Prologue

The acquisition of language is likely to be the most impressive accomplishment of each individual human
being and at the same time for most humans it does not seem less natural and more complex than breathing.
Other living beings do not express themselves with the same range of forms and despite the incredible
development of artificial intelligence we cannot get computers to really communicate as well as a five-year-
old child in fact just like leonardo da vinci studied birds when he wanted to create a flying machine,
computer scientists might study children in order to make machines communicate

so why do children use language more expertly than any machine could in this day and age

well part of the answer might well be in the quantity and quality of what we call their input the language that
surrounds them and especially the language that is addressed to them called child addressed speech

how does the nature status gender age of the person you are speaking to influence
how you speak to them and what you say to them?

imagine yourself greeting your best friend the president of the united states your mother your doctor or your
friend's baby for example

does the nature status gender age of the person you're speaking to influence how you speak to them and what
you say to them

how would you your best friend try to think of that if you were to meet the president of the united states
what would you say would it be the same thing as what you say or do with your best friend

to illustrate that let us look at some greetings in different contexts and especially between different types of
participants

so here is a set of examples to illustrate greetings

“Kevin and Kate meet” (brother and sister) This is us

What is special in the greeting here

Greetings are transformed by coronavirus, social distance, fear of contamination, distance between bodies
depends on the context even within a family

Clip “Stressed out” (two friends) by Twenty One Pilots

The ritual for greetings is an enactment of their friendship words are replaced by an embodied choreography
which is often the case between people or participants who are their age. It’s new way of greeting with this
specific choreography.

Queen Elizabeth II Meets Margaret Thatcher The Crown

In the video we have just seen it's the status of the two participants that conditions who does what, she has to
bow down in front of the queen and that's the way it is

“Rue and Jules meet” (2 friends) Euphoria

Here two friends who have not seen each other in a long time will run towards each other, rush to embrace
the other and then produce greetings about their feelings such as “i've missed you” so you see that the
importance of the words is connected to the fact that they haven't seen each other in a very long time.
“Joker meets Bruce Wayne” (future enemies) Joker

Here the main idea is that joker needs to kneel down because he is meeting a child and they're not the same
height so he kneels down to create some symmetry between himself and the child he's meeting him for the
very first time and it has some consequence because they're going to be future enemies.

“Detective Peralta meets Captain Holt” Brooklyn Nine Nine

The detective has a quite superficial warmth and that meets a very stern face so there is an asymmetry
between the two participants reaction, you have a very warm welcome smiling, etc and the other one has a
stern face, so facial expressions during greetings will depend
on who each person is and what they want to express.

“Trinity Killer (antagonist) meets Dexter” Dexter

Here it is interesting the gaze and the importance of the name for the rest of the story and the fact that
instead of having the person tell her name they used the name tag which is not very common

“Kate and her baby Jack” This is us

So here you have Kate with her baby and what's really important is touch, she touches the baby and then
takes the baby in her arms the use of very high-pitched voice and repetition is all very effective, all those
features enable her to enact the embody through her voice the love that she has for her baby

important resources that we have found in our examples of greeting

we have postures, we have touch, body movements, gaze, facial expressions, actions and verbal content

those resources we use for greetings are also resources we use in all kinds of communicative actions in our
daily life

those resources are used to construct meaning the adjective i will use myself to refer to constructing
meaning is the word semiotic i will thus call them semiotic resources

we have seen examples of all those resources in the clips posture touch actions body movements gesture
gaze facial expressions verbal content prosody
This is an experiment that was conducted on several languages

I am giving you illustrations in French, english and japanese and the first audio file you will hear the adult is
speaking to an adult in the second one the the adult is speaking to a child

it was each time exactly the same sentence read to an adult and read to a child so it's not spontaneous speech
it's just utterance, the sentence, that the experimenters, made them read what are the differences between
when adults speak to adults and i don't speak to children

