[music] Greetings! My name is Ekaterina Protassova, I work at the University of Helsinki. Today we are going to discuss how children learn languages. First of all, we will talk about how they learn their first language. They all start from scratch, of course. First, the child is born, and a combination of various factors is needed for him or her to learn how to speak: brain development, listening to adults’ speech, learning how to use their own articulatory system, voice development and socialization and cooperation with adults. Let us look at how Deb Roy, a psycholinguist, tried to understand how the word “water” was gradually formed in his son’s speech. He filmed 90 hours of video, watching closely as an amorphous word slowly turned into the word “water”. To analyse this massive amount of material, he needed help from a great number of computer linguists. We believe that in the future, this will be the main way of studying children’s speech. Not journal entries, like it was in the XIXth and in the beginning of the XXth century; not audio recordings, like it was in the middle of the XXth century; not video footage that became possible towards the end of the XXth century and is still done now, but collecting massive amounts of data, big data. This will help us to finally understand how speech is formed in the course of a child’s development from a newborn into an adult. Even after a person reaches the age of 30, speech development doesn’t stop. People continue learning new words and new syntactic structures all their life. We are constantly learning new ways to describe the world around us, because the world is always changing, because we always meet new people to talk with, and every new conversation partner requires a new way of communication. The first type of contact between a child and an adult is eye contact. Surprisingly, every newborn instantly knows which of the adults is looking at them, and, for some reason, this eye contact prompts them to start reacting to the adult’s speech. When babies see something familiar, they stop and smile, when they are disappointed, they cry. This way, they demonstrate their mood with their reactions to the world around them. Relatively early, babies start to use a wide range of different intonations, supposedly, to show how they feel. Sometimes their range of intonations is even wider than that of a 2 or 3 year old child. This way, their attitude towards the world is gradually formed. When children reach about 4 month of age, they start to react to music. They may track the sources of certain sounds. They show surprise and stop in their tracks when they hear a new sound. They start to babble - to make more or less incoherent sounds. Then, gradually, their babbling starts to resemble syllables of adult speech. A small child’s repertoire of sounds includes a variety of sounds from all languages of the world. However, later, only those sounds are left that exist in the main language used by the adults surrounding the child. When children approach their first birthday, they are usually able to say several words. However, only the adults who are closest to the child know what those words mean. Only they can decipher the child’s first, amorphic words. The children at this age understand quite a lot about the world around them, and they can communicate a lot through gestures. Children often accompany words with gestures, thus making their first sentences. It is very important that children use gestures to express themselves even when they have not yet mastered the vocabulary of their native language. A child’s first games, like pat-a-cake or peek-a-boo, are combinations of gestures and words that bring joy to the child. There is an interesting pattern: when a child’s vocabulary reaches around 50 words, he or she starts to produce two-word sentences. The words that the child combines are more or less amorphous, but they convey certain meaning. Sometimes, one word, like “give”, for example, is combined with names of all the objects that the child knows. Thus, it is around this word that first two-word sentences are formed. When the child notices that something happened, he or she names the event. When children reach 2 years of age, the lexical spurt begins. Every day, new words are added to their repertoire. They know and recognize a lot more words than they use themselves. At the same time, children’s morphology becomes more specialized. Usually, children start with using word forms that they hear most frequently in the adults’ speech. It is later that children learn to combine words into constructions similar to those used by adults. By the age of 2-3 years, children’s speech becomes more intelligible, but it is still difficult for an adult to talk to someone else’s children, because they have not yet mastered the whole phonetic or phonological system of the language. However, gradually, more adults start to socialize with the child, and he or she needs to establish contact with different teachers and same-age friends. So the child has to learn a form of language that is comprehensible for these new conversational partners, adjusting speech sounds to match the phonetic and phonological system common to their first, native language. At the age of 3-4 years, children already produce long sentences, ask questions about the world around them, are able to describe actions. By 4-5 years of age, the grammar of the native language is formed, and on a quite advanced level. If we spoke a foreign language on the same level as a 4-5 year old child speaks his or her native language, we would proudly call ourselves proficient speakers. However, a child is capable of much more in his or her native language. The child’s phonetic system is not fully formed yet, but it is going to happen very soon. A preschool child is at the peak of his or her activity and imagination. Formal education at school cuts off many paths that a child’s development could have followed, because the child is adapted to the norm. Surprisingly, stories made up by school children are often more primitive than those made up by kindergarteners. However, school children’s stories are built according to the scenario that the teachers belonging to a certain culture consider important to convey to the children of that culture. By the beginning of school education, not only concrete, but also abstract language concepts are formed, along with a very complex pronominal system that is unique to every language. The child’s vocabulary at this stage increases dramatically. There is a system called CHILDES, a big web portal hosting first language acquisition data from various languages all over the world. The portal was founded by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow. As early as the end of he 1980-s, they were able to start developing a system for the analysis of children’s speech. It was the children’s speech analysis that the first corpus methods were implemented for. Such a portal helps to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods of linguistic analysis and to learn how grammatical and lexical systems of different languages are formed. A famous study by Hart and Risley showed that the parents’ attitude towards their children, the way they speak to them, is a deciding factor that either helps or hinders the child’s success in life. That is why it is important for children to listen to speech addressed to them that describes situations they encounter in everyday life. People of high socioeconomic status talk to their children a lot, and on a wide range of topics. Their vocabulary is far larger than that of people with low socioeconomic status. For the child to be successful, this language input from adults needs to be increased, so that he or she can base his language system on it. From a theoretical standpoint, children’s speech was studied by psychologists, linguists and educators. They focused their attention on individual differences in language proficiency, on gender-specific differences in speech development, on the connection between the order in which the children were born and their vocabulary size. Nowadays, the most important indicator of a child’s language development is the way he or she tells stories, for example, recounting what happened to him or her, or describing a series of pictures. The children’s linguistic capacities are concentrated in these narratives. Some scientists believe that children’s speech is, for the most part, innate; some think that speech is only possible because every word is associated with an object from the world around us, some believe that socialization within a certain culture is key to a child’s development, there also are scientists who think that everything that children say is prompted by their wish to achieve something, with the functions that speech performs in their everyday life. And some scientists think that a child’s speech may be extrapolated from the speech he or she hears every day from the surrounding people. It is very interesting to compare all these theories.
