PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH:He did eat. He didn’t eat.
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD:He did a few things. He didn’t few thing.
PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH: He did eat. Did he eat?
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD: He did a few things. did he a few thing?
PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH: I like going. He likes going.
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD: I can go. He cans go.
PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH:
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD: I am going. He ams (or be’s) going.
PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH: They went to sleep. They wanted to sleep.
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD: They are sleeping. They are’d (or be’d) sleeping.
PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH: He is happy. He is not happy.
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD: He ate something. He ate not something.
PATTERN IN ADULT ENGLISH: He is happy. Is he happy?
ERROR THAT MIGHT TEMPT A CHILD: He ate something. Ate he something?
For virtually all of these patterns, she found no errors among the 66,000 sentences in which they could have occurred.
The three-year-old child is grammatically correct in quality, not just quantity. In earlier chapters we learned of experiments showing that children’s movement rules are structure-dependent (“Ask Jabba if the boy who is unhappy is watching Mickey Mouse”) and showing that their morphological systems are organized into layers of roots, stems, and inflections (“This monster likes to eat rats; what do you call him?”). Children also seem fully prepared for the Babel of languages they may face: they swiftly acquire free word order, SOV and VSO orders, rich systems of case and agreement, strings of agglutinated suffixes, ergative case marking, or whatever else their language throws at them, with no lag relative to their English-speaking counterparts. Languages with grammatical gender like French and German are the bane of the Berlitz student. In his essay “The Horrors of the German Language,” Mark Twain noted that “a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female—tomcats included.” He translated a conversation in a German Sunday school book as follows:
Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.
But little children learning German (and other languages with gender) are not horrified; they acquire gender marking quickly, make few errors, and never use the association with maleness and femaleness as a false criterion. It is safe to say that except for constructions that are rare, used predominantly in written language, or mentally taxing even to an adult (like The horse that the elephant tickled kissed the pig), all languages are acquired, with equal ease, before the child turns four.
The errors children do make are rarely random garbage. Often the errors follow the logic of grammar so beautifully that the puzzle is not why the children make the errors, but why they sound like errors to adult ears at all. Let me give you two examples that I have studied in great detail.
Perhaps the most conspicuous childhood error is to overgeneralize—the child puts a regular suffix, like the plural -s or the past tense -ed, onto a word that forms its plural or its past tense in an irregular way. Thus the child says tooths and mousse and comes up with verb forms like these:
My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Hey, Horton heared a Who.
I finded Renée.
I love cut-upped egg.
Once upon a time a alligator was eating a dinosaur and the dinosaur was eating the alligator and the dinosaur was eaten by the alligator and the alligator goed kerplunk.
These forms sound wrong to us because English contains about 180 irregular verbs like held, heard, cut, and went—many inherited from Proto-Indo-European!—whose past-tense forms cannot be predicted by rule but have to be memorized by rote. Morphology is organized so that whenever a verb has an idiosyncratic form listed in the mental dictionary, the regular -ed rule is blocked: goed sounds ungrammatical because it is blocked by went. Elsewhere, the regular rule applies freely.
So why do children make this kind of error? There is a simple explanation. Since irregular forms have to be memorized and memory is fallible, any time the child tries to use a sentence in the past tense with an irregular verb but cannot summon its past-tense form from memory, the regular rule fills the vacuum. If the child wants to use the past tense of hold but cannot dredge up held, the regular rule, applying by default, marks it as holded. We know fallible memory is the cause of these errors because the irregular verbs that are used the least often by parents (drank and knew, for instance) are the ones their children err on the most; for the more common verbs, children are correct most of the time. The same thing happens to adults: lower-frequency, less-well-remembered irregular forms like trod, strove, dwelt, rent, slew, and smote sound odd to modern American ears and are likely to be regularized to treaded, strived, dwelled, rended, stayed, and smited. Since it’s we grownups who are forgetting the irregular past, we get to declare that the forms with -ed are not errors! Indeed, over the centuries many of these conversions have become permanent. Old English and Middle English had about twice as many irregular verbs as Modern English; if Chaucer were here today, he would tell you that the past tenses of to chide, to geld, to abide, and to cleave are chid, gelt, abode, and clove. As time passes, verbs can wane in popularity, and one can imagine a time when, say, the verb to geld had slipped so far that a majority of adults could have lived their lives seldom having heard its past-tense form gelt. When pressed, they would have used gelded; the verb had become regular for them and all subsequent generations. The psychological process is no different from what happens when a young child has lived his or her brief life seldom having heard the past-tense form built and, when pressed, comes up with builded. The only difference is that the child is surrounded by grownups who are still using built. As the child lives longer and hears built more and more times, the mental dictionary entry for built becomes stronger and it comes to mind more and more readily, turning off the “add -ed” rule each time it does.
