Three is a Crowd?
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Three is a Crowd?
Child Language and Child Development: Multilingual–Multicultural Perspectives Series Editor: Professor Li Wei, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK Editorial Advisors: Professor Gina Conti-Ramsden, University of Manchester, UK Professor Kevin Durkin, The University of Western Australia Professor Susan Ervin-Tripp, University of California, Berkeley, USA Professor Jean Berko Gleason, Boston University, USA Professor Brian MacWhinney, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Children are brought up in diverse yet specific cultural environments; they are engaged from birth in socially meaningful and appropriate activities; their development is affected by an array of social forces. This book series is a response to the need for a comprehensive and interdisciplinary documentation of up-to-date research on child language and child development from a multilingual and multicultural perspective. Publications from the series will cover language development of bilingual and multilingual children, acquisition of languages other than English, cultural variations in child rearing practices, cognitive development of children in multicultural environments, speech and language disorders in bilingual children and children speaking languages other than English, and education and healthcare for children speaking non-standard or non-native varieties of English. The series will be of particular interest to linguists, psychologists, speech and language therapists, and teachers, as well as to other practitioners and professionals working with children of multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. Recent Books in the Series Culture-Specific Language Styles: The Development of Oral Narrative and Literacy Masahiko Minami Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children D. Kimbrough Oller and Rebecca E. Eilers (eds) Phonological Development in Specific Contexts: Studies of Chinese-Speaking Children Zhu Hua Bilingual Children’s Language and Literacy Development Roger Barnard and Ted Glynn (eds) Developing in Two Languages: Korean Children in America Sarah J. Shin Other Books of Interest Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism Colin Baker Learning to Request in a Second Language: A Study of Child Interlanguage Pragmatics Machiko Achiba Third Language Learners: Pragmatic Production and Awareness Maria Pilar Safont Jordà Language Acquisition: The Age Factor (2nd edition) David Singleton and Lisa Ryan
For more details of these or any other of our publications, please contact: Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, England http://www.multilingual-matters.com
CHILD LANGUAGE AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT 6 Series Editor: Li Wei, University of Newcastle
Three is a Crowd? Acquiring Portuguese in a Trilingual Environment Madalena Cruz-Ferreira “So again the seeds of things are of much latent virtue, and yet of no use except in their development.” Francis Bacon (1620), Novum Organon, 1.121
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cruz-Ferreira, Madalena Three is a Crowd? Acquiring Portuguese in a Trilingual Environment Madalena Cruz-Ferreira. Child Language and Child Development: 6 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Multilingualism in children. 2. Language acquisition. 3. Language and culture. 4. Portuguese language–Acquisition. I. Title. II. Series. P115.2.C78 2005 306.44'6'09469–dc22 2005014803 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-838-0 / EAN 978-1-85359-838-8 (hbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2006 Madalena Cruz-Ferreira. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Typeset by Datapage Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Ltd.
To my children, for showing me how three languages can be managed so smoothly within a family, and for putting up with a data-collecting mother throughout so many years. To Peter, with whom a 'different language' was never a problem. For Tio Zé, in memoriam.
Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x 1
Preview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What : Layout and Contents . . How : Data and Data Analysis Why : Purposes of this Study .
