Parents can help, but children take

a DIY approach to learning language

January 17, 2016 2.17pm EST
Author

1. Jeffrey Lidz
Professor, department of linguistics, University of Maryland

Disclosure statement

Jeffrey Lidz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or
organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond
their academic appointment.

Language learning is not a passive process in which children simply absorb and
copy their parents.
Parents can help children develop their language. But when it comes to building the
linguistic structure that undergirds the
language, new research shows that
children would rather do it themselves.
Perhaps one of the oldest debates in the
cognitive sciences centres on whether
Figure 1Language learning is not a passive process in which children have an inborn faculty of
children simply absorb and copy their parents
language. This faculty makes it possible
for children to learn the language of their
community.
Evidence for its existence comes from the richness of the system that language
users come to have as compared to the finite set of sentences that any one learner
is exposed to.
But, in many cases, it is hard to tell how this faculty operates because childrens
language environment contains many cues to linguistic structure. And, of course,
children learn precisely the language of their community. Nobody exposed only to
English ever learned Japanese.
In the rare and unfortunate cases that children are not exposed to a language as,
for example, with deaf children who are not exposed to a signed language
previous evidence suggests that children nonetheless develop a communication
system with some key structural features of natural languages. These kinds of
situations suggest that children do have an innate faculty of language and that
language can emerge even in the absence of experience.
Children invent their own language structure
New research with four-year-old learners of Korean shows that, even when children
are fully immersed in a language, they acquire linguistic features that are missing
from their environment.
In essence, this work suggests that all children are, in some sense, isolated from the
structures that underlie the language of their environment. And, like the deaf-
isolates, all children (re)invent the structure of their language.
The study focused on how Korean parents and children interpreted a series of
negative sentences. It found, first, high variability among both adults and children in
how they interpret these sentences. Although people were consistent in their
interpretations across multiple sessions, they often differed from each other.
Second, the study showed that the interpretation of any given child was not
predicted by the interpretation of their parent.
The fact that the variability was maintained in the children, but was not passed on
from parent to child, suggests that speakers of Korean do not learn this feature of
the language from their parents.
This was a small-scale study examining an obscure part of the Korean language. We
focused on this feature because of its unpredictable variability among adults.
Most points of variation within a language can be predicted by geographical or other
social features. Think tom-ay-to vs tom-ah-to, soda vs pop, or whether you get in
line or on line.

The fact that this variability is unpredictable

Figure 2 Children have an innate language-
making capacity.
among adults made it a perfect test case for
asking whether children learn from their parents.
And the fact that the variability was independent
in children and parents suggests that parents do
not provide all of the information about their
language to children. Instead, children are able to fill in the gaps, using their innate
language faculty.
In the normal course of development, typical children do hear evidence about the
structure of their language. This evidence comes from the speech of everyone
around them parents, teachers, adults and other children.
When children do sometimes make errors, they typically overcome them by the time
they get to school age. Those errors that remain eventually disappear simply
because they dont match the language of the community.
What this new research shows is that language learning is not a passive process in
which children simply absorb and copy all of the features of their environment.
Instead, children actively construct their language using a combination of their
experience and their innate language-making capacity.