Here is another lovely set of examples of childhood grammatical logic, discovered by the psychologist Melissa Bowerman:
Go me to the bathroom before you go to bed.
The tiger will come and eat David and then he will be died and I won’t have a little brother any more.
I want you to take me a camel ride over your shoulders into my room.
Be a hand up your nose.
Don’t giggle me!
Yawny Baby—you can push her mouth open to drink her.
These are examples of the causative rule, found in English and many other languages, which takes an intransitive verb meaning “to do something” and converts it to a transitive verb meaning “to cause to do something”:
The butter melted. Sally melted the butter.
The ball bounced. Hiram bounced the ball.
The horse raced past the barn. The jockey raced the horse past the barn.
The causative rule can apply to some verbs but not others; occasionally children apply it too zealously. But it is not easy, even for a linguist, to say why a ball can bounce or be bounced, and a horse can race or be raced, but a brother can only die, not be died, and a girl can only giggle, not be giggled. Only a few kinds of verbs can easily undergo the rule: verbs referring to a change of the physical state of an object, like melt and break, verbs referring to a manner of motion, like bounce and slide, and verbs referring to an accompanied locomotion, like race and dance. Other verbs, like go and die, refuse to undergo the rule in English, and verbs involving fully voluntary actions, like cook and play, refuse to undergo the rule in almost every language (and children rarely err on them). Most of children’s errors in English, in fact, would be grammatical in other languages. English-speaking adults, like their children, occasionally stretch the envelope of t
he rule:
In 1976 the Parti Québecois began to deteriorate the health care system.
Sparkle your table with Cape Cod classic glass-ware.
Well, that decided me.
This new golf ball could obsolete many golf courses.
If she subscribes us up, she’ll get a bonus.
Sunbeam whips out the holes where staling air can hide.
So both children and adults stretch the language a bit to express causation; adults are just a tiny bit more fastidious in which verbs they stretch.
The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius—master of most constructions, obeying rules far more often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether. How do they do it? Children of this age are notably incompetent at most other activities. We won’t let them drive, vote, or go to school, and they can be flummoxed by no-brainer tasks like sorting beads in order of size, reasoning whether a person could be aware of an event that took place while the person was out of the room, and knowing that the volume of a liquid does not change when it is poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, narrow one. So they are not doing it by the sheer power of their overall acumen. Nor could they be imitating what they hear, or else they would never say goed or Don’t giggle me. It is plausible that the basic organization of grammar is wired into the child’s brain, but they still must reconstruct the nuances of English or Kivunjo or Ainu. So how does experience interact with wiring to give a three-year-old the grammar of a particular language?
We know that this experience must include, at a minimum, the speech of other human beings. For several thousand years thinkers have speculated about what would happen to infants deprived of speech input. In the seventh century B.C., according to the historian Herodotus, King Psamtik I of Egypt had two infants separated from their mothers at birth and raised in silence in a shepherd’s hut. The king’s curiosity about the original language of the world allegedly was satisfied two years later when the shepherd heard the infants use a word in Phrygian, an Indo-European language of Asia Minor. In the centuries since, there have been many stories about abandoned children who have grown up in the wild, from Romulus and Remus, the eventual founders of Rome, to Mowgli in Kipling’s The Jungle Book. There have also been occasional real-life cases, like Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron (the subject of a lovely film by François Truffaut), and, in the twentieth century, Kamala, Amala, and Ramu from India. Legend has these children raised by bears or wolves, depending on which one has the greater affinity to humans in the prevailing mythology of the region, and this scenario is repeated as fact in many textbooks, but I am skeptical. (In a Darwinian animal kingdom it would be a spectacularly stupid bear that when faced with the good fortune of a baby in its lair would rear it rather than eat it. Though some species can be fooled by foster offspring, like birds by cuckoos, bears and wolves are predators of young mammals and are unlikely to be so gullible.) Occasionally other modern children have grown up wild because depraved parents have raised them silently in dark rooms and attics. The outcome is always the same: the children are mute, and often remain so. Whatever innate grammatical abilities there are, they are too schematic to generate speech, words, and grammatical constructions on their own.
The muteness of wild children in one sense emphasizes the role of nurture over nature in language development, but I think we gain more insight by thinking around that tired dichotomy. If Victor or Kamala had run out of the woods speaking fluent Phrygian or Proto-World, who could they have talked to? As I suggested in the preceding chapter, even if the genes themselves specify the basic design of language, they might have to store the specifics of language in the environment, to ensure that a person’s language is synchronized with everyone else’s despite the genetic uniqueness of every individual. In this sense, language is like another quintessentially social activity. James Thurber and E. B. White once wrote:
There is a very good reason why the erotic side of Man has called forth so much more discussion lately than has his appetite for food. The reason is this: that while the urge to eat is a personal matter which concerns no one but the person hungry (or, as the German has it, der hungrige Mensch), the sex urge involves, for its true expression, another individual. It is this “other individual” that causes all the trouble.