Child addressed speech

The sweet music of spaces (Darwin, 1877)
Let us talk about some of the dimensions what i would like to illustrate is that there are unconscious vocal
adjustments adapted to the baby's musical sensitivity. as you've heard when the adult was talking to a child
the whole melody of the voice was much more interesting with a lot of variations

language addressed to children is characterized by a remarkable musicality which is expressed through

highly exaggerated prosodic parameters it is also one of the child's earliest musical experiences and the
prosodic exaggeration that characterizes it may make it easier for children to spot different units of their
mother tongue in conjunction with other cues. Thus the language addressed to the child is characterized by a
higher pitch from three to four semitones a great continuity in the evolution of the melody and of the simple
and unidirectional intonation contours five or six prototypical contours come back regularly with different
functions to attract and maintain the baby's attention or on the contrary to calm him down

the flow adapts to the condition and there is more regularity and arithmeticity in the productions in language
addressed to the child as well as more and longer pauses

you have slowing down, syllables last longer in child addressed speech especially in content words

the second feature is this focus on content words there is more of an prosodic saliency on content words, the
pitch is different, there's emphasis, overall there is higher pitch but there are exaggerated intonation contours
with more variation between the lower pitch and the higher pitch,the pitch varies a lot

I don't often end utterances with rising intonation when they speak to children and they make longer pauses
already in their mother's womb babies prefer their language addressed to children over the language
addressed
to adults and this preference will be maintained until the age of 19 months when the child's progression in
the mother tongue seems to depend less on the style of speaking they prefer language addressed to children
all the more so as adults use strongly modulated and exaggerated melodies with rapidly rising contours, the
children's
preference for that kind of speech underscores its potential importance during the language acquisition
process

Inconscious vocal adjuestemts adapted to the baby’s musical sensitivity

you can almost hear the melody the notes and baby's preference for this type of language is really noted and
there are a lot of scientific papers about that from about birth to 19 months and this is also why there's so
much singing addressed to children in a lot of cultures especially in the english-speaking world there are a
lot of songs and nursery rhymes such as this one which is very recently rhythmical

hickory dickory dock

the mouse ran up the clock the clock
struck one the mouse ran down
hickory dickory dock

very often those nursery rhymes are accompanied by gestures so that the meaning can be even more
accessible to the children and they learn the gestures at the same time as the words and this all makes for
unconscious pedagogy which evolves as the baby grows up

Example
unfortunately you can't see the mother because she's filming the baby but you can hear her, it would be also
interesting to watch her facial expressions and her gestures. we can see the baby and how he answers the
mother and replies exactly at the right time. this is called turn taking when each of the participants really
know when to produce language

How would we qualify the prosody in child addressed speech?

you have higher pitch more variation in pitch and it's all slower

In terms of the lexicon

There are fewer words than when an adult addresses another adult the words are less varied there are a lot of
repetitions of the same words they're all words that have that are used very frequently they're words
associated to the here and now

As far as the syntax is concerned

syntax is simplified, they are a lot of repetitions and a lot of reformulations

here is the transcription of the beginning of the video

there are less than 60 words in 61 seconds that's one word a second that's much slower than actually normal
conversations are.
and you have throughout the whole productions of the mother you have reformulations of the same two
ideas in red and in green in red you have the idea “talk to me” the mother is filming and wants the child to
produce
vocalizations and in green you have her comments about what the baby says

so once the vocalizations are produced the baby coos the mother makes comments about them and she gives
value to them she shows the baby that she praises the baby for having produced vocalizations

adults adopt their way of speaking to the capacities of their childand adopt a particular register language
addressed to children also called motherese” or baby talk” in english which one finds in a large number of
cultures around the world but the adaptations are not only musical prosodic it is a particular way of using
language extremely simplified in terms of syntax meaning and phonological repertoire and it is interesting to
note that those vocal adjustments are made in an intuitive and natural way and rarely take place outside of
the
context of interaction with a baby

at the lexical level words are transformed and replaced by the munitives and there are fewer different words
than in speech addressed to adults

at the phonological level the repertoire might be reduced the characteristics of the language addressed to
children are not static and mothers adapt the way they speak to the age of the child

the morphology includes the use of function words called free morphology and the use of tenses aspect
modality

simpler syntax means that the utterances will be less complex, shorter, simpler

pragmatics involves the functions of language speech acts will be less varied than an adult speech

