Week Two

Language Acquisition & Socialisation

Human language has the design feature of Cultural Transmission. While language is most often
passed down from one generation to the next, the language that we grow up speaking is not a matter
of our DNA (our ‘nature’); instead, it depends very much on the language(s) that is being spoken in
our social context. The process of language learning and the parallel process of cultural learning take
place from birth through contact with other human beings.

Activity 1
Use your life experiences to answer the following questions. Write your notes in the table. If you don’t
have any young children in your family or among your friends’ families, give your best guess!

At what age do children start walking? 12 months

At what age do children start talking? 18 months

What type of speech sounds do infants make Babbling, laughing, cooing

when they are learning to talk?

What type of speech sounds do you think are The letter r, diction
difficult for children to learn?

Do you think that parenting style makes a Yes

difference to how well or how quickly a child
learns to talk?

You’ll find the answers to these questions through the notes below.
If you answered ‘yes’ to the final question, you will be surprised to learn that the answer is in fact
‘no’. Studies of language acquisition from all over the world indicate that the human species develops
language in a very similar process and with very similar outcomes (adult speech). Language
development happens regardless of the language being learned, or of the kind of input experienced by
the child. Parenting style doesn’t matter, so long as infants hear people talking around them (or see
sign language communication between fluent signers, if a member of a Deaf community).

The first two months (8-10 weeks)

In the first two months of life after birth, babies spend much of their time sleeping and feeding, with
small periods of awake ‘play’ time. During the wakeful periods, they produce noises associated with
biological functions (crying, coughing, burping), and most of their physical actions are reflexive
rather than deliberate actions. The thing that interests them most is human faces, and they look at and
copy facial expressions. So if you show a baby a sad or worried fact, they will start to cry, but if you
smile, they will smile back.
In terms of language, although new born babies aren’t making speech vocalisations, in the early
weeks they are already responding to language stimuli. Studies have found an increase in the rate of
sucking when a baby is exposed to the mother’s voice. Also, there are increased rate of sucking when
a baby is exposed to contrasting sounds. The repetition of ‘pa pa pa’ – produces slowing sucking
rates, but a change of sound from ‘pa’ to ‘ba’ produces an increased sucking rate. This is interpreted
as the baby ‘noticing’ the sound change.
Infants' responses to tiny differences between sounds that
adults may not be aware of. So in English, different [t] sounds
(alveolar or retroflex) are not distinguished and adults can’t
hear a difference, but infants do hear the sounds as different.
On the other hand, the sound [i] is different when produced by
a man, woman or child, but infants do not discriminate between
different articulations of the same sound – i.e. the same place
of articulation.
The capacity that we have to hear a sound produced by
different people as the ‘same’ is to do with the physical
properties of the sound wave – regardless of who says a
particular sound, that sound has shared physical properties.

Up to six months
As infants develop, they add cooing and laughing to basic
biological noises, and they begin to engage in vocal play,
producing a wide range of sounds including raspberries,
clicking noises, and some vowel sounds like [a]. Parents do not
necessarily recognize this vocal play as language preparation
because infants experiment with all sounds available to them, not
just those used in their mother tongue.
More interesting perhaps, is that at this age, babies start to grasp
objects in their hands, to reach for objects (including their parents),
and to play with sound-making toys (like rattles and squeaky toys).
In parallel with this, they use sounds, including vocalisations, to
attract attention and they begin turn-taking with adults. So when an
adult speaks to the infant, the infant will respond with vocalisations.

Up to the first year

In the next six months of their lives, children engage in more intensive vocal activity with ‘babbling’.
They are gradually narrowing down the sound set that they produce. So instead of making all kinds of
different sounds, they produce more of the sounds used in their mother tongue. They produce a range
of consonants at the front of the mouth (bilabial /p, b, m/ and alveolar /t, d, n/). Sounds produced with
the lips are visible to infants. They see their parents and caregivers opening and closing their mouths,
and they copy this ‘gesture’. Sounds in the alveolar region (the ridge behind the top teeth) are also
common. This is likely because this is the same place that is involved in sucking and swallowing. Try
these actions, and you will feel your tongue rising to the roof of your mouth behind your teeth. This is
a ‘gesture’ that infants develop control over very early in life
in order to feed. Infants also produce sounds with their mouths
open. These will be vowel sounds, and they tend to produce
maximally different vowels (/i, a, u/).
Most infant ‘babbling’ takes the form CV (or consonant +
vowel) as the child practices sequences of sounds over and
over like duga duga duga or ma-ma-ma-ma. These sequences
begin to follow the intonation patterns of speech and song. Just
like adults, children at this age use different intonations for
questions, to express surprise and to make demands, even if
they are not using recognisable words yet.
One year of age
At around one year old, children reach the one-word stage: articulating recognisable basic words like
dada, mama, woof or dog. Words are used for more than just their basic meaning, so a word da could
mean ‘I want a duck’ or ‘Look, there is a duck over there’ or ‘This is a duck’. At this age, da could
also mean ‘dog’, or ‘daddy’. Learning to pronounce recognisable words corresponds with learning to
walk upright, which also happens at around one year old. It is unusual for children to walk and talk at
the same time. Usually a child will start talking and then later walk, or they will walk first and then
develop recognisable speech after. It appears that when the brain is busy learning one skill, the other
skills have to wait.
The forms of words used by one year olds are highly simplified. This is because at this age, infants
don’t yet have full control over the muscles in their vocal tract. Sounds in the back of the mouth
(like /k/), fricative sounds which require a controlled exit of air flow (like /s/ and /z/, as well as ‘th’
sounds /θ/ and /ð/) and combinations of consonants (like /sp/ and /pl/) are hard for infants to
coordinate. Parents have to ‘interpret’ their children’s speech.

