Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

James Pennebaker and Molly E. Ireland are two psychology professors at the University of Texas. In the September edition of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ^[1], they talk about Language Style Matching or LSM.  This is the where you take on characteristics of the person that you are speaking with in order to ensure a favorable conversation will result.  It is also observed after watching movies and reading books.^[2]

So, one evening, I read about their study on Stumbleupon ^[3] (a website I recommend BTW) and then I get back to my readings for uni and I read about Bakhtin (1981) ^[4].  For Bakhtin, speakers learning a new language take words from other people.  They take them to be used for their own purposes.  And the more they bend the utterances of others for their own intentions, the more they enter the communicative chain.  This is the way that they gain confidence and find their own voice.

Are we underestimating the reliance that students have on mirroring?  We understand only too well that students need to have a language-rich environment in order to pick up the language but are we really making the most of the language-rich environment when we provide it?  Is there some way of encouraging students to mirror more?

Have you ever watched a child who is acquiring their first language, their imitations are almost enough to drive their parents up the wall.  Perhaps the greatest limitation we have in learning another language is our pride.

“Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate.  The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are a part of, and this is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture.”  (McDermott, 1993^[5])

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^[1] http://content.apa.org/journals/psp.rss

^[2] http://www.utexas.edu/news/2010/10/04/language_relationships

^[3] http://www.stumbleupon.com/

^[4] Bakhtin, M. M. (1981).  The dialogic imagination: Four essays.  Austin: University of Texas Press.

^[5] McDermott, R. (1993).  The acquisition of a child by a learning disability.  In J. Lave & S. Chaiklin (Ed.), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on activity and context.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

On the path to the most efficient way to learn languages

I think that the secret to understanding the most efficient way to learn a foreign language is in watching children.  There are differences between learning your second language and learning your first not the least being that you tend to do the latter with an adult brain which has more life experience and cognitive capabilities. But understanding the way that children do it may just give us the way that is most easily digestible for the brain.

My daughter turned 2 years old yesterday and I have noticed many things that have changed the way that I think about how languages are learnt.  First, I must mention that my daughter is being raised bilingually (English and Thai) which they say means that her first utterances will come later but she will have cognitive benefits in the long run (being able to explain the world in two different languages).  And I have to admit, this has been the case.  My daughter has a cousin who is one week different in age (being raised in a monolingual New Zealand family) and when I compare the two, she did start off behind as her little brain sorted through two very different sets of sounds.

Imagine learning a language just from watching DVDs in that language.  Not easy right?  Now imagine learning two languages just from watching DVDs but the languages switch and you never know which language you are listening to at any one time.  Sure you get used to the sounds of the two languages eventually and distinguish them but it takes a little longer.

Having said that, at the two year old point, she is not particularly suffering.  She can communicate ideas as well as any two year old.  She has developed the strategies for communication failure and seems to be more used to it than a monolingual two year old.  She does not get frustrated but quickly tries substituting for other words that she knows.  Often this means substituting the word in English for the Thai word or vice versa.

• She does tend to use the language that is most preferred by the speaker.  She speaks mostly English to me and mostly Thai to her grandmother (who speaks no English). 
• The words that she knows seem to be mostly labels and verbs that she can demonstrate (jump, eat, sit here, brush your teeth as apposed to drive, think etc).  She has very few social phrases and is reluctant to greet (shyness?). 
• Her sentences are telegraphic in nature; she has recently started to string together 3-4 words to convey more meaning but most tend to be the typical 2 word (subject-predicate type) utterances. 
• She can say many adjectives but is reluctant to put adjectives and nouns together for whatever reason.  She says red and car but does not use the two together.
• She is definitely creating combinations of words that she has never heard (e.g. she said "pink up" when she wanted me to throw the pink balloon into the air) showing creative use of the language.
• Correction tends to be very effective on a lexical level but not on a behavioral level.  If she says blue and it is purple, she can be corrected with the simple words "that is purple".  This might suggest that she is aware of the fact that she is experimenting to some degree and is not heavily invested in the idea of using one word over another.  Trying to stop her from doing something that she wants to do however, totally different story.

So, what conclusions can we draw from this?  I think that at this age, she is learning by creating.  She tries new combinations of parts that she knows and has learnt from her environment but the combinations are entirely hers.  Later, she will start to learn bigger chunks in the form of phrases, idioms, proverbs etc.

I believe that the advantage that children have is partly biological (learning the language at the time that the brain is creating the synapses (the connections).  And perhaps it is partly due to the simultaneous development between language and cognitive ability (you see the thing for the first time and you learn a new name-that's easier to remember than trying to attach a new label to a common everyday item that you already have a label for).

