Wed 16 Jan 2008
My do it
Posted by jangari under English, Language Acquisition, Languages, Linguistics
[4] Comments
A discussion tonight about my nephew and his linguistic development at 1 year and 11 months, gradually turned to the broader issue of child language acquisition. Apparently, and this is new knowledge to me, infants learning English (we didn’t discuss any other languages and I’m not enough of a Chomsky to presume to speak for all languages) latch onto first person possessive pronouns before nominative or accusative, and will then use them in sentences. That is, they’ll say my do it before they say I do it.
Now, I have no expertise in child language acquisition and will defer to anyone who gives even the slightest impression that they do, so I’m perfectly happy to accept the above. But I thought I’d offer the discussion to my knowledgable and erudite readership to enlighten me.
I suppose there may be some reasonable foundation to this theory. Infants probably learn possession quite early (my pencil, my car and so on), and then later, when constructing sentences with subjects and verbs (and perhaps objects, though I doubt the ‘it’ is segmentable from the verb at this early stage) they may draw analogy from the possessive constructions that they’ve practiced with every noun they know. Furthermore, the fact that “I” [ai] and “my” /mai/ are rather phonologically similar wouldn’t do a great deal to constrain this generalisation.
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has any more expertise in child language acquisition than I do – that is, anyone at all.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:57 am
I have no experience beyond watching the language acquisition of my own two children (now ten and almost-nine), but I have to say that, to the best of my recollection, both my girls said “I do it.” (leaving out the “will” or the “can” or whatever helping verb would have been appropriate.
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s how THEY did it…
January 17th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Mrs. Chili, you’ve just countered my parents’ anecdotal experience of one grandchild with that of two of your own children. So thanks for your contribution in tripling our sample-size!
January 20th, 2008 at 1:50 am
I’m no acquisition person either, but I thought that kids generalised one form first, not necessarily possessives. I’d never heard this about possessives particularly, and the kids I’ve known at the relevant age all said ‘I’ for everything, too. They’ll say ‘my’ (rather than ‘mine’) and point. Maybe that was what they were thinking of?
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 am
I’m not a linguist, but from a psychoanalytic perspective, it would make sense for the ‘I’ to be first. The ‘me’ is an objectification of the self, and it would take some experience for a child to be able to conceive of themselves in the third-person.