poon ‘spoon’ pane ‘plane’

tis ‘kiss’ tin ‘clean’

tow ‘cow’ pola ‘stroller’

Children also generalise at this stage, so as well as one word having many different meanings (as in
da means ‘duck’, ‘dog’, and ‘daddy’), one word can have a very broad meaning, far broader than in
adult vocabulary:
● nana (from ‘banana’) meaning any kind of food
● mama for all women
● car or bus for all vehicles
● green for all colours (maybe meaning something like ‘colourful’ as kids at this age are not
very accurate with colour terms when they are learning to talk)

Up to the second year

Over the next year, a massive amount of physical and linguistic development occurs. The average
vocabulary in use is around 200 words, but children comprehend far more words and they love
listening to stories, songs, and conversation. Children begin to use pronouns to refer to themselves
(me, my, mine) and they use the objects around them to replicate adult behaviours. They are able to
assign objects meaning and significance. This is visible in the way they play.
 Children copy the behaviours of adults around
them. Here is an example of a young girl
dressing up as a ‘lady’.

Islamic prayers normally involve a sequence of

standing and kneeling. Here is an example of a
child copying prayer behaviours with a face
cloth and bottle top in place of a prayer cloth
and stone.

As a child learns to manipulate his or her physical world, and begins to assign significance to
everyday objects, grammar emerges with the 2 word stage.

Two-word combinations

· grandma car
· more cheese
· no bed
· tank-yu mummy
· no poo
· one mouse, more mouse
· one bus, another-one bus
These two word combinations gradually extend into three-word patterns which allow children to
interact with adults in their world, and create their own realities.

Three-word combinations

· Abi no bath
· Abi no toilet
· rara didi poo (rabbit did a poo)
· Abi’s turn?
· No, Abi’s turn

Development of adult speech

Adult grammar is acquired in phases. Children sometimes appear to regress, or go backwards in their
use of grammar, but this can be explained by looking at the systematic steps that children move
through.
We can see this with a pattern for acquiring past tense forms of verbs – the forms we use to talk about
actions that happened before the present moment. The regular way of making verbs past is to add the
suffix we write as -ed onto the end of the verb. This works for a lot of verbs, like laugh-ed, play-ed,
climb-ed, scream-ed as well as those where we change the spelling a bit, like hopped, and cried. But
there are also a lot of verbs in English that are irregular, in that they don’t follow the basic past tense
pattern. Examples include broke, brought, went.
Phase 1: when children first learn the forms of verbs, they use the ‘correct’ adult form. This is an
exciting time for parents, who hear their children using ‘grammar’ in their speech.

Phase 1

played

climbed

cried

broke

brought

went

Phase 2: In phase 2, children begin to notice the rules of the language they are learning. They acquire
the regular pattern for expressing past tense, and are able to add –ed onto the end of a verb. Once they
acquire this rule, they apply it everywhere they can, including to irregular verbs. This is characteristic
of 3-year old speech. It tells us that at phase 1, children don’t necessarily understanding that the verb
form has a complex meaning, which includes the basic word meaning, and past time reference.
 Phase 1 Phase 2

played played

climbed climbed

cried cried

broke breaked

brought bringed

went goed

Phase 3: As children enter phase 3, they gradually learn which verbs are irregular. This process
happens over several years, from around age 4 onwards. Literacy education at school has an impact
on this learning because children are seeing the irregular forms of words in print. Common words like
go-went are acquired faster than less common words like fight-fought.

