If your mother is a graduate student in English, and you are developing your linguistic abilities, it is likely that you will become the target of a variety of experiments, both official and spontaneous. Charity was six months old--the age that most kids start picking up language--when I took graduate linguistics last semester. For my mid-term and end of semester project--both of which received A's, I have to add--I studied her acquisition of the English language.
Now that she's 15 months old, I'm no longer taking linguistics, and I really should be folding the basket of semi dry laundry sitting next to me, I'm still studying her.
This morning, Charity said a new word--Owl. We were reading "Spooky," a Halloween touch and feel book that reduces the efforts of the contortions master while I'm changing her diaper. At the end of the book there is a stately, majestic, and slightly creepy brown Owl, complete with horrendously photoshopped red eyes. After repeating the word several times--"Owl, owl, owl"--she proudly says it with a little hooting affect that makes me think she's got a career in radio drama--"Ooowwwll." Of course, it sounds a little bit like, "ow," which she already knew how to say.
With the addition of "owl" to her vocabulary, Charity has about 10 words in her arsenal. To the best of my recollection, they are yeah, no, ow, owl, mama, dada, eyes, nose, mouth, banana. With the exception of "owl," these are all pretty practical words that she utilizes on a daily basis, although banana might soon be replaced by "Reese Peanut Butter Cup" after this morning's Halloween candy indulgence. According to our parent educator from Parents as Teachers, kids learn to form words by watching the mouths of their parents and other people who can speak. When they want to learn a word that is interesting to them, they intently watch the mouth.
This is contrary to what I learned as a student of linguistics. According to Noam Chomsky, kids learn how to speak because they are simply subjected to speech. They hear their parents speaking to each other, to them, and to other people. They hear the TV and the radio, and they overhear conversation all around them. Apparently, this is what makes kids speak--not an intense desire to say "owl."
But although most of my sketchy research from last semester proved Chomsky right, my instincts as a parent still question him. After all, my daughter just went from trying to tangle her foot up in my keys singing, "nose, nose, nose," to unfolding what little laundry I managed to get done while mumbling, "uh-oh, knee, knee, knee." Although, at this point, I assume that she doesn't know how to use these words, she knows that they are words; and they are words I tend to say quite a bit. (There's another experiment for me--the number of times parents of children under two say "uh-oh" in a day.) And while it is true that I usually can't look my daughter in the eye and command, "say cow," with a favorable result, she does watch me quite closely when I say interesting words, especially those connected with pictures in books and objects around her. If I ceased to emphasize the words that I want her to learn, I have the feeling that she would not learn them, or at least not as quickly.
So after my highly scientific and reliable linguistic experiments, I have concluded that the most often hypothesized result is the correct one--it's a combination of nature and nurture. Of course kids simply pick up words, and generally those are the words we really don't want them to know, but if we as parents make an effort to emphasize a certain word, I think it will get learned faster. Of course, these results are completely biased. As a parent, I want to think I make a difference. Oh, and I also conducted another experiment--and my child turned out to be incredibly smart, beautiful, and well-adjusted. Imagine that. :)