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Part 1: Becoming Multilingual 2 Issues in Bilingualism and Bilingual Acquisition . Bilingual and Monolingual Lingualism . . . . . . . Bilingualism versus dual monolingualism . . . Mixed speech and bilingual fluency . . . . . . . . The language(s) of bilinguals . . . . . . . . . . . . . The ‘Buffet Effect’ in Bilingual Acquisition. . . . . 3 The Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Family Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Few Issues in Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The sibling effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developmental feature or idiosyncrasy? . . . . . 4 Data Collection and Analytical Choices . . . . . . . . The Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modes of data collection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choices in data collection: limitations and purposes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analytical Choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The choice of target forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Format of examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phonetic transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intonational transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Speaking Languages, and Talking about Them . . Signalling Different Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . Refuse to accept one particular language . . . . Use carriers of language-specific prosody . . . . Make each language maximally different . . . . Use any language-specific device . . . . . . . . . . vii
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Referring to Language(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Use the language to refer to it . . . . . . . . . . . . Use speakers of each language as symbols for each language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Make use of translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Use the name of the language, or the word ‘language’ itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussing Language and Language Use . . . . . . Characterising language varieties . . . . . . . . . . Commenting on non-native uses of language . Part 2: Making Sense of Portuguese 6 Shaping Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laying the Foundation for Sounding . . . Practising the Components . . . . . . . . . Mastering intonational fluency . . . . . . The basics of intonational choices and beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Speaking in Sentences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sentence fluency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Filling in the fluent whole . . . . . . . . . The prosodic role of fillers . . . . . . . . . 7 Probing for Constituency . . . . . . . . . . . . . Words in Inventories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The word ‘word’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child inventories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child Vocabularies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passive vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Active vocabulary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Words in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multi-word meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Compounding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Probing for Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Words and Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Word referents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Word meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Strategies to Approach Word Meanings . Semantic manipulation . . . . . . . . . . . . Querying around words . . . . . . . . . . . Replacive words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Part 3: Acquiring a Third Language 9 A New Language: Intruder or Guest? . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning Languages for Communicative Purposes. . . Learning Languages for Curricular Purposes . . . . . . . Attitudes Towards the Children’s Multilingualism . . . From Adults . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Peers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Language Input and Language Management in a Multilingual Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Who Speaks What to Whom, When, Where and Why One person / which language? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The multilingual nature of language interaction in the family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Children’s Apportioning of Linguistic Space among their Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The languages of the home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Making a home for a new language . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining language territories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Language dominance? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Balancing Culture and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Languages and Cultural Mindsets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Precursors to Socialisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural Idiomacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unravelling cultural roles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biculturalism and cultural modes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity and cultural camouflage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity and cultural shelter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appropriating Language: Acquisitional Strategies Make do with what is available . . . . . . . . . . . . One thing at a time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To learn how to use something, use it . . . . . . . The Role of Acquisitional Strategies in Child Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three is a Crowd? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
Acknowledgements My greatest debt goes to Prof. Li Wei, who first persuaded me to write this book. Along the many ups and downs in the writing itself, I always had the reassurance of his timely encouragement and his judicious advice, which were there for me, any time. Thank you for believing in this project, and for believing that I could bring it to port. I also owe my gratitude to the many extra informants who contributed to this study. Several children and adults outside of the core family took part in exchanges involving the three children in the study, or are named by them. Permission to use the data and names of all participants who, at times unwittingly, found themselves involved in recording sessions was duly requested and obtained, from children, their parents and other adults. Their role in the children’s life is introduced where relevant for the discussion of the data. Particularly in what concerns the children’s playmates, they did know that they might be recorded, but they did not know where or when. To all of them, my sincerest thanks, for their willingness to participate and for allowing me to quote them by their real names. MCF Singapore, December 2004
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Chapter 1
Preview This book is about three children and their breakthrough into language. The children are siblings, primary bilinguals in Portuguese and Swedish, and acquired English as the language of schooling. The book presents a preliminary description of the children’s mastery of one of their languages (European) Portuguese, against the background of their multilingual environment. The aim is to provide an account of the processes that enable the children’s competent allocation of linguistic, social and cultural space to one language alongside two others, not despite their multilingualism, but because of it. In its as yet unforeseeable complete form, the ongoing study on these children has the ambitious aim of providing as detailed a picture as possible of their linguistic and social development throughout the first ten years of their lives, as competent users of each language and as multilingual users of each. The book does not aim at giving a full account of the children’s linguistic development, not even in Portuguese. Rather, the material presented in the book is the result of a number of choices, detailed below, that aim instead at giving a first glimpse into a much larger developmental picture. The focus is on the investigation of how the children came to be able to talk about what interests them, i.e. how they made language work for them. In the process, extensive discussion is given of a central issue in child language studies, namely, what is it that children are saying and in what way are we able to interpret what they say. Language is new for children, though not for their linguistic role models. It is therefore interesting to investigate what strategies children devise, from the very beginning, in order to navigate their way along their languages. These strategies can be linguistic or, for example, gestural, used as discovery procedures for linguistic and cultural patterns. From within the perspective of the acquisition of Portuguese, this book gives an overview of how the children are learning to make sense of their languages, their surroundings and themselves. The study concerns the children’s spontaneous, everyday use of language, and what it reveals about their linguistic development. The role played by monolingual or multilingual adults and peers in the children’s development is analysed. The matter of the children’s choice of language deserves particular attention, both in the sense of language being chosen over other available means of communication to achieve a particular effect, and in the sense of a particular language being chosen over another in a particular situation. Not least, special attention is paid 1
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to the children’s attitudes towards each of their languages, as well as to their own insight into their multilingualism and multiculturalism, and how to express it in different languages. Other issues that are central to the understanding of language use are also surveyed, such as language input and language management within the family and among the children’s peers, as well as strategies used by monolingual speakers around the children to assist effective communication. The rationale behind the three major sets of choices in the present study is detailed below.