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3

played played played

climbed climbed climbed

cried cried cried

broke breaked broke

brought bringed brought

went goed went

The acquisition of word-building grammar that begins to happen at phase 2 follows the development
of more complex motor skills (particularly manual skills). Children who use simple grammar are
capable of building complex physical structures. The block shapes in the photo belong to a flat puzzle.
Here, they have been repurposed to build a castle – notice the symmetry in the design, which was
created without adult input. This new structure (and many many others) was inspired by the Disney
movie Frozen and the castle that the character Elsa built out of ice.
Expansion into sentences
As children transition from shorter structures into full sentences, we can observe that children don’t
make mistakes with the word order of their language. They acquire word endings that are important
early in their language learning, and once the rules are established, they correctly apply word endings,
even in languages with much more complicated word formation systems than English
By 5 years old, children are asking questions, making negative statements, forming complex sentence,
and talking about the past, future, other places (displacement). Some sounds are still emerging, like
‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘j’, ‘z’, and ‘th’. These kind of sounds (fricatives and affricates) won’t be fully in place
until 8 or 9 years of age. Some children also take time to pronounce ‘r’ sounds as an adult would.
Although children may not produce all speech sounds as an adult would, they certainly hear the
speech sounds of their language as distinct. This shows clearly in efforts to correct pronunciation. A
child might say “truf” for “truth”. When an adult models the correct pronunciation as “truth”, the
child is most likely to respond by saying, “yeah, truf”. They hear the pronunciation of the adult, but
they do not realise that their own pronunciation is different.
The key point about child language acquisition is that all children gain a command of the language
that is spoken around them, despite the casual and variable level of language exposure that each child
receives, and despite the reality that adult speech is full of incomplete sentences, natural speech
dysfluencies, and interruptions and overlaps from other speakers.

Activity 2
Children overgeneralize rules when learning a language. What child forms of the words are likely to
appear instead of the adult forms? Write in your guess of ‘child language’ in the table.

Adult form Child form Adult form Child form

children childs sang sung

went goed geese gooses

better gooder worst baddest

best bestest knives knifes

brought brung worse worser

Activity 3
Children frequently produce the kinds of sentences listed below. Each structure differs from adult
English. What would an adult say? What language function/real-world function is the child trying to
express? Make notes beside each example.
1. Don’t giggle me. Don’t tickle me
2. I danced the clown. I danced my toy clown
3. Yawny baby, you can push her mouth open to drink her. The baby is tired, she needs her
bottle
4. Who deaded my kitty cat? Who killed my cat?
5. Are you gonna nice yourself? Are you going to be nice?

Activity 4

Prediction Task: How does language acquisition happen, in spite of the imperfect model that is
provided to infants and children? Make a few notes on how you believe children learn language,
before reading on.
 By being encouraged when correct language is being performed (reinforcement) which will lead to
less grammatical errors.

Theories of language learning

The evidence for language acquisition is complex and subject to different interpretations.
1. Imitation
We might assume that children learn by hearing and repeating adult speech.
BUT: Children produce imperfect constructions, even when correct forms are made available. This
was illustrated with attempts to correct the pronunciation of “truf” (for “truth”). Another example
shows attempts to correct verb forms. A child uses the regularised ‘hold-ed’ instead of the irregular
form ‘held’, even after the adult has produced the irregular verb form ‘held’ as an example.

Child My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

Adult Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits.

Child Yes.

Adult What did you say she did?

Child She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

Adult Did you say she held them tightly?

Child No, she holded them loosely.

This child is at Phase 2 of past tense development for this lexeme. She has learned the past-ed rule,
and she is applying it persistently, even when the adult provides the ‘correct’ word form.

2. Reinforcement
We might assume that children learn because they are positively reinforced when speaking well, and
negatively reinforced when speaking incorrectly.
BUT: research shows that reinforcement actually doesn’t occur very often in interactions between
children and their care givers. If correction is offered, it is often focused on content, rather than on
form, as shown in this interaction:
Child: That’s daddy’s one
Parent: No, that’s mummy’s one
Child: Oh, that’s mummy’s one
Here, the correction provided by the parent is about meaning, not about the form of the utterance.
As with pronunciation, children don’t realise that they are making ‘errors’ and can’t necessarily
correct themselves when shown a correct construction. Instead, they follow their own grammar, at
whatever developmental stage it is up to.

Child Nobody don’t like me.

Mother No, say ‘Nobody likes me.’

Child Nobody don’t like me

(Dialogue repeated eight times)

Mother Now, listen carefully, say ‘Nobody likes me.’

Child Oh, nobody don’t likes me.

Child Want other one spoon, Daddy.

Father You mean, you want the other spoon.

Child Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.

Father Can you say ‘the other spoon’?

Child Other one spoon

Father Say ‘other’

Child other

Father Spoon

Child spoon

Father Other spoon

Child Other spoon. Now give me other one spoon?

These kinds of conversations are actually very rare between parent and child. Normally parents are so
pleased that they can understand their children, that they find any grammatical errors ‘cute’ rather
than problematic, and they don’t typically spend time correcting their child’s language.