but um this is not true for every culture, every culture has their specific way of addressing children what i
have shown so far are children in western societies, in western societies idols consider that children must
participate in interactions from birth this is not the case in all cultures there are indeed some exceptions
where parents do not change the way they speak when addressing their children because they do not
consider them as a partner in the interaction before they are able to produce their first words

for example the samoa community in the southwest pacific or the kaluli's in papua new guinea or the quiche
maya in Guatemala

however among the kaluli's if there is no simplification of the language strictly speaking the exchange is
more complex than it seems because it is triadic, the mother using the mediation of a brother or sister more
elderly to direct the interaction with a baby so there is also a form of guidance where the mother provides a
lot of information on the functioning of the interaction

Example

you will see another video please pay attention to what the mother does and what ellie the little girl does

so what the mother has used here is a gesture not only does she repeat are you finished but she repeats the
gesture that has a kind of redundant meaning with finished which is conventionally used to express the
notion of having finished

here is a transcription another way of transcribing

on the left the participants in the middle you see the actions and gestures, ellie does not speak but she
moves.the middle column is quite full in terms of her actions and gestures and then vocal and verbal
productions are in the right column and only the mother uses words and she vocalizes line five as you can
see

ellie has finished her meal and her mother is providing both a spoken and gestural expression of her
state. ellie's mother expects the gesture to help her daughter understand the meaning of her multi-modal
utterance by linking gesture and speech the mother grounds the word finished and facilitates ellie's access to
meaning as she relies on both auditory and visual cues

she actually connects her own production of a recurrent gesture a gesture that is repeated very often in
conventional communication which is called the palm down lateral with the arms sweeping towards the
exterior. this recurrent gesture is used to express completion to ellie's own behavior so she connects her own
vocal production verbal production and a gesture

after two repetitions on the part of the mother of the same multi-modal production this gesture plus finished
ellie seems to eco her mother's gesture and a more sketchy performance with a reverse movement from
periphery to center probably because of the positioning of her arms at the beginning of the gesture ellie's
body is in resonance with her mothers

studies show that the nature and the frequency of maternal gesture influenced the development of children's
communicative repertoires caretakers also use gestures in playful scripts or songs and nursery rhymes

for example bye bye waving the hand peekaboo hiding and then opening and saying peekaboo so that's a
playful way of playing with the adult's absence which is very stressful for the child bravo clapping your
hands

all those gestures are a way of teaching the child specific conventional gestures along with words parents
spontaneously use gestures in everyday communication so you have actions and gestures and songs which
are a way of teaching the words and their meanings by associating them with gestures and actions but
parents also
spontaneously use gestures in everyday communication. All those gestures derive from the culture in which
the children are being raised and have very strong social and symbolic values .caretakers embody their
communicational intent more and rely on redundant multimodal combinations when the children are
younger gestures are used to attract the child's attention to particular events objects or words to highlight
reinforce
and disambiguate the spoken content and function as a support system secondary to speech so gestures are a
support system that complements speech but parents also are experts at using exaggerated facial expressions

gaze so how they use their eyes and gaze at the child and gaze at an object that they want the child to look at

touch there's a much more touching the child than with adults

and posture going towards the child going backwards doing all kinds of things with your trunk

to communicate more efficiently with their children

why do i just use specific features to address their children rather than communicating with them just like
they do with other adults why do they adjust to children

one reason is that it allows them to maintain social bonds but also express affect and express specific speech
acts. another reason is that it increases comprehension

so there are specific linguistic benefits

what could be the function of each of the features specific to child addressed speech pause or change of
pitch mark grammatical structure words link to the context to the environment enable the child to understand
the
meaning because if the child is surrounded by objects or events and you talk about
them you can refer to them more easily

the redundancy between gesture and speech are also ways to construct meaning

and prosody contours marks speech acts such as calling requesting prohibiting soothing