What: Layout and Contents The book is divided into three main parts. The first one, Becoming Multilingual , provides background information along four chapters. Chapter 2 reviews a number of issues in studies on bilingualism, relating these to the children’s acquisitional strategies and to patterns of language mixing and of monolingual usage in the children’s speech. The chapter concludes with the presentation of the research questions guiding the present study. Chapter 3 focuses on the children, including personality traits, perceived and practised sibling hierarchy, parent/child interaction, schooling and settling in among the different countries and cultures where the family has lived. Chapter 4 deals with the database used in this study, including choices in data collection and transcription. The final section in this chapter lists the conventions used in the presentation of results. Chapter 5 gives an overview of the children’s early and later differential uses of their languages, as well as of their ways of discussing language itself with the different means at their disposal along their linguistic development. Part 2, Making Sense of Portuguese , contains three chapters that detail issues in the children’s progressive mastery of Portuguese in a multilingual context. Chapter 6 discusses the children’s grappling with the phonology of the language, focusing on its prosody through the children’s use of sounds and tunes. Chapter 7 deals with matters pertaining to structure at word, phrase and utterance level, whereas Chapter 8 discusses linguistic meanings, whether carried by single-word or multiword utterances. Part 3, Acquiring a Third Language , has three chapters dealing with the role played by each of the children’s three language in their approach to communication and to life. Chapter 9 covers the emergence of English in the children’s linguistic lives, and the related turning point in their family environment from bilingual to trilingual. It also addresses the children’s first encounters with school-bound second-language learning, as well as attitudes towards the children’s multilingualism, from the children themselves and from others. Chapter 10 focuses on the
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apportioning of linguistic space and usage resulting from the appearance of English in the children’s linguistic repertoire, including the children’s perception and practice of each language’s individuality and scope. It discusses language choice among the children, according to factors such as interlocutor or topic of conversation, and addresses matters of language input and language management in a multilingual environment, reflected in modes of parent/child, child /parent and child/child linguistic interaction. Chapter 11 situates the children’s uses of Portuguese within the broader issues of multilingual culture and identity, by addressing matters such as values and mindsets conveyed through language, as well as attitudes and interaction mediated by the use of different languages. The final chapter in the book articulates an overview of findings with issues in child bilingualism, cognitive and social development, and related language use.
