a boot on. Going to see kitten. Put the cigarette down. Dropped a rubber band. Shadow has hat just like that. Rintintin don’t fly, Mommy.
2;8: Let me get down with the boots on. Don’t be afraid a horses. How tiger be so healthy and fly like kite? Joshua throw like a penguin.
2;9: Where Mommy keep her pocket book? Show you something funny. Just like turtle make mud pie.
2;10: Look at that train Ursula brought. I simply don’t want put in chair. You don’t have paper. Do you want little bit, Cromer? I can’t wear it tomorrow.
2;11: That birdie hopping by Missouri in bag. Do want some pie on your face? Why you mixing baby chocolate? I finish drinking all up down my throat. I said why not you coming in? Look at that piece a paper and tell it. Do you want me tie that round? We going turn light on so you can’t see.
3;0: I going come in fourteen minutes. I going wear that to wedding. I see what happens. I have to save them now. Those are not strong mens. They are going sleep in wintertime. You dress me up like a baby elephant.
3;1: I like to play with something else. You know how to put it back together. I gon’ make it like a rocket to blast off with. I put another one on the floor. You went to Boston University? You want to give me some carrots and some beans? Press the button and catch it, sir. I want some other peanuts. Why you put the pacifier in his mouth? Doggies like to climb up.
3;2: So it can’t be cleaned? I broke my racing car. Do you know the lights wents off? What happened to the bridge? When it’s got a flat tire it’s need a go to the station. I dream sometimes. I’m going to mail this so the letter can’t come off. I want to have some espresso. The sun is not too bright. Can I have some sugar? Can I put my head in the mailbox so the mailman can know where I are and put me in the mailbox? Can I keep the screwdriver just like a carpenter keep the screwdriver?
Normal children can differ by a year or more in their rate of language development, though the stages they pass through are generally the same regardless of how stretched out or compressed. I chose to show you Adam’s speech because his language development is rather
slow
compared with other children’s. Eve, another child Brown studied, was speaking in sentences like this before she was two:
I got peanut butter on the paddle.
I sit in my high chair yesterday.
Fraser, the doll’s not in your briefcase.
Fix it with the scissor.
Sue making more coffee for Fraser.
Her stages of language development were telescoped into just a few months.
Many things are going on during this explosion. Children’s sentences are getting not only longer but more complex, with deeper, bushier trees, because the children can embed one constituent inside another. Whereas before they might have said
Give doggie paper
(a three-branch verb phrase) and
Big doggie
(a two-branch noun phrase), they now say
Give big doggie paper
, with the two-branch NP embedded inside the middle branch of three-branch VP. The earlier sentences resembled telegrams, missing unstressed function words like
of, the, on
, and
does
, as well as inflections like
-ed, -ing
, and -
s
. By the threes, children are using these function words more often than they omit them, many in more than ninety percent of the sentences that require them. A full range of sentence types flower—questions with words like
who, what
, and
where
, relative clauses, comparatives, negations, complements, conjunctions, and passives.
Though many—perhaps even most—of the young three-year-old’s sentences are ungrammatical for one reason or another, we should not judge them too harshly, because there are many things that can go wrong in any single sentence. When researchers focus on one grammatical rule and count how often a child obeys it and how often he or she flouts it, the results are astonishing: for any rule you choose, three-year-olds obey it most of the time. As we have seen, children rarely scramble word order and, by the age of three, come to supply most inflections and function words in sentences that require them. Though our ears perk up when we hear errors like
mens, wents, Can you broke those?, What he can ride in?, That’s a furniture, Button me the rest
, and
Going to see kitten
, the errors occur in only 0.1% to 8% of the opportunities for making them; more than 90% of the time, the child is on target. The psychologist Karin Stromswold analyzed sentences containing auxiliaries from the speech of thirteen preschoolers. The auxiliary system in English (including words like
can, should, must, be, have
, and
do
) is notorious among grammarians for its complexity. There are about twenty-four billion billion logically possible combinations of auxiliaries (for instance,
He have might eat; He aid, be eating
), of which only a hundred are grammatical (
He might have eaten; He has been eating
). Stromswold wanted to count how many times children were seduced by several dozen kinds of tempting errors in the auxiliary system—that is, errors that would be natural generalizations of the sentence patterns children heard from their parents:
PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH
: He seems happy.
Does he seem happy?
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD
: He is smiling.Does he be smiling?
