Words beginning and endings are learned too because people raising young kids are spending a great deal of time decomposing and telling them simple words. Repeating "cat", "cat", "cat" with pauses.
Statistical learning --and there are studies about this-- is also obvious when multi-lingual kids make up words that do not exists.
They'll use words from one of the language they know to come up with words (or words beginning / ending) in another language. These words, statistically, could make sense. And they'll pronounce them "properly". Yet they don't exist.
So it's not just the words: it's the pronunciation too.
As the father of a fully bilingual kid (french / english) that was fascinating to watch.
This really is a thing. My son seems to have learnt the grammar, but not so much vocabulary of English, so he'll borrow vocabulary from Spanish, and force English grammar over it to invent entirely new words.
Example: he doesn't know how to say 'to lie' in English ('mentir' in Spanish). So he says: "You are _menting_" to say that somebody is lying.
> Words beginning and endings are learned too because people raising young kids are spending a great deal of time decomposing and telling them simple words. Repeating "cat", "cat", "cat" with pauses.
I'm pretty sure that years ago I read in a textbook somewhere that the effect size for this kind of thing is very small relative to other "parent talk" behaviors like exaggerated intonation?
(But I also wouldn't be surprised if that was just the author's take and not at all a settled matter.)
Thank you for this. My kids are bilingual in Dutch / English and often make up such words.
I like that they'll use words from different languages in the same sentence. School disagrees though. I've once heard someone say that bilingually raised people have a higher chance of becoming schizophrenic, although I really doubt that has any major influence.
I have one good reason for not doing that, the main reason for language is communication, if you mix two languages, the other person needs to know two languages to understand you, instead of 1,so we try to stick to one, chosen based on context
Same here. One thing that was funny watching my daughter making the same mistakes italian students make when learning english, even though she was born and raised in an English country.
Learning a language that's phonetic makes reading so much easier, when dealing with English it really throws you off the lack of the feature
Sometimes I feel a little bad we're foisting 4 languages on our kids, plus two more within a 20 minute drive so I expect some basics there will be picked up too.
Our eldest likes language battles: she's corrects me in another language but the game is that I must continue in the 'wrong' one.
Its also contextual maps for statistics. Spoon and fridge are always mentioned in kitchen context.
(Actor + wordsequence + location) * repetition_as_filter makes for a significant data point in language. Thus words are first uttered in context and a feedback is expected.
Statistical learning --and there are studies about this-- is also obvious when multi-lingual kids make up words that do not exists.
They'll use words from one of the language they know to come up with words (or words beginning / ending) in another language. These words, statistically, could make sense. And they'll pronounce them "properly". Yet they don't exist.
So it's not just the words: it's the pronunciation too.
As the father of a fully bilingual kid (french / english) that was fascinating to watch.