How: Data and Data Analysis Any presentation of results involves at least two kinds of choices, one concerning the type and amount of data, the other concerning the analytical framework from within which discussion of the data can make sense. Decisions about what to say and how to say it are personal, because they serve the purposes that the researcher set for the research. Choices in data are compounded in large databases of spontaneous speech, like the one on which this study draws. Raw data are besides necessarily untidy, which may further muddle up the analysis because there are so many things to say that can be said in so many different ways. Choices in analytical framework are often no choice, in that they often pursue a habit that was shaped by the preference of academic mentors, who therefore made the choices for the novices under their supervision. The rationale behind specific choices made in this study is as follows. Major choices concerned the language to be analysed and, within it, which aspects of it to focus on. A study on Portuguese can be interesting on several counts. Two of these are that Portuguese is widely spoken as a native and foreign language, including by large groups of immigrant communities, and that it is a language that has given rise to several pidgins and creoles around the world. A more specific reason behind the choice of this language is that Portuguese is the first peer language of the children in this study, i.e. the one that they started using among themselves. There is no lack of material on child Portuguese, particularly due to the surge of interest in this area in the last three decades (see CruzFerreira (2000b) for an edited and annotated bibliography on the acquisition of Portuguese, both European and Brazilian). The bulk of these studies concerns the monolingual acquisition of specific aspects of
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the language. On the other hand, most studies on bilingual children pay exclusive attention to the children’s bilingualism, often to ascertain matters related to language imbalance or features of mixed speech. This book purports to give a different story, by including discussion of the children’s monolingual production in Portuguese. That is, by reporting on how, faced with several languages, the children make sense of Portuguese by making Portuguese make sense. The descriptive chapters dealing with Portuguese in this book cover selected features of the children’s speech, concerning issues in their acquisition of phonology, grammar and vocabulary that were deemed novel in the literature on child language, child bilingualism and child Portuguese. Phonetic features of the children’s productions deserve extensive discussion throughout the book, because sound is the medium of speech, and because it is through clues present in the sound signal that evidence for the emergence of words, phrases and parsing in general can be sought. Particular emphasis is given to the acquisition of intonation, a linguistic system commonly neglected in acquisitional studies, whether monolingual or multilingual. The three children appear in fact to use features of intonation as the prime strategy guiding their search for both meaning and identity among the languages in their environment. The study also concerns the acquisition of discoursal and pragmatic features characterising the use of Portuguese, as well as the acquisition, through language, of the culture and modes of thinking associated with the language. One consequence of the choices of language and issues pertaining to it is that the book deals with what its title suggests, i.e. the acquisition of Portuguese in a multilingual environment, and not with the children’s multilingualism per se . However, what the children do with their Portuguese relates to what they do with their multilingualism and multiculturalism in ways that, to me, are striking for our understanding of an overall picture of language in the making. The greater attention given to features of Portuguese in the book does not, and in fact cannot, detract from the fact that the children are multilinguals, and are learning each of their languages as such. The book contains recurrent discussion of matters pertaining to bilingualism and bilingual acquisition, including multilingual acquisitional strategies, mixes and data from the children’s other two languages that may provide support for their command of features of Portuguese, or failure to do so. Because the children are multilinguals, the simultaneous acquisition of Swedish and the later acquisition of English must necessarily form part of an account of their language abilities. Because Portuguese is not the only linguistic tool at the disposal of these children, some insight may be gained into how multitooled children like these acquire language. The latter point is also one of the reasons why this study deliberately avoids comparison of these children’s data with data
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from monolingual peers: the children are not monolingual. The other reason is that comparative studies of this kind usually have a judgmental purpose, often that of showing that bilingual children are in some way lacking in linguistic competence, or are at least different. They are different, for the tautological reason that monolingual and bilingual experimental populations are different. Whether they are found lacking is a matter of analysis, and of what to count as the norm. Equally different results, and equally uninteresting, would be obtained if studies focused on asking questions the other way around, taking bilingual populations as the implicit norm and monolingualism as the variable. Given that the majority of the world’s population is multilingual, questions phrased in this way could at least claim some statistical legitimacy. Some of the data in this study raise questions about theoretical justification for normative stances such as the above in linguistic analysis. One, more general, concerns precisely the view that bilingualism is a kind of monolingualism that can only begin to be understood once monolingualism is accounted for. This is discussed in Chapter 2. Another, more particular, concerns for example, which of the grammatical genders in a gendered language like Portuguese should be taken as unmarked, or even whether a stance about marked versus unmarked linguistic features is useful at all. This is discussed in Chapter 7. Other issues in child language and child bilingualism, pertaining to particular topics presented in each chapter, will be discussed along the book. Much has been said about child data being taken as evidence for features ascribable to universal grammars and universal uses of language, and much has been said about features of particular languages being taken as features of language. These are assumptions, not necessities. Finding results that match an assumption, or hypotheses derived from it, is not difficult, and arguably not interesting either, because the answer is not in the data, but in the analysis. Because analyses depend on assumptions, the issue of empirical verification risks becoming fully circular. While the present study does not question these assumptions per se , it does keep in mind that they are assumptions and, as such, cannot be proven right or wrong. By presenting data from three children, this study hopefully avoids too broad generalisations sometimes found in studies of one single child or of one single feature of the speech of one child. Conversely, since the children are obviously individuals, taking some of their individual data as representative also shows that quite different conclusions may be drawn about the acquisition of Portuguese. It is in this sense that this study is exploratory. Discussion of theoretical matters is kept to a minimum for two additional reasons, related to whether child data and data from single languages mirror or suggest so-called universals of language, respectively.