3. Analogy
Some academics have suggested that children learn by hearing a sentence structure and using it as a
basis to form other sentences. So if a child hears:
 ● I painted a red barn.
Then they should be able to produce by analogy:
● I painted a blue barn.
The order of red and barn can be reversed, if the speaker wants to focus on the colour, rather than the
whole object:
● I painted the barn red.
By analogy we should be able to change activities (and thus verbs from paint to another activity).
Based on the first structures, a child could say:
● I saw a red barn.
This is a good sentence. But if the alternative word order is used, the result is structurally okay, but
semantically nonsense, because we can’t, by looking, change the colour of something.
● *I saw a barn red.
So grammatical analogy doesn’t always work as a strategy. While analogy might explain some of the
new sentences that children make, it doesn’t explain how it is that children correctly produce
structures that they haven’t heard before, and avoid those structures that would be possible by
analogy, but aren’t actually used by adults.

4. Structured input
Another idea is that children learn to talk because adults use a special type of language with them.
This is the baby talk theory... and it is the case that in Aotearoa New Zealand, adults tend to talk to
young children in a slower manner, with exaggerated intonation and complete sentences.
BUT: the language used by adults with children turns out not to be not grammatically simple. You
would probably avoid saying ‘Would you like a cool beverage?’ to your child, but you don’t often
hear adults saying ‘Baby want drinkie?’ (except maybe in the movies).
It turns out that in many cultures, there is no ‘baby talk’ register at all. So baby talk, the idea that
children receive a kind of simplified language that helps them learn, cannot explain language
acquisition.
5. The innateness hypothesis
Finally, we come to the innateness hypothesis. The reality is that children don’t ordinarily receive
grammar lessons. Even so, somehow, all children develop the capacity to use language grammatically.
And it turns out that their developmental stages are pretty similar, regardless of their mother tongue.
This is true even for children who use sign language.
This has led linguists to suggest that the human brain has a linguistic blueprint or template of some
kind, which is used by children to develop their language skills. So they receive language input from
the environment around them, and their brain is structured in such a way that they can turn this input
into language comprehension and production.
The language input, as I have mentioned, is incomplete – this is known as the ‘poverty of the
stimulus’ and it simply means that children never hear the complete and correct version of their
language. Natural language is full of dysfluencies (false starts, hesitations, repetitions, incomplete
structures).
In spite of this ‘poverty of stimulus’, all children develop complete and complex grammatical
knowledge of their mother tongue (or tongues, if they are being raised as bilingual). The innateness
hypothesis claims that children are able to develop complex grammar from insufficient input because
they are pre-programmed to do so, they possess a system of basic ‘language’ settings that they can
employ to understand the structures of their individual language. Exactly what these language settings
might be is still being debated, but the innateness hypothesis remains a useful explanation for an
extremely complex process that is arguably unique to human beings.

Language Socialisation
In Week 1, we were introduced to two types of cultural and linguistic knowledge. Propositional
knowledge is the knowledge we have of people, objects and entities in our world. An example of
propositional knowledge in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand is knowing that a cat is a pet, rather
than a pest. Another example is knowing that social distancing and mask wearing reduces disease
transmission.
Procedural knowledge is the knowledge of how to get things done in our society. We discussed our
knowledge of how to get food, and what it means to keep a pet.

The relationship between language and culture

It is difficult to separate out language and cultural knowledge. These two aspects go hand in hand in
the human species. While highly complex levels of language and culture are evident in all human
social groups, it is questionable as to whether either is present, even at a very simple level, in
creatures that have very similar DNA to ours.
One perspective is that language is a part of culture, a tool for the transmission of culture. It is a
means through which social learning or enculturation can take place. Using language, knowledge that
has been acquired by one person can be transmitted to another.
I should stress here that language is not the only means by which knowledge can be transferred. A lot
of basic cultural knowledge is transmitted by observation and imitation. One of the oldest ways of
educating people in specific types of knowledge is through an apprenticeship system, where
observation and imitation are the core learning strategies.
However, many cultures have formal systems of transmitting knowledge which rely heavily on
language. We are participating in one now – the formal education system. Our formal education
system is predominantly a language-based means of transmitting accumulated cultural knowledge.
Recognising that language is an important means of transmitting cultural knowledge has led
researchers to the understanding that studying language is a valid part of studying culture. Language
gives us a way to access cultural knowledge and practices. It is very difficult to study culture without
any reference to language.
But how does one go about the study of language and at the same time, give consideration to culture?
How can we use our knowledge of language to better understand the culture of the community that we
are investigating? When linguists answer this question, we start use language as a lens to understand
culture and we are guided by this question: How does the linguistic data express or reflect the culture
of the community that we are learning about?
Activity 5

Reflection: Consider the short section on Culture and Nature in the Week 1 reading by Duranti.
What does it mean to say that Culture is distinct from Nature?

