Re: Learning words

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

This story is, from what we know about language acquisition in
children, extremely implausible.
There is now a wealth of data (see Elizabeth Spelke site at harvard
for some) about what children know and when they know it. E.g., when
they are mere months old they already distinguish native phonemes from
a) noise and b) foreign phonemes. They also (soon after, but I don't
remember when) distinguish amongst different native phonemes (i.e., if
they've heard two or more languages). This is all pre-verbal.


On Apr 25, at 6:44 PM, George Scithers wrote:
The story is told of one family -- with uncles and aunts and so on
-- who decided to teach the family's young 'un as many languages as
possible. So: each person talked to the kid in a different language.
The kid observed all this, apparently thought it over, and then
proceded to start inventing a language of his own.
The experiment was hastily dropped and the household settled in one
a single language for the time being.

G H Scithers
----- Original Message ----- From: "David B. Kronenfeld" >
To: 
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2008 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: file searching/vista help
I don't know what's in her head, but my then 19 month old
granddaughter happily toddled around the house on her last visit
checking out the words for everything--proudly asserting the ones
she already knew and avidly learning those that were new.




David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103