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First, researchers are, naturally, conditioned by the research paradigm, in Kuhn’s (1970) sense of this term, in which they have been brought up, whose purpose, once established as a paradigm, is that of reproducing thinking. Currently popular, theory-driven analyses of child speech appear ensnared in ritual discussion of labels and thinking where ‘much of the work is argumentation that carries you further and further from the data’ (Napoli, 1996: 396/397). Child data are probed for evidence of whatever constructs correspond to whatever labels in successive levels of abstraction, that end up having little to do with what the child actually says and all to do with what the analytical framework expects the child to be saying. In other words, what the child has acquired will depend on what the theory defines as acquirable and assumes is there to be acquired, a view that Donaldson (1978: 33) guards against: ‘To Western adults, and especially to Western adult linguists, languages are formal systems. A formal system can be manipulated in a formal way. It is an easy but dangerous move from this to the conclusion that it is also learned in a formal way.’ In my view, the formal elegance of a set of constructs said to have been acquired (or not), and said to reflect formal universal features of language matters far less than whether the child is successfully (or not) communicating by means of speech with other human beings. On the other hand, as Lass (1998: 6) rightly points out, ‘in a way, there are no facts without theories. One might even define a theory as / in part / a framework that tells you what a fact is.’ The framework that guides the analyses presented in this study assumes that language is a tool, whose successful use, like that of any tool, needs exploring. Exploration proceeds by means of strategies, devised according to the means, linguistic or otherwise, at the disposal of the child at different developmental stages, and probed for effectiveness. The study targets a description of these strategies, in what they reveal about the children’s progressive discovery of how language may serve their communicative needs. Second, it is often claimed that language, in collocations like ‘the language faculty’ or ‘the nature of language’, can only be accessed through its concrete manifestations, i.e. the different languages spoken by human beings. This is a commonsense claim, in that the term ‘language’ in these collocations refers to an abstract entity. Unfortunately, the word language is quite ambiguous in English, in that it also refers to each of the different tongues spoken by human beings. It is often not clear from the literature which of the two meanings of this word is being discussed, nor whether the ambiguity is being systematically explored or simply overlooked. By way of a lexical idiosyncrasy, one particular tongue, Saussure’s (1915/1969: 25ff.) ‘langue’, can easily be (mis)taken for the ability to use tongues / or to speak in them (Saussure’s, 1915/1969, ‘langage’). The two meanings of the English
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word are unambiguously differentiated in Portuguese too, through the words lı´ngua and linguagem , respectively. Researchers are, naturally, conditioned by the language that they use. The discourse of science varies not only according to the lexical and grammatical resources that are available in the language used by the writer (Fahnestock, 2003), but also according to the cultural traits associated with that language (Dahl, 2004). Given that more linguistic descriptions, as well as more detailed ones, are available for English than for any other language, and given that the bulk of linguistic thinking is published (and often worked out too) in English, regardless of which language constitutes the object of study, there is a clear risk of extrapolating features that are found in English to characterise universal uses of language (Sampson, 2001), and of mistaking English terminology for a neutral, default metalanguage in which to encapsulate them. In other words, English provides both the database and the tools for its analysis. Lucy and Gaskins (2001: 258) echo both these points, in the same paragraph: ‘In place of empirical research, the literature has been filled with a wide variety of speculative answers that inevitably confirm the initial theoretical predilections of the analyst’ and, they go on, ‘People have freely extrapolated from research data on our own language or some telling personal experience with another.’ Another important choice concerns the modelling of child data. Most studies on language acquisition assume the adult language not only as the target of child forms but as the model itself upon which to map and explain child utterances. Most studies do this implicitly, by interpreting the child’s utterances according to what the researcher (or the caregiver, or both) assume is the child’s target, taking into consideration context, mood of the child at the time of utterance and similarity of the child’s utterance to an acceptable adult form. Children are therefore assumed to be using the adult system, while acquiring it. This makes good sense, in that learning in general does not seem to depend on instruction as much as on use. It is not useful to wonder how children can use something that they have not acquired yet. The pertinent question is rather, how can children acquire something without using it. That is, the learning is in the use. We learn to walk, or to ride a bicycle by doing it, and the same is reasonably true of language. In addition, interpretation of utterances is largely instinctive, whether the speaker is a child, an adult, a native or non-native user of the language in question, for the reason that language users expect language uses to make sense. If adult listeners hear a child utterance that sounds like ‘shoe’ in a context where an association with footwear is likely, they will naturally infer that the child is attempting to replicate an adult form of a word. The child utterance will accordingly be taken as one child-way of saying the adult word, and described as exhibiting particular phonological, cognitive and other features that may be found to associate the child form to the adult form. Two issues arise
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here, one concerning what can we legitimately claim that the child is likely to be targeting, the other summarised in the more general question, ‘How do we know?’ The issue of deciding what a child means, particularly a very young child, is not easy, as has been noted even in early research on this subject (Stevenson, 1893). In particular, the identification of child meanings and associated forms will depend on what child productions are taken to target. Findings will of course vary according to assumptions, and so will, in turn, theorisation based on different findings. If the child who presumably said ‘shoe’ is assumed to have meant ‘shoe’ in the adult meaning of this word, then the child will be said to have acquired the adult word, complete with word class and associated meaning. But if the child’s use of the word is assumed to express pleasure at a new pair of shoes, or as a description of someone putting on their own or the child’s footwear, then the child word will be assigned a different meaning and a different word class. That is, the same child word will count as a token of a different vocabulary or grammatical acquisition depending on what is taken as the model target. Target forms need therefore to be incorporated in the description, not as abstract models taken from available accounts of the languages in question, but through surveying of which forms the child is in reality exposed to. Obviously, children do eventually acquire adult uses of language (they eventually become adults too), because if they did not, they would not be able to function properly in the adult-geared communities that characterise human social organisation. There is progress in acquiring language, in the sense that child utterances become more and more like adults’. This being so, one reasonable way of describing the progressive changes in child uses along time is to assume that children are attempting to follow a model, the one provided by pre-existing language uses around them. But within any developmental ‘stages’ that one might want to postulate, progress is not necessarily forwards in the sense of ‘steadily more like the adult target’. Progress is rather a process of exploration, of back-and-forth probing, whose visible results may at first sight suggest un-learning of forms that earlier appeared safely in place, or confusion between them. The human strategy of overgeneralising from previous experience in order to accommodate new information is naturally used by children approaching their language(s) too. Strategies may include devices that do not play a linguistic role in the particular language under observation but that may make sense crosslinguistically. The children’s own strategies cannot therefore always be said to follow an adult target. In fact, it is when children are judged to have stopped using their own exploratory strategies that language acquisition is deemed complete. By then, their strategies to approach a language are common to adult users of that language. Language
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acquisition is then a process of conforming to a pre-existing norm, both in acquiring target forms and in the ways of getting at them, as is discussed in different chapters along this book. Adult forms, however, are not unmoveable and they do not constitute a closed repertoire on which both children and adults can draw for their different communicative needs. Language is open-ended, because so are the purposes that it serves. It is in fact not clear at all from the literature whether the label ‘acquisition’, applied to language or languages and to children’s linguistic development, is a misnomer. Language learning, in all of its aspects, is of course a lifelong endeavour (Foley & Thompson, 2003). If the adults who serve as models for the child are also acquiring uses of language, children must be targeting forms whose use continually shifts. In addition, if language mastery is a lifelong process, either there is no cut-off age for its acquisition, because there is no point in time where one can say that acquisition is complete, or there are as many different cut-off ages as researchers choose to establish, depending on the different aspects of language mastery that interest them. Methodological issues of this kind are discussed in Chapter 4. A clear