you have a different prosody according to the speech act you are using

the notions to remember

child directed speech also called motherese or parentess or baby talk

it's the type of discourse adults use when they speak to children and it's characterized by specific
features or a clear and simplified way of communicating to younger children used by adults and older
children cds child-directed speech is often more melodic and emotionally charged it's thought to appeal
more to babies they pay more attention when they are spoken to in this manner but not only babies also
children and it
varies according to the child's age the specific features of cds child directed speech include but not
exclusively slowing down using high pitch simplified syntax simpler vocabulary repetitions reformulations
adding multi-modal cues gestures facial expressions gaze and so on and so forth

scaffolding
in a building scaffolding is a temporary structure used to support a work crew and materials to aid in the
construction maintenance and repair of buildings. In french the word is echafaudage but in french the word
for scaffolding when it is used in terms of learning or to characterize the strategies adults use with children
or with second language learners also in French the word is etayage

the term scaffolding is used to express how adults (experts) provide support and guidance to help children
(novices) learn especially when it concerns learning language when the children learn the skill at stake the
support can be lessened as their abilities develop and until they can do the new skill all on their own
scaffolding is also a way for adults to help children learn and when they they evaluate assess that the child
has learned enough they can decrease the scaffolding and let the children be more autonomous or more
agented more be the agent of their own learning

so what kind of support can be given support may be given for example by indicating that there is a problem
asking questions reformulating providing praise yeah you you're gonna do it don't worry you you're doing a
good job and so on by gesturing by acting by exaggerating facial expressions and so on

those two notions the notions of child-directed speech and of scaffolding were specific to the inputs, how
adults address children

content words are opposed to function words content words are words that possess semantic content they
possess a meaning that is that you need to learn they refer to an object an event and they contribute to the
meaning of the sentence in which they occur

function words which we oppose to content words are words that express grammatical relationships among
other words within a sentence so specify the attitude or mood of the speaker

Let's do a little exercise

Which words are Content words / Function words

Child address speech

Content and Function words

There are great variations between mothers

Syllables last longer in child addressed speech

Function words are words that express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence or
specify the attitude and mode of the speaker

Prepositions, determiners, conjunctions are function words

darwin
lived from 1809 to 1882 he was a man of the 19th century

an english naturalist biologist geologist he was famous for the theory of evolution in a nutshell all species of
life the sun from a common ancestor he was one of the first scientists known to have kept a diary about his
first born son he observed and wrote down how his baby expressed his emotions through every possible
communicative resource we have in our bodies vocal productions, body movements, facial expressions,
words he wrote about his son just how he had written about rocks animals men and women that he had met
during his voyage on the beagle he was a naturalist that was hired to go around the world on a ship and he
described
the rocks, the animals, the insects, the birds, that he had seen and that's how he came up with the theory of
evolution

speech act
is a communication action accomplished through the medium of speech but i also use it for other resources
such as gesture or facial expression or even gaze

examples are requesting describing praising suggesting

Try formulating … for a two year old
1) A request, Could you give the ball?
2) A description, Naima is eating
3) A suggestion, Oh you’re tired! Shall we go to bed?

those are different speech acts

Prohibition no don't eat that

Argumentation you can't eat that because it's dirty
Request can you give me your hand
Promise I will give you a cookie after your nap
Greeting Hello how are you
Order Come here immediately
Apology Excuse me darling

those are the kinds of speech acts that we use in our everyday life

imitation

and let's go back to an example that we have already seen last time watching their mother's imitation of the
child's cooing and of her pitch but observe how the child imitates the mother's pitch and how she places her
coin or blubbing and takes her turn, this is called turn taking

entry into communication begins with children's extraordinary ability to imitate of which you have surely
had many examples the photos you see here illustrate the baby's early abilities to mimic facial expressions or
stick out their tongue as early as a few days old

now let's look at example two, ellie is around a little bit older than one year old, we are going to observe
how she produces a very conventional gesture called the shrug,

her grandmother is just ecstatic to see how the little girl can take up the gesture that in conventional gesture
language means “where” or “i don't know”

intentions
children can use gestures but in the next example you're going to see how the adults can read ellie's desire/
intention before she even actually finishes completing her action

ellie's grandmother formulates the child's intentions that her gestures and facial expressions are indicating
before a desire is expressed in words
we can see the child's thoughts and intentions quite clearly through a fairly conventional facial expression
like the intention to kiss her teddy bear and ellie's grandmother will put it into verbal adult language for her

you can almost capture the flow of consciousness of the child as her grandmother does and she formulates it
for her it. must be said that ellie's mother and grandmother are constantly stepping into ellie's shoes and
projecting first-person perspective on her experiences as if they were in perfect empathy with her or at least
they had that illusion