What belongs to nature is not the result of human intervention.

 What kinds of human behaviours give us evidence that culture (and more specifically language) is
distinct from nature?

Activity 6

Imagine yourself in the future, talking to young

people about what life was like in 2022. What
Procedural Knowledge (“how to” knowledge)
do you have of courtship/dating/ finding-a-
partner practices? How is courtship different
today from in the past?
Make notes below.

Finding a partner has changed drastically today. With the introduction of technology, many
people resort to meeting people online and it gives people the opportunity to get to know
someone at any time of day, not face-to-face.

Language Socialisation
Competent use of a language, and competent participation in a culture, involves more than simply
control of the grammatical systems, knowledge of the meaning of words, and knowledge of cultural
practices. At the same time that children acquire a grammatical understanding of their mother tongue,
they are also acquiring a knowledge of what counts as appropriate linguistic and cultural behaviour in
their cultural context.
Imagine you are holding a baby or carrying a baby. How is the baby positioned? Are you looking at
the baby’s face?
The treatment of children as potential addressees
One way that interactions with children differ from family to family is in whether adults consider
infants to be potential addressees or not. Another way of saying this, is whether adults are willing to
interact with children as though they are capable of understanding, or not.
A universal tendency has been observed: Adults, older siblings, and others wanting to communicate
with infants and small children in many cultures tend to simplify the content of their talk to achieve
communication.
Not all cultures use ‘baby talk’, but there are other ways of ‘simplifying’ language for children, such
as using basic vocabulary rather than complex or academic vocabulary, and repeating or paraphrasing
your words to give the child multiple opportunities to understand.
There are differences in the age or developmental stage at which adults begin to interact with children.
What follows are generalisations. There are of course differences from one family to the next, and
from one parent to the next, and in some families, from one child to the next, as first born children (or
last born children) may be socialised differently from other children in the family.
When a child is a potential addressee
When a child is positioned as a potential addressee, caregivers begin addressing infants from birth.
Adults may use high pitch, and exaggerated intonation to hold the child’s attention, and some adults
will even produce responses on behalf of the child. In the months immediately following birth, infants
are not actually producing any ‘speech’ type sounds, so this speech behaviour is quite optimistic on
the part of the caregiver. When a child is being positioned as an addressee, they are held facing their
caregiver.

When a child is not a potential addressee

When a child is not positioned as a potential addressee, it may be the case that adults don’t spend time
interacting with children in the early months or even first year of the child’s life. In such cases, talk
begins when the child reaches the 1-word stage and starts producing recognisable utterances. The 1-
word stage generally coincides with walking or at least independent mobility, so linguistic interaction
is therefore delayed until the child is showing physical signs of ‘human’ behaviour. This happens at
around one year of age. In this type of situation, a child doesn’t need to be facing their caregiver, and
there are plenty of examples of young babies being strapped to the back of their parent, or to the front
but facing out, rather than being held facing their parent.
In these circumstances, when another adult addresses the child, the caregiver might respond on behalf
of the child, speaking with a high pitched ‘child’s’ voice.
Once a child shows readiness for communication, by producing recognisable words, and
demonstrating independence, then more active language socialisation can occur. In some contexts,
children are actively instructed to speak in particular ways.
Observation: In all cultures, there appears to be an underlying understanding that children need to
hear complex speech in order to become proficient speakers of a language. There are no cultures
where deliberately denying language exposure to children is acceptable.
Observation: There are differences however, in the age at which a child is treated as a potential
addressee. For some people, and indeed in some cultures, infants are addressed from birth; in other
cultures interaction is delayed until evidence of physical development occurs. Independent mobility is
important, and clear attempts to articulate words are important as well. When a child begins to
produce recognisable words, they are generally treated as being ready for language socialisation.
Observation: regardless of the cultural strategies employed to socialise children, the outcome in
terms of language acquisition is not substantially different – all children acquire the language of their
care givers.