Though speech input is necessary for speech development, a mere soundtrack is not sufficient. Deaf parents of hearing children were once advised to have the children watch a lot of television. In no case did the children learn English. Without already knowing the language, it is difficult for a child to figure out what the characters in those odd, unresponsive televised worlds are talking about. Live human speakers tend to talk about the here and now in the presence of children; the child can be more of a mind-reader, guessing what the speaker might mean, especially if the child already knows many content words. Indeed, if you are given a translation of the content words in parents’ speech to children in some language whose grammar you do not know, it is quite easy to infer what the parents meant. If children can infer parents’ meanings, they do not have to be pure cryptographers, trying to crack a code from the statistical structure of the transmissions. They can be a bit more like the archeologists with the Rosetta Stone, who had both a passage from an unknown language and its translation in a known one. For the child, the unknown language is English (or Japanese or Inslekampx or Arabic); the known one is mentalese.
Another reason why television soundtracks might be insufficient is that they are not in Motherese. Compared with conversations among adults, parents’ speech to children is slower, more exaggerated in pitch, more directed to the here and now, and more grammatical (it is literally 99 and 44/100ths percent pure, according to one estimate). Surely this makes Motherese easier to learn than the kind of elliptical, fragmentary conversation we saw in the Watergate transcripts. But as we discovered in Chapter 2, Motherese is not an indispensable curriculum of Language-Made-Simple lessons. In some cultures, parents do not talk to their children until the children are capable of keeping up their end of the conversation (though other children might talk to them). Furthermore, Motherese is not grammatically simple. That impression is an illusion; grammar is so instinctive that we do not appreciate which constructions are complex until we try to work out the rules behind them. Motherese is riddled with questions containing who, what, and where, which are among the most complicated constructions in English. For example, to assemble the “simple” question What did he eat?, based on He ate what, one must move the what to the beginning of the sentence, leaving a “trace” that indicates its semantic role of “thing eaten,” insert the meaningless auxiliary do, make sure that the do is in the tense appropriate to the verb, in this case did, convert the verb to the infinitive form eat, and invert the position of subject and auxiliary from the normal He did to the interrogative Did he. No mercifully designed language curriculum would use these sentences in Lesson 1, but that is just what mothers do when speaking to their babies.
A better way to think of Motherese is to liken it to the vocalizations that other animals direct to their young. Motherese has interpretable melodies: a rise-and-fall contour for approving, a set of sharp, staccato bursts for prohibiting, a rise pattern for directing attention, and smooth, low legato murmurs for comforting. The psychologist Anne Fernald has shown that these patterns are very widespread across language communities, and may be universal. The melodies attract the child’s attention, mark the sounds as speech as opposed to stomach growlings or other noises, distinguish statements, questions, and imperatives, delineate major sentence boundaries, and highlight new words. When given a choice, babies prefer to listen to Motherese than to speech intended for adults.
Surprisingly, though practice is important in training for the gymnastics of speaking, it may be superfluous in learning grammar. For various neurological reasons children are sometimes unable to articulate, but parents report that their comprehension is excelle
nt. Karin Stromswold recently tested one such four-year-old. Though he could not speak, he could understand subtle grammatical differences. He could identify which picture showed “The dog was bitten by the cat” and which showed “The cat was bitten by the dog.” He could distinguish pictures that showed “The dogs chase the rabbit” and “The dog chases the rabbit.” The boy also responded appropriately when Stromswold asked him, “Show me your room,” “Show me your sister’s room,” “Show me your sister’s old room,” “Show me your old room,” “Show me your new room,” “Show me your sister’s new room.”
In fact, it is not surprising that grammar development does not depend on overt practice, because actually saying something aloud, as opposed to listening to what other people say, does not provide the child with information about the language he or she is trying to learn. The only conceivable information about grammar that speaking could provide would come from feedback from parents on whether the child’s utterance was grammatical and meaningful. If a parent punished, corrected, misunderstood, or even reacted differently to a child’s ungrammatical sentence, it could in theory inform the child that something in his growing rule system needed to be improved. But parents are remarkably unconcerned about their children’s grammar; they care about truthfulness and good behavior. Roger Brown divided the sentences of Adam, Eve, and Sarah into grammatical and ungrammatical lists. For each sentence he checked whether the parent had at the time expressed approval (like “Yes, that’s good”) or disapproval. The proportion was the same for grammatical sentences and ungrammatical ones, which means that the parent’s response had given the child no information about grammar. For example: