Early Language Acquisition

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jill. I’m calling from Bayview, Wisconsin. It’s part of Milwaukee, and I like to listen to the podcast as I walk along Lake Michigan.

Oh, wow. Well, Jill, what can we help you with?

Well, thanks so much for taking my call. It’s something that I’ve been curious about for a while, and I don’t even know if I would start researching it.

It’s about how children acquire spoken language.

So I’ve anecdotally noticed that my daughter and my friend’s children start with nouns.

That the first word that they’ll speak is often a noun.

For my daughter, it was a cat.

And I think mine was juice, et cetera.

And then I think maybe verbs would be next.

But I’m wondering if this is a pattern across languages,

Across time, even maybe across geography,

That as children acquire their spoken language,

They tend to start with a noun

And then progress through other parts of speech.

Interesting. I did that.

This is wonderful.

This is something I could talk about for hours,

Even though I’m no expert whatsoever on it.

I’ve seen it in my own son, just as you’ve seen it in your daughter and your other relatives.

It’s wonderful to watch the language come in.

You’ve got a couple questions there.

To answer them all kind of in one big blow, and then I’ll do a little kind of breaking it down.

Nearly everyone who is not impaired, that is if they can hear and their vocal cords are functioning,

Their tongue is there, will speak in pretty much the same order no matter what.

No matter where they are in the world, no matter what language they speak,

They will almost always master the parts of their language spoken around them in the same order.

It’s really interesting.

And they start a little earlier than the nouns with practicing the sounds that they hear.

There’s a great FAQ, a frequently asked questions list,

At the Linguistic Society of America website, lsadc.org.

You can find it there.

But they summarize this so perfectly.

They just make it plain that as long as you are talking to a child,

They will pick up language.

You do not need to instruct them.

There are no lessons required.

So they start with these sounds.

They repeat the sounds that they hear around them,

Their vowels.

There are some vowels that are common to all languages,

But the consonants and whatever.

And then, like you say, they’ll pick up some nouns,

Things that are incredibly common to them,

To their environment, and interesting.

So that’s why mama and papa, or mommy and daddy,

Are often the first words they say.

But cat is a really common one,

And dog is a really common one,

Because these animate, really interesting creatures just attract their eye and their omnipresent.

Yeah, yeah, mine was spatula.

She was fond of the kitchen.

Not really, not really. What was yours, Grant?

I don’t know, actually. I don’t know.

You don’t know your first word?

No, I don’t know what my first word was.

Mine was bird.

Was it bird?

Bleh.

And what was yours, Jill? Do you remember?

Mine was juice.

Oh, yours was juice. Okay, yours was juice. Okay, very good.

Anyway, to make a long story short, then they move on.

They don’t use the complex words for a while.

They’ll move on to a little more complicated verbs.

The verbs appear almost when the nouns do.

Oh, really?

But it’ll be easy verbs like see and run.

Or even something general like do.

And by the time they’re in kindergarten, say about five or six,

They’ve really mastered all of the grammatical functions of English naturally.

They do make mistakes.

They do need some refinement.

But generally, all the rules are there.

They just simply need to be guided to use the right rules at the right time.

It’s really kind of incredible.

There are many theories about why humans all generally learn language in the same way.

Some people believe it’s hardwired in us,

The same way that birds might be hardwired to migrate

Or to understand the songs of other birds.

And other people believe that it’s just that the human brain is so impressionable

That we could learn anything as a child

As long as there were people around us who were doing it so that we could emulate it.

It’s really interesting stuff.

I will link to this FAQ on the Linguistic Society of America site.

There’s so much literature about this, though.

There are people who devote their careers to language acquisition.

It’s more than I could say in this few minutes.

So, Jill, does that make sense to you?

It sort of jibes with your experience, right?

It does totally make sense.

And my daughter is kind of in the irregular verb phase right now

Where she conjugates everything the same way, you know, socially.

I put that on the table.

How old is she?

She doesn’t understand that.

She’s three right now.

Oh, she’s three.

This is the reason we have this show, Jill.

Language is the most remarkable thing that humans do.

I think so.

Did you do that?

I knew you two would have the answer for me.

But we’ll link to a lot of resources.

We’ll try to find some summaries of the topic,

And we’ll see if we can find some books to recommend

That won’t overwhelm with a lot of academic talk,

And we’ll kind of just express the joy that we feel

When we talk about language acquisition.

Oh, I would really appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling, Jill.

Okay, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your language questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.