The treatment of children as potential speakers

The second way that interactions with children may differ is in the way in which utterances produced
by children are received by adults. Particularly, we are interested in utterances that are unclear. When
children are learning to speak, a lot of what they say falls into this category. Bilingual children present
their parents with even more of a challenge because there are two possible language sources to
explain every utterance that a child makes, and very young children interweave their languages and
can combine words from one language with another in a very flexible way.
There are three common responses from adults to children’s vocalisations
· The unclear utterance is ignored by the adults. This means that when a small child
vocalises, but doesn’t produce a recognisable word, the vocalisation is simply ignored. This
can be linked to understanding of social relationships. If adults are strongly positioned as
 social superiors, and children are positioned as subordinates, then an adult might not feel it is
appropriate to engage with and try to work out what a child is saying. It is up to the child to
make the effort to communicate. Some adults feel ‘silly’ engaging with a child’s unclear
communication.
When a child produces an unclear vocalisation, the parent may overtly indicate that the
utterance is unclear. The parent may claim non-understanding, or ask the child to repeat
themselves, or even tease the child for being unclear.
· With very young infants, adults often copy vocalisations back at the children, without any
expectation of meaning being involved. These kinds of exchanges seem to reflect the belief
that vocal play is important for language development, but they are not interpreted as
language by adults.
· Finally, a parent may reformulate an infant’s utterance. In this strategy, the parent guesses
what the child has said, and reformulates the unclear utterance as adult speech. So if a child
points at a duck and says ‘da’, a caregiver might encouragingly say, ‘Yes, it’s a duck’. Or
possibly, “No, it’s a ducK’, to be more correct in their feedback.
Although all children produce unclear language as part of normal linguistic development, adults vary
in how they respond to such vocalisations. Some treat the gestures and vocalisations of their babies as
being meaningful and communicative, while others do not.

Assigning a culturally appropriate meaning

A child’s first recognizable words are an important milestone for all parents. Children’s first words
tend to be linked to salient or important aspects of their environment. A colleague of mine mentioned
that her child’s first word was ‘cat’; another said it was ‘dog’. Family pets are on the same height
level as small children, and they are an important feature of a child’s life. An academic colleague
insisted her child’s first word was ‘book’! One of my children produced the word for ‘clock’ when we
visited family in Iran. Clocks are a noticeable feature on the walls of Iranian homes, and my daughter
clearly noticed all the clocks. She pointed and said atch-atch which was her way of saying so’at
‘clock’ in Persian. Even though the sounds were not correct, the attempt to communicate was clear, as
she would point at each clock, and vocalise atch-atch.
We should keep in mind though, that before children produce words that adults recognise, they are
producing lots of words that we don’t understand. Because they have limited control over their vocal
muscles, they can’t make contrasting sounds in the way that adults do, and their words tend to be
shortened and simplified. Until they develop the fine motor control to produce contrastive sounds,
their vocalisations are very difficult to interpret, so we can understand why parents might choose to
ignore some of these early speech efforts.

Child-centred and Situation-centred socialisation

An interesting contrast occurs in language socialisation, where we can compare language socialisation
that is focused on children, with language socialisation that is focused on the communicative
situation.
1. Child-centred socialisation involves engaging with a child’s vocalisations, and
accommodating a child’s unclear linguistic behaviour by reformulating or expanding. It also
can mean accommodating a child's lack of linguistic competence by simplifying the way we
speak to children.
2. Situation-centred socialisation involves accommodating a situation by ignoring the unclear
utterances of a child, or trying to get the child to speak more clearly. This can also involve
speaking on behalf of a child, to give the child a way of being situationally appropriate. In this
way, the child is brought up to speed by being provided with repeated adult models of
situationally appropriate language use.
 3. An adult may pay more attention to the child in some circumstances (maybe when they are
home alone), and more attention to the situation in other circumstances (maybe where there
are other adults around to observe their behaviour).
Neither child-centred socialisation nor situation-centred socialisation produces better language
outcomes for children, although perhaps situation-centred socialisation might result in a child who
produces more appropriate adult-like speech sooner, and is therefore thought of as being more ‘polite’
or socially skilled. Child-centred socialisation might produce a child who is more willing to speak up
and take communicative risks, even if their speech is not yet like adult language. But there is a lot of
individual variation, both in parenting styles, and in child development. It is difficult to generalise
beyond saying it doesn’t seem to matter what type of parent we are. So long as a child is surrounded
by language, and eventually by people willing to talk to them, they will learn to speak.
Technology Note: early research on the effects on language acquisition of spending long periods of
time watching TV or playing games on a digital device suggests that replacing face-to-face language
with digital language can slow down a child’s language development. The element of interaction is
missing. Babies in particular are happy to pay attention to human faces, but they don’t acquire
linguistic knowledge from screens!

The development of a linguistic identity

In this final point, I want to consider how language socialisation results in the formation of distinct
linguistic identities in children. Very early on in life, children become aware that language forms have
different social meanings, and that different ways of speaking are appropriate for and towards
different participants.

Context: 4 year old girl, empty glass and bottle of milk next to place at table

Child to mother (direct) ‘Mommy, I want milk.’

Child to father (indirect) C: ‘What’s that?’

F: ‘Milk’
C: ‘My milk, Daddy.’
F: ‘Yes, it’s your milk.’
C: ‘It’s milk, Daddy.’
F: ‘Yes, it is.’
C: ‘You want milk, Daddy.’
F: ‘I have some, thank you.’
C: ‘Milk in there, Daddy’
F: ‘Yes.’

