Summary Details
| Query: |
Linguists Writing About Their Own Children
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| Author: | Arika Okrent | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Language Acquisition
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| Summary: |
I'm not going to list every reference here, but I'll try to break down the
general story in a semi-coherent way: The practice of scientific observation of one's own children goes back at least as far as Charles Darwin (Biographical sketch of an infant, 1877). Other classics are Clara and Karl Stern (Die Kindersprache, 1907), J. Ronjat (Le developpment du langage observ�� chez un enfant bilingue, 1913), Milivoj Pavlovitch (Le langage enfantin: acquisition du Serbe et du Fran��ais par un enfant serbe, 1920), A.N. Gvozdev (From first words to first grade, 1949) and the four volume work of Werner Leopold (Speech development of a bilingual child, 1939-1949). I particularly like the title of E. Kenyeres's 1938 article ''Comment une petite Hongroise de sept ans apprend le Fran��ais.'' Bilingual households are well represented in the parent/child literature: the works of Marilyn Vihman (Estonian/English), Maraget Deuchar (Spanish/English), Annick de Houwer (Dutch/English), Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews (Cantonese/English), Phillip Carr (French/English), Philip and Elizabeth Prinz (ASL/English) and many more. There are also some trilingual households represented (who wouldn't take notes in such a situation?) Jean-Marc Dewaele (French, Dutch, English) and Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (Portuguese, Swedish, English). Other well known studies: Robbins Burling (Language development of a Garo and English speaking child, Word, 15, 1959), Ruth Weir (Language in the crib, 1962), M.A.K. Halliday (Learning how to mean, 1975), Labov & Labov (The phonetics of cat and mama, Language 54, 1978) Also, the works of Melissa Bowerman, Lise Menn, and Ron Scollon. The observation doesn't always stop at one generation. Neil Smith, whose ''The Acquisition of Phonology'' (1973) was a study of his eldest's son's phonology, is now studying that son's eldest son's phonology. And Marilyn Vihman's much studied daughter also became a linguist, and now studies her own daughter. Finally, I must point you to the work of Deb Roy, which was described to me by the person who referred me to it as both ''impressive'' and ''a little scary.'' From the project web page: ''Roy has begun a pilot project in which he is recording his son's development at home by gathering approximately 10 hours of high fidelity audio and video on a daily basis from birth to age three. The resulting corpus, which already contains over 100,000 hours of multi-track recordings, constitutes the most comprehensive record of a child's development made to date. This data provides many new opportunities to understand the fine-grained dynamics of language development.'' Check out his time-lapse evolution of the word ''water.'' http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/projects/hsp.html I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with all this, but if you have any thoughts/anecdotes/epiphanies you'd like to share with me, please do! Thanks to Susan Fischer, Michael Silverstein, Anamaria Ducasse, Peter Daniels, Mirjana Dedaic, Michel DeGraff, Fiona MacArthur, Ruth Carroll, Philip Carr, Susan Burt, Gabriela P��rez B��ez, Sashka Probkin, Bruno Estigarribia, Nora Wiedenmann, Theresa Heyd, Tom Fritzsche, Nan Ratner, Peyton Todd, Joshua Viau, Ernest McCarus, Roswita Dressler, Derek Irwin, Steven Chandler, Armina Janyan, Phaedra Royle, Wayles Browne, Damien Hall, Bernard Spolsky, Larisa Zlatic, Ginger Pizer, Lise Menn, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Marilyn Vihman, Michael Swan, Sonja Lanehart, Peter Backhaus, Jean Dickson, Janet Randall Now, a grab bag of other references, in no particular order: Susan Iwamura, The Verbal Games of Pre-School Children, 1980 Sussane D��pke, The role of parental teaching techniques in bilingual German-English families, International Journal of the Sociology of Language yr.1988 vol.72 pg.493 Saunders, George. Bilingual Parenting: From Birth to Teens. 1988 Salikoko Mufwene. ''On the Language Bioprogram: Hints from Tazie'' in a volume I edited: ''Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony and Development'' (MIT Press, 1999). Daniel Dato, On Psycholinguistic universals in children's learning of Spanish Developmental Linguistics: Theory and Applications edited by Daniel P. Dato, 235-254. Washington: Georgetown University Press. 1975 Carr 2003. International Journal of Bilingualism 7.2: 177-202. 'French-English bilingual acquisition of phonology: one production system or two? S. Burt. 1998.''Monolingual children in a bilingual situation:Protest, accommodation and linguistic creativity,'' Multilingua 17, 4: 361-378. Mirror of Language by Kenji Hakuta. Nora Wiedenmann (2007), ''Sp��ter Spracherwerb''. In: Sprache & Sprachen, 35, 33-44 (ISSN 0934-6813). Nan Ratner, Interactive influences on phonological behavior, J Child Lang 20 1993 case study Peyton Todd. Tagging after red herrings: evidence against the processing capacity explanation in child language.Appearing in the Journal of Child Language, 1982 Feb;9(1):99-114. Zlatic, Larisa, Peter MacNeilage, Chris Matyear and Barbara Davis. 1997. ''Babbling of Twins in a Bilingual Environment,'' Applied Psycholinguistics 18: 453-469. Claire Painter, Into the Mother Tongue 1984 Vihman, M. M. (1982). The acquisition of morphology by a bilingual child: A whole-word approach. Applied Psycholinguistics, 3, 141-160. Y.R. Chao ''The Canton Idiolect: An Analysis of the Chinese Spoken by a 28-month-old Child.'' Semitic and oriental studies, University of California, publications on semitic philology, 27-44, Berkeley, 1951. (about his granddaughter) |
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| LL Issue: | 19.3932 | |
| Date Posted: | 21-Dec-2008 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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