Day 3, CoEDL Summer School. Have bubbles, will travel.

Only a half day at summer school today - but what a day. Somewhere on the third floor in the Babel building at Uni Melbourne, my worlds collided again - you know those times where you think, I didn’t plan this but somehow all the elements of my life have come together and I’m exactly where I should be right now?

So no flippant remarks for this #coedlsummer post, more a genuine moment to say, “whoa”.

Child language acquisition. Just what the crap do we even know about child first language acquisition (FLA) anyway?

Barb Kelly and Jill Wigglesworth laid it out in ‘Making acquisition data part of fieldwork’, and the following two maps wrinkled my tiny little brain.

In the first world map, the size of each country is scaled according to the number of languages that are native to that country:

In the second map, the countries are scaled according to the number of languages represented in the CHILDES database, which is a repository of child language data:

Spot the difference?

We know a lot about how English-, French-, and Spanish- speaking children learn language; we have a lot of recordings, a lot of documentation of children’s speech in these countries.

But these languages are pretty freaking typologically similar, meaning they have lots of similar sounds and grammatical structures and even actual vocabulary in common. So what do we know about how children learn tonal languages, or languages with clicks? How do children learn languages with word order that isn’t subject-verb-object, or languages that stack prefixes and suffixes and infixes like Lego? Do all children tell stories in the same way?

We just don’t have the documentation for any of this. When linguists go out into the field to document a language, they’re just not recording children.

This is a massive oversight, say Kelly and Wigglesworth. Let’s start recording this data along with adult language use. Record it for your own project or at least record it for someone else to use later on.

So I’m sitting there in this lecture thinking, you know what speech pathologists are really well-trained at?

(Now might be a good time to mention, I’m trained as a speech pathologist and worked in the profession for four years.)

And look, there are lots of linguistic-y things we’re not great at, but you know what speechies are really good at?

Eliciting language data from children.

So what could a speechie with a linguistics qualification (or a linguist with a speech pathology qualification) achieve?

Give me a plane ticket, a recording device, and some bubble mix*; I think I’ve got a postdoc for life.

(*The joke, by the way, is that speech pathologists love bubbles as a language elicitation tool. Felt I probably needed to explain that in-joke.

Kelly, B., & Wigglesworth, G. (2016). Making Acquisition Data Part of Fieldwork. CoEDL Summer School: Melbourne.