In this example, the child seems aware that they must talk to mum differently than to dad, and that
mum and dad have role differences that have an impact on what each one can reasonably be expected
to do for the child. The expectation is that the mother will provide things on request; whereas the
father doesn’t have this role. The father might need to be persuaded to engage in this activity. Keep in
mind that in households where the father is the primary caregiver, the linguistic behaviours are likely
reversed. So as with much gender research, we should consider whether factors like parental role are
influencing the child’s behaviour, or the extent to which we can generalise from a single example of
parent-child interaction to a whole culture.
Activity 7 - Reflection/Projection Task
Consider your observations/experiences/expectations of language socialisation and make notes on
the following questions:

1. At what age are infants considered to be potential addressees by your family members (or
by you)? How old would an infant need to be, before you started talking to them?

2. At what age are infants considered to be potential speakers by your family members (or by
you)? At what age would you try to interpret an infant’s vocalisations?

3. Think about language socialisation: if you wanted your parent(s) or caregiver(s) to make
you a cup of tea or coffee, or give you a ride somewhere, or give you permission to do
something, how would you make your request? Is your gendered identity or their gendered
identity a factor in how you make your request? Or are there other factors that might
influence your behaviour? If you are a parent or aunt/uncle, consider your interactions
with the children around you, and interactions of people with different gendered identities
with children.

Readings:
Fromkin, Victoria et al. 2005. An introduction to language. 5th Edition. South Melbourne,
Victoria: Thompson. Chapter 8: Language Acquisition.
Foley, William. (1997). Anthropological Linguistics. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell
Publishers. Chapter 17: Language Socialization.
Crystal, D. 2007. How language works. London: Penguin. Chapter 71: How to look after
languages: recognising functions.

Language & Culture: Reflection Activities

Consider the short section on Culture and Nature in the Week 1 reading by Duranti. What does it
mean to say that Culture is distinct from Nature?
 - this section focuses on the difference between what we do because of our shared
human DNA and what we learn through cultural transmission
- lots of human behaviours are a product of the ways that our physical bodies function,
and how we experience the earth (gravity, heat, cold, light and dark). We breath, eat in
response to hunger, drink in response to thirst, experience emotions of pain, happiness,
fear, sorrow, shame, surprise, move independent by crawling and then walking and
running – these behaviours are instinctive)
- not only this, it seems that all humans are born with the capacity to develop language –
this capacity is part of our genetic inheritance (our nature), but the details of the
languages, and the cultural behaviours that we acquire, are linked to our experiences
after birth (how we are nurtured).

What kinds of human behaviours give us evidence that culture (and more specifically language) is
distinct from nature?

- children learn the languages and cultures that surround them. This might be the
language/culture of their genetic relatives, but it doesn’t have to be. Children who are
adopted learn the language of their new family; when families migrate, their children
acquire the language spoken in their new social context.
- do we speak the languages of our grandparents? of our great grandparents? If we
don’t, we have evidence that language is a product of cultural transmission rather than
direct genetic inheritance. My great great great grandparents spoke Scottish Gaelic on
my fathers side, and Irish Gaelic (from northern Ireland) on my mothers side. I have no
living relatives who speak Gaelic now. My ancestors were forced to become speakers
of English.
- other examples of human behaviours that result from nurture (how we are socialised)
could be our religious beliefs and how we express those, holidays that we celebrate
and how/when we celebrate them. The tie to language isn’t as obvious, but for
example, the holy books associated with some of the major different religions are a
written expression of religious history and beliefs, as are the cultural scripts associated
with religious services. And we say “happy birthday” and write things like “have a
wonderful year” in birthday cards...

Imagine yourself in the future, talking to young people about what life was like in 2021. What
Procedural Knowledge (“how to” knowledge) do you have of courtship/dating/ finding-a-partner
practices? How is courtship different today from in the past?
 - procedural knowledge concerns the normalised ways that people achieve certain
cultural goals. Finding a partner is a cultural goal in all societies. How this is
achieved is different in different cultural groups. Within a culture, there may be
different types of procedural knowledge.
- In Aotearoa NZ, young people may access religious networks to find a partner (a
suitable partner is someone who belongs to the same religious group), or social
networks (a suitable partner is someone who participates in the same face-to-face or
online social networks), or family networks (a suitable partner is identified by a family
member, for example an aunt or uncle, or one’s father, and ‘matched’ with you).
- Suitable partners can be determined by financial stability (or earning potential),
education level, interests etc.
- Suitable partners may be determined by their physical attributes (keep in mind that
cultural notions of beauty change through time, and there is a huge difference today as
to what is considered ‘attractive’ compared to as little as 30 or 40 years ago.
- Suitable partners may be understood as forming a cisgender heterosexual couple
capable of ‘in-house’ reproduction, or birth sex may not be relevant, or partners may
only be considered if they are same-sex. When reflecting on this question, you should
be aware that homosexuality was a criminal offence until 1986 in Aotearoa. Same-sex
relationships between women were never criminal here, but they were socially
stigmatised and same-sex couples hid their relationships from society. Social attitudes
(propositional knowledge - beliefs) have changed considerably in recent years, as well
as the social structures that inhibit or support those attitudes (procedural knowledge
and systems), although it is important to keep in mind that not every member of a
cultural group holds the same set of beliefs.

