Jean Berko Gleason

“Desarrollo del lenguaje” está escrito para cualquiera que este interesado en saber cómo adquieren los niños el lenguaje y cómo se desarrolla el mismo a lo largo de toda la vida. Este libro descubrirá al lector cosas como qué puede oír el feto antes de nacer o qué ocurre con el lenguaje en un cerebro envejecido y todo lo que acontece entre tanto. Demostrará, basándose en los desarrollos de la neurociencia cognitiva, como el lenguaje una vez adquirido, no es estático, sino que atraviesa una continua reorganización neuronal.… (mehr)

The charitable interpretation of this article is that it's business in the front, party in the back. The business in this case is looking at four- to seven-year-olds (in two groups) to establish to what degree they have acquired the English inflectional suffixes -'s (-s/-z/əz, along with the uninflected plural possesives), -ed (-t/-d/-əd), -ing, -er/-est, -es (3p sing.); and the derivational suffixes -y, -er. The results are varied, show that the morphemes are productive (not just learned by rote, so that if you see a picture of a "wug" you know that two of them are two "wugs"), that they are acquired to various degrees, and that this improves over time. In other words, borrrrrring, and just what you'd expect, and it seems like this is really a datagathering exercise more than a proper study, and wouldn't even have been necessary except that Berko is in a post-Chomsky world and is reacting to an extremist Skinnerianism that says "of course kids don't have a productive morphology! it's all conditioning!" And it makes you wonder, again, how Skinner even happened, and not only that but how he happened hard enough to provoke an extreme nativist reaction that we are still responding to today, and we all know our Hegel but I still can't help but feel that the whole history of 20th-century cog-sci shows that smart nerds let their better judgment get overwhelmed by the desire to believe they could hypnotize girls into sleeping with them, and then smart hippie nerds came along and reacted brattishly agains the pocket-protector set, because nature was better than nurture and human nature was good.


It's a pain in the ass sometimes. Berko is looking for phonological rules (it being the sixties) in what are clearly articulatorily motivated, phonetic processes (universally, presence as well as productivity of the morphemes is acquired in order of articulatory difficulty, and where there are complications, it's clear that they'd explain themselves if you'd stop thinking in terms of abstract units in the brain and their incredibly snarled rule structure for JUST one second: like, Berko spends a lot of energy establishing whether sibilants exist yet as a phonological category, as evidenced by whether you pluralize e.g. fish /fɪʃəz/ like a grup or /fɪʃs/. But like, /fɪʃs/ is really hard to say, and if we had a non-sibilant like /ç/ we'd probably see /fɪçəz/ and not /fɪçs/, because IT'S EASIER. Brain categories derive from rather than determine phonetics and acoustics, and rules, as far as I'm concerned, do not exist--only physical constraints.


But it was 1961, and I should stop hacking on Berko I guess. The party in the back is what she does with the second half of the data, where she sees first if kids can use agentive and diminutive affixes generatively, and the answer is no: while the adults in the study figured a little wug would be a wuggie or a wuglet or a wugette, the kids went with "baby wug" and "teeny wug"; where the adults thought one who zibs is a zibber, the kids came up with "zibbingman" and "zibman". We're still in the realm of generative affixes, but already the more interesting question is becoming not "what can they do," but "why do they do it the way they do it instead"? And then we move on to compound analysis, and this is where the kids go on cute parade, providing rationales for compound words that the author divides into identity ("it's called an airplane because it's an airplane"), salient-featural ("it's called a birthday because you get cake"), partial-etymological ("it's called a blackboard because it's black") and full-etymological (it's called a blackboard because it's a black board"). And you surely can see--Berko even notes it, although with short shrift--that you can't draw good conclusions from this about what kids are doing--maybe the partial-etymological kid doesn't fully understand how compounds work yet, or maybe she just thinks "it's black" is good enough because obviously it's a board, duh; maybe the kid who says "it's called thanksgiving because you get turkey" is stuck at the salient-feature stage or maybe she'd just rather talk about turkey than Pilgrims or whatever; maybe the worse results for birthday than fireplace are because birth and day are less salient than fire and place, or maybe the kids just get excited because they're kids and want to yell about cake even though they could tell you perfectly well what a birthday is. Maybe "because it's an airplane" kid is just playing, or bored. Kids are people, not answer machines, and Berko gets that--she devotes enough time to recording unanalyzable-in-her-terms data like "it's called Friday because you eat fried fish" or "it's called Thingsgiving because you give people things" that she has to get it--but she seems to feel like something has to be done about it and not know what that something is. She does note that adults do it too ("it's called a handkerchief because you go kerchoo into your hand"), so maybe she slowly came around to the idea that performance is closer to the core of what language is than competence.

(Appeared in Word.)… (mehr)