Imitation communicative intention

Example 4
Why does the father imitate ella's sounds?
What elicits the father's are you tired?
Why does the father point to ella’s head in his head at the end?

if children take up and imitate the forms produced by their parents, parents also sees and take up the sounds
and movements produced by their children in order to endow them with as much meaning as possible and
shape them into a form that could be compatible with the adult's communicative system

this was an example of how a father takes up a non-intentional non-communicative gesture made by the
child and transforms it into a game which is a transition towards meaning

ella’s is one year in two months she is not exactly speaking yet but she can make requests through pointing
gestures and vocalizations

we saw at the beginning of the extract that there is no need to create meaning the importance is to create
sounds and a connection between the two participants

when the interaction is interrupted the participants relaunch it as soon as possible

for example the father says are you a good girl? without really trying to share information just to create a
relationship with his daughter to tie as if there was a ribbon that they needed to feel in his hands all the time
to communicate with her and that's when the child touches her face and the father interprets that and says are
you tired? Then he makes a lot of that gesture ella makes a more theatrical gesture hand on face, face turning
away from her father, gesture is then verbalized by the father but attenuated with this “ooh” a little bit so he
says are you Tired? and then oh a little bit”

then her hand slides down her hair she taps her head as she looks at her father and vocalizes the father
questions her with a rising intonation hm? without any linguistic content and then he just wants to do
something out of that it can't just stay without a continuation so he takes up the child's gesture but he does
not reproduce the exact same gesture the gesture is transformed into a ritual a routine that they do all the
time that parents and children in western countries do all the time

so the father starts giving it some kind of meaning to conventionalize it into a pointing gesture and
designates his head repeats that accentuates it exaggerates it and then he's going to do baby's head daddy's
head
the father labels what he is designating the head and then he actually does the same gesture on ella's head
he says daddy's head baby's head the father has transformed a non-intentional gesture into something social
conventional ritualistic

ella is going to produce some kind of gesture to imitate her father and continue the game but the father is not
into it anymore he's back to his breakfast

what it does show is that she has seized it as a game

the course of language development

language acquisition begins in the womb children who are only a few days old can already discriminate their
own language from another but in terms of production, children first need to learn how to control breathing
which they start doing at birth and which will be very important to control their vocal tract and speech. they
first start by crying and by two months old they can respond to smiling between two and three months they
begin cooing more and more cooing babbling they start vocalizing with more and more control and also
control their facial expressions and start smiling voluntarily around little bit later around four months old
then they begin laughing the phonemes they use are extremely varied in terms of motor control between four
and six months old they can sit and by six months they can sit on their own on the floor on a couch
meanwhile adults attribute meaning to all their crying shouting grunting moving laughing and cooing by
about seven to ten months old children begin reduplicative babbling producing sequences such as da da da
da da da da and through their exchanges that's how it's going to be a stream of sounds that is going to refer
to that especially when the child is going to be able to reduce the sequence to just the repetition of one
syllable once

around seven months old deaf children will also babble with their arms and hands deaf children who learn to
sign with deaf parents who are signers and they produce sequences of sign language syllables that are
fundamentally identical to the syllabic units found in vocal bubbling

so there appears to be no fundamental difference between learning to speak and learning to sign the whole
gesture system that we use can be grammaticalized into a conventional language signing being different
according to where you live the community you live with

in great britain they have british sign language in america they have american sign language and they're not
at all similar

there appear to be no fundamental difference between the signing systems and the speech systems

children produce their first word for their first signs at the end of their first year and of course they start
understanding those words several months earlier children's first words tend to refer to the here and now
objects and events happening around them more abstract expressions will only be used much later

example 5
you've seen a typical giving scene and here i'm interested in the fact that naima is not yet one year old and
she can understand what the mother wants from her, pick up the ball and bring it to her father she has
understood the request that the mother made