Reflection/Projection Task
Share your observations/experiences/expectations of language socialisation with the group:

1. At what age are infants considered to be potential addressees by your family members (or
by you)? How old would an infant need to be, before you started talking to them?

- e.g. Julie’s family members talk to newborn babies and sing to them, but her Pākehā
family talks less than her Persian family. Her Persian family members spend most of
the baby’s awake time interacting with the baby. From birth, babies are considered to
be potential addressees.

2. At what age are infants considered to be potential speakers by your family members (or by
you)? At what age would you try to interpret an infant’s vocalisations?

- e.g. Julie’s Persian family members treat any vocalisation of a baby as ‘meaningful
language’ and they assign meaning to the baby’s vocalisation, including assigning
meaning to vocal play
- e.g. Julie’s Pākehā family members start treating vocalisations as ‘language’ once
there is evidence of intention, for example the baby looks/points at an object and
vocalises. This starts to happen around 6 months, although recognisable words
generally emerge in infants at around 1 year.

3. Think about language socialisation: if you wanted your parent(s) or caregiver(s) to make
 you a cup of tea or coffee, how would you make your request? Would it be different? Is
your gendered identity or their gendered identity a factor? Or are there other factors that
might influence your behaviour? If you are a parent or aunt/uncle, consider your
interactions with children, and interactions of people with different gendered identities with
children.

- e.g. In Julie’s family, she wouldn’t ask a male family member to make her a cup of tea
or coffee; instead she would offer to make them one, even if she was visiting their
house. Her dad is an exception, because he has a fancy coffee machine and likes
making visitors coffee. She would probably also offer to make female family members a
cup tea if she wanted one herself, so that she wasn’t imposing on them, even in their
homes. This seems to be partly about gender (she finds it easier to ask female family
members and wouldn’t impose on a male) but also partly about politeness (rather than
asking, she would offer to make her mother or sister a cup of tea if she wanted one
herself, even in their houses). In most cases, if visiting family members, she wouldn’t
need to ask for anything because she would be offered a drink by the host.
- Julie’s children are learning to do the same thing. Their father will ask them to make
him a tea or coffee, but if they want something, they will make it themselves. They used
to ask me ‘Can I have a hot chocolate?’ but they tend not to ask their father, because I
have been the primary care giver. They don’t bother asking me about drinks now, and
only ask me permission to eat ‘special’ foods (cakes or chocolate). No doubt, they’ll
stop asking about treats and start helping themselves as they get older. They *might*
get told off for doing that...

Language Acquisition
1. Children over-generalise rules when learning a language. What child forms of the words
are likely to appear instead of the adult forms? Write in your guess of ‘child language’ in
the table and discuss your responses with the group.

Adult form Child form Adult form Child form

children childrens, childs sang singed

went goed geese gooses

better gooder/betterer worst baddest/worstest

best goodest/bestest knives knifes

brought bringed/brang (like sang) worse badder/worser

Note: Some of the irregular forms are used commonly so children hear words like ‘children’ and
‘best” all the time. They sometimes produce mixed constructions that combine the regular ending with
an irregular form, like ‘childrens’ or ‘bestest’.
2. Children frequently produce the kinds of sentences listed below. Each structure differs
from adult English. What would an adult say? What language function/real-world
function is the child trying to express? Discuss your ideas with the group.
1. Don’t giggle me. > Don’t make me giggle.
 2. I danced the clown. > I made the clown dance.
3. Yawny baby, you can push her mouth open to drink her. > ... to make her drink.
4. Who deaded my kitty cat? >Who killed my kitty cat? (made die)
5. Are you gonna nice yourself? > Are you gonna dress up? (make yourself look nice)
In each case, the child is trying to express causation (the causative function), where one
person causes another person/thing to perform an action. In English, we usually do this with
a complex structure involving ‘make somebody do something’. We also have a few special
words that are inherently causative like ‘kill’ which equals ‘make someone die’ and ‘dress
up’ which is equivalent to ‘make someone/yourself look nice’. The child hasn’t acquired the
regular pattern for causation with make, or the inherently causative words like kill yet, and
is trying to use non-causative verbs as causatives.
In class, I noticed that some students had trouble interpreting what the child was trying to
say. Because child language is produced in a physical context, care givers have a lot of clues
to help them interpret what the child is saying. In fact, a lot of parental energy is spent trying
to assign meaning to children’s language!