The environment as behaviorists suggest does provide guidance and I am sure that later in life, she will see the world through the limitations of the language(s) that she is speaking.  But this will always be at odds with the need to speak creatively and express unique ideas and problems and above all think in a way that only she can.

Are we being loyal to our methodology?

  It seems to me that if you look at the theories that existed in the past about how we learn languages, we   see a lot of how we are teaching today.

In the 50’s and 60’s the leading line of thought was behaviorism.  Behaviorism was focused on what we could record.  The utterance was all that counted and researchers were not interested in the cognitive process that brought that utterance into being.

Derived from experiments on dogs and other animals, behaviorism said that children start with a blank slate and they get everything from their environment.  They learn their patterns of behavior, their personality and even their knowledge through conditioning (this had a good result, do it again; this had a bad result, avoid it next time).

This is what we are doing with correction.  There is still so much of this going on in the classroom and the results on the affective factors of each student should not be underestimated.  We try and we learn on the results of that attempt.  This school of thinking was unable to explain how students learned to be so creative with the language but it did have a huge effect on how we teach.

In 1964, Jenkins and Palermo[1] timidly put forward a theory that children learn through creating language frames and learning to substitute.  They said that imitation is essential in learning to put together authentic-sounding utterances in this way.

Doesn’t this sound like such a big part of what goes on in the classroom?  We teach a grammar structure and the students practice substituting the verbs and the nouns into the sentence to make it mean what they want it to mean. 

When they published this theory, they admitted their statements to be speculative and premature (p. 143).  I think that their hesitation comes from the fact that they are not describing how children learn their first language but they are putting forward a methodology that is commonly-used in classrooms and textbooks around the world.

Now we are faced with a multitude of approaches and methodologies which are grouped together as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).  CLT is about helping people to discover the language through communication not through memorization and getting students to enjoy being creative and focusing on competence in communication (performance).

But still the aspects of behaviorism and substituting into frameworks remain in every classroom.  Are these remnants of past ways or just practical differences that remind us that there are differences between first language(s) acquisition and second language acquisition?

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[1] Jenkins, J. & Palermo, D. (1964). Mediation processes and the acquisition of linguistic structure.  In U. Bellugi & R. Brown, The Acquisition of Language.  Monographs of the society for research in child development, 29 (Serial no. 92).

One for the parents

This post is about how you learn your first language as a child.  This a good one for parents to read.

Exercise your articulatory muscles
You do this by babbling.  Note that all cultures babble and it is not only normal, it is a necessary part of language development. 
Even if the child's first language will be sign language, they will babble; they babble with their hands.  In their case, the articulatory muscles are in their hands and fingers.

Copy the sounds
Keep in mind here that children understand more than they can express.  This is proven with kids who can use signs to express their requests before they can ask for milk and the amount of gesturing that kids use in general.  My daughter used a hand and sound gesture to point out planes well before she could articulate the word "plane".

Kids learn nasals and voiced stops (see the IPA chart here) first.  These are the "b", "g", and "d" sounds. 
The fricatives and liquids come last.  "s", "z" and "y" sounds, for example.

What is interesting is that if you get to know the IPA chart, you see that children are actually approximating words using the sounds that they are familiar with first and you can translate these approximations.
Can't say Zebra?  Says Debra
Can't say see?  Says Dee

Understanding how kids approximate words they hear using the sounds that they can already use may just help a lot of frustrated parents out there figure out just want the screaming toddler is upset about.

What about correction?
There is a lot of evidence that correction does not play a big part in First Language Acquisition as adults tend to correct kids on factual not grammatical errors:
Child:  There is five chairs!
Adult:  There are SIX chairs
Not:  There ARE six chairs.

And, children can be oblivious to correction anyway, at least to some extent:
"Child: Nobody don't like me.
Mother: No, say "nobody likes me"
Child: Nobody don't like me.
(eight repetitions of this exchange)
Mother: No, now listen carefully; say "nobody likes me"
Child: Oh! Nobody don't likes me."
McNeill, D (1966). Developmental psycholinguistics. in F. Smith & G. Miller (Eds.), The genesis of language: A psycholinguistic approach (pp., 69-73). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

And yet children still learn to speak despite our terrible teaching.  The human brain is a truly amazing thing!

Language acquisition research in action

I have read about such experiments and always wondered just effective it is to measure the attention span of children as a way of evaluating their interest in sounds.