Giving events: complex structure

MOTHER: give daddy the ball

Child gives ball to father

FATHER: Hey, thank you

there are
two entrances bounding the main physical
transfer event the giving which helped mark three main stages the mother says “give daddy the ball” this is
the initiation the child actually picks up the ball gives the ball to the father that's the execution and the
father says hey thank you and that's the acknowledgement

so you have the two parents who produce some verbal which really clarify the scriptfor the child, there is a
script of giving you need to talk about the giving andthenthere's the execute there's theinitiation asking for
the giving there's the execution and there's the thank you the acknowledgement so the complexity here
comes from the fact that there are multiple agents with multiple intentions and plans all of which must be
coordinated negotiated in the situation through a combination of language gesture and action and this is how
children learn language they learn language by living language or the languaging around them in their
everyday life connected to their context to their actions to the others actions and creating relationships
through language

by about 16 to 18 months there is a word spurt or word explosion which means there is a rapid increase of
the words children produced they will also start combining them with gestures, then with other words the
utterances children start using are often called telegraphic speech because they're very short and because
function words such as “the “and “of “and bound morphology such as the past tense absent and then
children's utterances will gradually increase in length as they add those grammatical words or morphemes
and as they diversify their use of tenses their morphology

while children are increasing the number of words they also learn to control their bodies so they eat by
themselves they build towers they use grammatical words and at the same time they can jump they can
undress they couldn't draw circles they can draw people meanwhile adults will provide a lot of repetitions
reformulations of what the children say that are not exactly similar to the idol target they're going to repair
when children make non-standard productions which we could call errors and they're going to praise them

example 6
Naima putting two words together at a time and the mother reformulating the whole utterance

utterance is telegraphic but together they express a complete event you see that the child says give mommy
the mother reformulates you're giving me this one okay thank you so she she shows the child that she
acknowledged the fact that uh the child has said something that she can understand and she thanks her for
her gift and then

naima is going to describe her action “naima gives” so still two words but here she uses the agent in the first
line she had used the target of the giving and here she expresses the subject talking about herself with her
first name as a lot of american and even French children do the mother reformulates again “naima's
giving it to mommy” the mother's reformulation contains the subject the verb target of the the object that is
given it and the target of the giving to mommy and here naima is going to combine all of this “naima” that's
the subject “blueberries” that's the object “blue blue naima blue is naima blue is Naima

she cannot put all the elements together but little by little she is constructing all the elements that are needed
to build the whole utterance

example 7

you could see that she's already

building whole entrances but she does
something that is not
standard in english calling herself with
her
own name
she does that because her mother uses
third-person naima a lot to address her
instead of saying you
she will say naima and
adults in western countries do that
a lot

children's
utterances when they're
three years old become longer and longer
thanks to their mastery of complex
clauses
and more complex syntactic devices they
can use
“yes no” questions such as is there milk
in the fridge
or relative closes the cookie that i
ate this is when children might start to
make quite
a few errors i would as we will see in
part three

at four years old

children can really
tell stories they start arguing
they make reported speech which means
they can tell you what somebody else
said
and include different characters who
speak differently in their stories
they continue to use gestures but
they're gestures that are called
co-verbal they're produced with speech
and children's mastery of prosody
enables them to use humor
and irony and adults continue to
repeat reformulate repair praise
present models of adult
conventional speech

example 8

ellie is playing being the

waitress
and using a lot of different words
expressions
even arguing and
using gestures

example 9
the child is around four
years old
and a lot of this story has
bits and pieces of story she has heard
which is inventing, creating some parts of it putting all
of that together

five and seven

a lot of children at least in western
countries learn to read and write
they may start learning a second
language if they're not already
bilingual
their working memory expands they make
complex narratives and argue with even
more
subtlety but it will take them until
puberty to stabilize their syntax
they will learn to use the passive voice

for example mostly thanks to

literacy to the fact that they go to
school
their lexicon community continues to
diversify.

