In recent, I can almost say recent decades
now, I've been very active in cross-linguistic
research. Initially I was focused on English-speaking
children, and we really had a handle on what
these children are like. There are some individual
differences, of course.
Somewhere along the line, I read something
about typical language development across
as being quite different from ours. So, I
started wondering, what would language-disordered
children look like? Children who basically
had the same diagnosis, but who were acquiring
a very different kind of language.
I started eventually studying children in
Italian with a diagnosis of Specific Language
Impairment, only to see that their symptoms
were really quite different. There were a
few universals, like most of these kids were
slower in acquiring words. Most of these kids
were slower in putting words together into
two-word combinations. But beyond a few of
those more or less universal characteristics,
their grammatical patterns for instance, in
terms of what was especially problematic,
were quite different from those in English.
That was very eye-opening to me. Thing that
I thought were "abstract" and maybe beyond
the reach of children with language impairment,
especially kids at the preschool level, turned
out to be a snap for Italian-speaking children
with language impairment. Because there is
a lot of redundancy, transparency in the language,
very overt agreement between adjectives and
nouns and subjects and verbs that we just
don't have in English. And the information
at the ends of words, which can be problematic
for English-speakers, because these are consonants
like t's and d's and s's and z's, are vowels
in Italian. So what proved to be difficult
for these kids included inserting little function
words, but not producing noun or verb endings,
for instance.
When studying some of the other Germanic languages,
after moving from Romance languages to Germanic
languages, I'm realizing now that word order
is problematic for children with language
impairment in languages -- it never occurred
to us in English, because English is such
a strict subject-verb-object kind of language,
where we don't deviate from that except in
a few specific instances. So word order is
just not problematic for children in English,
but it sure is for kids in other languages.
So, that made me have to dig further. It's
not going to be something simple like, grammatical
agreement is difficult, or the notion of plural
is difficult, or the notion of past-tense
is difficult. It's not at all simple. There's
a heavy interaction between what's transparent
in the language, and what's peculiar in the
language, and what's a grammatical function.
It's been pretty exciting from that standpoint.
What you need to do now is try to find what
could be responsible. Of course, we're always
shooting for the "single factor." It's rarely
or never quite that simple. But you're hoping
to find some kind of overriding factor that
might account for very different symptoms
as a function of the kind of language being
acquired.
Just to give you an example, when I looked
at all these differences after making an observation
that doesn't sound very profound at all, that
is: Whatever features, we're talking about
grammatical features now here, happen to be
problematic for young typically developing
children acquiring that language. For instance
in English, in our language acquisition textbooks,
we often hear about how young children are
telegraphic in their speech. They produce
these two and three-word utterances without
words like "the" and "of"and "is." And sometimes
they leave off "ed" and "s" at the end, so
it's very telegraphic. That metaphor works
very well. We think that's the way all kids
are going to be. Then we find children in
some of these languages that have very rich
grammar, where all words have to have a grammatical
ending. A kid never hears a word without a
grammatical ending. And sure enough, they
never leave off grammatical endings, no matter
how limited they are, because they never hear
one and it never occurs to them. How can I
account for these very different kinds of
symptoms, and yet these kids do have a language
problem very clearly.
That's when we started to think about -- I'll
give you another example. Some kids will say
things like "him running"or "her running."
It sounds like, where did they get that? It's
very ungrammatical. Or "him play basketball."
Why don't they say "He plays basketball",
"He played basketball"? Where is this "him"
and "her" coming from? Well, as we started
thinking about it, we realized that in the
input, kids do hear things like "I saw him
play basketball yesterday." Or, "I saw him
running." So you can get errors of that type,
and then think, if kids -- and we do know
they have a wide variety of problems -- if
kids are not understanding the more complex
sentences, what they're doing is inappropriately
extracting things like "him play basketball"
because they don't understand that you can
only say "him play basketball" if you have
something earlier in the sentence that allows
for it. If they don't understand that larger
grammatical structure, they might inappropriately
extract things.
What's interesting is, in let's say a language
like German, you have word order errors that
are very un-English like. For instance, a
child might alternate between -- I always
use the example -- "Christina drinks coffee"
(but the German equivalent), they'll alternate
between that correct form and an incorrect
version like "Christina coffee drink" where
drink will have the infinitive ending. How
do you explain that? Well, as a matter of
fact, when you ask questions like "Can Christina
drink coffee?" in a language like German,
you would actually ask it correctly as, "Can
Christina coffee drink?" So if kids, again,
don't understand that the use of drink in
a sentence is going to depend on something
earlier on in a question like "can" -- they
might inappropriately extract something like
"Christina coffee drink." and alternate that
with "Christina drinks coffee." because they
also hear that in simple sentences.
I guess the point is that if you make a single
assumption, that there are certain larger
syntactic structures these kids have a hard
time deciphering, you can get a very varied
range of errors that look, at first glance,
like these are totally different things going
on if a kid is in Germany versus the US or
in Italy or in Israel or in Hong Kong or Hungary
or Finland -- because we are studying kids
in all those countries -- that these are very
different errors. But sometimes you can account
for what seem to be different errors by making
the same assumption.
But we never would have thought about that
if we weren't forced into looking at very
different errors according to the kind of
language the kid is acquiring.
We never could have done that with English
alone. And someone in a different country
could never do it by looking at their language
alone. That's absolutely critical.
But there's another benefit as well, and that
is the more we understand -- for instance
some of the collaborative work I've done with
colleagues who were studying monolingual Spanish
speaking children with specific language impairment,
and we would sometimes compare with English
and so on -- it turns out the more you know
about those languages, the more you're in
a position to study something that's really
important in the US these days, and that is
bilingual children with specific language
impairment. Bilingual Spanish-English children
with specific language impairment are a growingly
important (if there is such a word) participant
population these days because there are a
lot of bilingual kids, and some of them will
have language impairment, just like a certain
number of monolingual children will have impairment.
So the cross-linguistic research is also important
for understanding the basic condition, but
the more we can catalog details about different
languages, the more we're in a position to
also help kids who have more than one language.
And how those languages might interact. Because
we know how each language works separately,
first of all -- if we didn't know that, we'd
be stuck with bilingual. I think for the longest
time, a lot of the work in the bilingual area
emphasized important things like cultural
values and things of that sort. But, this
kid has this problem now. What are you going
to do? You can respect the child's culture,
but now what are you going to do -- when you
have this language and this language and the
child is using both of them? You really need
a lot of those empirical facts as well. I
think the cross-linguistic work has really
helped to bring some of those facts.
