September 22, 2015

“Dada!” “Mama!” “¡Papá!” “¡Mamá!”

A child’s first word is a momentous occasion. As it should be! Today, we scramble for cell phones, share videos with relatives around the world, and wait to find out what word number two will be. It is an exciting time in the child and parents’ lives. As the months stretch on, the child learns more words and her vocabulary grows. Now she can say:

“Dada!” “milk” “want” “no” “ball”

Individually, the child can communicate a variety of meanings with just five words. If she says “want” when there is a piece of fruit on the table, her parents know that she would like to eat the fruit. “No” by itself can turn down and number of activities suggested by a parent and “ball” can signal playtime. Once she has enough words in her repertoire, the trick is compiling them together in meaningful and well-structured phrases.

When she says “milk” by itself, she could be thirsty or she could be pointing out a familiar object. If she says “want milk” it becomes clear that the interpretation should be the former; she would like to drink the milk. Although few adults would agree that “want milk” is an acceptable English sentence. (Imagine using it to order a latte at a café!) Yet for children, it’s the way they explore creating phrases for the first time and it’s perfectly normal. It’s an exciting step in language development.

Looking from afar, the formula for building sentences is simple. Take some words that have the meaning you want, add them together in a way that is permissible in your language, and there you go! When we look closer, it gets a bit more complicated for these young language learners. They have to take the meaningful words like “want” and “milk” and tie them together with function words like “I” and “the”. Together “I want the milk” becomes a well-formed, English sentence.

One way linguists gauge a child’s progress in language development is by measuring the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). This is done by counting the meaning-bearing parts of each phrase or utterance. For example, “ball” would have an MLU of one, “want ball” would have an MLU of two, and “want balls” would have an MLU of 3 because “ball” carries the meaning of the round toy and the plural marker “-s” signifies that there are more than one. Overtime, MLUs grow in length as children’s vocabulary and language structure skills grow. Children don’t start off spitting out full, complex sentences, but they build them up slowly over time (adding about 1.25 units per year) and different children increase their MLUs at different rates [3]. So parents, have patience and keep talking to your child. Don’t be alarmed if siblings develop utterances in different ways.

Looking at noun phrases in English and Spanish, we can see that they differ quite a bit and children need to have acquired some function words, like “the” or el/la to produce adult-like noun phrases. In English, we put the definite article “the” first followed by the adjective (if there is one) and then the noun, e.g. “the red ball”. In Spanish, we also start with the article, followed by the noun, and the adjective often comes last, e.g. la pelota roja. Additionally, in Spanish, we have the added feature of grammatical gender. All Spanish nouns are either assigned feminine or masculine gender and the article and coordinating adjectives must agree with the gender marked on that noun. To say the “the red ball” in Spanish, “ball” pelota has feminine gender so the article must be la and the adjective must end in –a, roja “red”.

In both Spanish and English, plurals (most often) are formed by adding –s to the ends of nouns. We can have one “ball” and pelota or two “balls” and pelotas. In English, this has no bearing on the article or the adjective. “the” and “red” do not change whether we use the singular “ball” or the plural “balls”, but in Spanish, the article and adjective must agree with the noun to form la pelota roja “the red ball” and las pelotas rojas “the red balls”. While it may seem as though grammatical gender and plurality complicate noun phrases in Spanish, native speakers are very good at acquiring these patterns and using them to produce well-formed noun phrases.

In the beginning, children may not be producing noun phrases, preferring to use bare nouns like “ball” instead of “the ball”, but they are listening when parents produce these sentences and are slowly learning to incorporate them in their own speech. When listening to Spanish they can pay attention to the sound endings, the feminine –a at the end of pelota compared to the masculine –o at the end of queso “cheese”, the distribution of these sounds in the speech stream, and the way they function in sentences. These three aspects will help them learn and use grammatical gender in their speech later on [1].

As they are developing their understanding of ways to make good noun phrases, children may use article-like elements that are marked for proper grammatical gender when they are in the two word stage. Instead of using la with feminine words like la pelota or el with masculine words as in el queso, the child might say a pelota or e queso. This shows the beginnings of grammatical gender development in Spanish speakers and bilingual children. Additionally, if they use an adjective, they may make it agree with the noun in gender even if there is no article present, such as in the feminine phrase mamá linda “pretty mama” [2]. These types of categories that play a more functional role in language, such as plural and grammatical gender markers, may be appear at different times in the language learning process for different languages. What is important, as always, is for parents to give their children plenty of good input and overtime, the children will be able to use these elements of speech effectively.

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References

[1] Mariscal, S. (2008). Early acquisition of gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase: starting small. Journal of Child Language, 35, 1-29.

[2] Montrul, S. (2004). The Acquisition of Spanish. Morphosyntactic Development in Monolingual and Bilingual L1 Acquisition and in Adult L2 Acquisition. [Series on Language Acquisition and Language Disorders]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

[3] O’Grady, W. (2005). How Children Learn Language. [Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lauren Perrotti

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