Children’s “errors”

Pragmatic error through imitation

Example 10
What we will be interested in her is tat she is trying to say a word, she is only 15 months old and she says
some of the eords that are important and repeats some f the words that her mother says “my glovs on” and
she says “glove” and then the child wants to give the book to the mother, so the child knows what to do
when you give something, the mother says what is expected from her when you receive something “thank
you” and the pragmatic error is that the child repeats the “thank you” but it is not a person who is supposed
to thank, she is the person whi gave and so that san error that’s very often made by children

Associating giving to thank you

The use of past tense

Now, one error” that is extremely common in child language english is their use of the past tense

Example 11

Child: Daddy goed to work

Mother: Yes, that’s right. Daddy went to work
Child: Daddy goed to work in car
Mother: Yes, daddy went in his car
Child: Daddy goed his car very fast
Mother: Ah ha. Daddy went to work in his car. Say went to work, not goed. Daddy went to work
Child: Daddy wented to work

Why does the child say wented?

How will the child learn to say went?

The mother provides the correct form but she doesn’t tell the child “don’t say goed say went”

As the child continues to use the deviant form goed the mother gets little bit tired of that mistake and she
corrects much more explicit at the end, if the first time she corrected the child with more emphasis maybe it
would’ve helped
Why wented; because the child really wants to use the past tense and there’s been an over regularization of
the rule that when you want to obtain the past tense you add ED.

The child is going to learn the past tenses in 3 stages

Stage 1: The child uses went

During this stage, children use just a few verbs in the past tense and learn them from the input. For example
the first verbs used in the pas tense will be: came, got, gave, looked, needed, took, went.
Mostly irregular verbs with different morphology

Stage 2: The child uses goed

The number of the verbs in the past used by the child grows. The child has probably generalized a rule: to
construct past tense, you add ED.
The use of goed is evidence that the child has generalized that rule and acquired it.
The child can even generate a past tense for an invented verb.

Stage 3: The child uses both goed and went

The regular and irregular form coexist. Children have regained the standard use thanks to the input, but they
might continue to apply the rule…
They will progressively become aware that the goed form is not used in their environment.
The acquisition process is gradual. This can extend over several years.
They can be observed to use the two forms within the same conversation. But will gradually abandon the
form that is not in their environment.

Example 12

Dop it! Instead of Stop it!

Stop is what we call a consonant cluster, made of 2 consonants and it’s not easy to start a word with a
consonant cluster

Kids don’t have the motor control in need to produce the ST in STOP, but they don’t just leave it, they
substitute the sund they can produce, theres a very smart substitution for ST in STOP if she take a carefull
look at the acoustics of ST you see that the T in those words look different from each other, sounds different
from each other, the vocal cords kick in sooner for the T in STOP. D is basically a T where the vocal cords
kick in sooner, when children stop substitute that sound they show the difference between STOP and DOP
and they make a hypothesis that its important for the language and theyre right. In fact DOP IT is closer to
STOP IT than if they had said TOP IT

Calls the cat doggy

This is called an = over-extension when children’s turn into words they haven’t figure out all the situations,
they form hypothesis and apply tehm for their own, the child may call all the pets doggy but wouldn’t call
their doll doggy. Their hypothesis is that doggy means anyghint thah moves that has 4 legs and produces
sounds.

Says thank you when giving something

Children are taught to say thank you when they receive something, but as parents are so eager to tell them to
say thank you, they often themselves, say “thank you” when they give an object to the child.

You give something to the child, you give the ball or you throw the ball and you say thank you expecting
them to repeat it, that can create some kind of confusion and the children might think that “thank yo”u is
what you say when you give instead of “here you go” for example.
I can’t will go today

Auxiliary verbs are really hard, there are so many little words that change the meaning of the course.

When kids construct phrases, even if they don’t do it correctly, they’re making amazing attempt to fit a lot
of meanings together in one entrance. I can’t will go today includes information about permission stages
can negation can’t. all that is combined into one entrance, trying this kind of construction out is a major
step toward grammatical complexity.

Dance me daddy
There is no reason to think that Dance me would not work. The child would have to abandon that creative
causative construction, when she finds out that nobody uses it.
And when she hears different models, such as “make me dance”.