1094th General Monthly Meeting
How Children Learn to Speak
Professor Ray Cattell, University of Newcastle
Date: Wednesday, 6 June, 2001
Time: 6:00 for 6:30 pm
Venue: Building W5C, Room W5C 232, Macquarie University
If you asked most people in the street if they knew how children learnt their native language, I think most would say they did, and if you asked them the details, there would be a good deal of similarity in their answers: the children's parents teach them. But from a scientific point of view, that is almost certainly not the correct answer. This talk will aim at explaining why. That isn't to say, of course, that parents have nothing to do with it.
Every day of our lives, we open our mouths many times, and out come sentences. Language is so much a part of our environment that we don't notice that this is an extraordinary phenomenon, which raises one of the most important scientific questions in existence: how do we do it? Even more astonishing is that four-year-old children can also do it. How? And why can't your dog do it? (Many-dog owners think their dogs understand the language, but do they?)
He is the author of three books and several dozen academic papers. The most recent book was Children's Language: Consensus and Controversy (Cassell, London, 2000). In the United States it received a Choice Award for an outstanding academic book (Choice in the US is an organization that makes recommendations to university libraries). Another book on the subject of language, the brain and the mind is presently in preparation.
Report on the General Monthly Meeting
by E.C. Potter
Hands up those who remember saying "mama" for the first time as a baby! No hands up; so, do we know how infants learn to speak? This was the question posed by Ray Cattell, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Newcastle.
We adults know from our own repeated and concordant observation that the speaking process in children progresses from single words, to word strings we call sentences. Even 5-year old children are typically capable of forming and coherently communicating a sensible statement they have never composed before. Further, they can do this fluently, without hesitation or conscious planning such as pre-parsing or word ordering). As Professor Cattell said: children very quickly recognize rules and exceptions to rules, e.g., the past tense of "go" is not "goed."
Professor Cattell expanded on this with examples of "instant" verbal subtleties soon mastered by children. Thus the childish statement " Martin is too stupid to talk to Sue" is certainly clear, but the meaning is very different (but still clear) if the word "Sue" is omitted. Again, the title of this report has an erasure that invites reading both the corrected and uncorrected versions to see how their respective meanings differ in a childishly jocular way.
Professor Cattell went on to discuss theories. V.F. Skinner (1904-1990) wrote the book "Verbal Behaviour" in 1957, following experiments on animals. He had compared a pigeon "taught" to strut in a figure-of-eight fashion (plus reward afterwards) with (for example) car drivers safely completing familiar journeys without recalling any of their road decisions or precise driving actions. Skinner said language is a result of stimulus and conditioning, i.e., "behaviouralism", but his eminent peer Chomsky, reviewing Skinner's book, demolished this conclusion. Instead, he presented the "mentalist's" view that "insight is predominant and that ideas are formulated and communicated from the mind, even with children. To this end, Chomsky contrasted the statement "I climbed the mountain" (where "up" is understood by the childish listener) with "I climbed down the mountain" (where even a child instantly sees that "down" is vital for clarity).
Wherever the truth of learning to speak lies (and Ray Cattell is still writing books about it), his lecture stimulated and conditioned his audience into vocal yet disciplined discussion that would have neared eternity but for the application of President David Craddock's gag. Dr E.C. Potter, your reporter, spoke the vote of thanks for an insightful lecture.