statement of assumptions in studies of child language is therefore crucial. It is the only legitimate way in which researchers can come clean about the unavoidable truth that we simply do not know what children are doing in order to get at language. The crucial questions are not what children have acquired, or not, that reflects the model that we assume. It is clear that the data will bear interpretation according to the model, because the model was designed to query the data according to it. The crucial question seems to me to be ‘How do we know?’, because this is the question on which all others depend. Child data are not free from analytical manipulation in order to corroborate the latest version of the theory of the day. For example, many studies on the acquisition of Portuguese are geared towards satisfying current generative-spawned theorisation about language acquisition. However, by their own nature, child data do escape the introspective activities said to be the crucial mode of enquiry in some research on language (see Sampson (2001) for discussion of this issue), despite the often unstated assumption of taking the results of adult introspection as the model of child forms. This being so, there are no certainties in child language; there is only a stronger or weaker likelihood that child data mean what we say they do. Bearing in mind these provisos, there are nevertheless well established ways of safeguarding interpretation of child data. As said above, I will adopt the common assumptions that child forms target adult uses and can be interpreted according to these. I will also give all the information that is available to me, with as much detail as possible on context and situation of child utterances, as well as on what prompted me to provide the interpretations that I offer. Phonetic transcription of child utterances
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is also given wherever relevant. By doing so, it is hoped that the likelihood of my interpretations can be assessed. It is also my hope that readers will want to come back to me with feedback on interpretations that I may have got wrong, or may have missed altogether. Besides assumptions, clarification is also needed in what concerns definitions of terms. Being the science of language, linguistics provides a way to talk about language. In this sense, linguistics can be said to be the language of language. Language is not only common to all human beings, it is also a topic that interests human beings, given its centrality in any human endeavour. Language is talked about by means of language, in everyday situations that involve no necessary precision in the use of its terms. It is therefore not surprising that several technical terms of linguistics, particularly the more common ones that are also everyday words, are often quite nebulous in the literature, giving rise to ambiguous and confusing interpretations. One of these terms is the word language itself, discussed above. In this study, the non-count meaning of the word is intended, when used without preceding determiner and in collocations such as ‘ability to use language’ or ‘language acquisition’. Countable uses of the noun refer to particular tongues. The term word continues to defy definition, and I make no attempt to contribute to the controversy surrounding it, let alone to point at some solution. Discussion of the word word is given in Chapter 7. The term grammar applies in a broader sense than usual. In some literature, grammar is often used as an equivalent of the terms syntax and/or morphology, to mean the set of formal properties and relationships characterising the parsing patterns found for morphemes and phrases. Given that meaning-yielding units of languages are not exhausted in their morphemes and phrases, the term grammar is here taken to mean a formulation about the patterning of any linguistic items, from sounds through words to texts. The grammar of a language is a statement of the coding rules describing linguistic behaviour that enable communication in that language, including the rules governing particular exchanges among particular speakers, that is, particular ways of using a language. The terms bilingual and trilingual , and their variants, applied to the children in this study, are used in different ways. Bilingualism refers to their simultaneous acquisition of Portuguese and Swedish, whereas trilingualism refers to the fact that there are three languages in their childhood. The prefix bi- to characterise a type of ‘lingualism’ is sometimes taken in the literature as synonymous with the prefix multi- . These uses stem from the assumption that there may be a difference between the use of one single language and the use of more than one, but not between the use of two languages and the use of more than two, an assumption that I endorse. The various uses to which the label bilingual
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has been put in the literature are discussed in the next chapter. Other more specific terms will have their definitions discussed in the relevant sections of the book.
Why: Purposes of this Study The purpose of this book is to give an overview of developing language ability, in a multilingual environment. No exhaustive analysis of any language, language level or developmental stage (or of any child) is attempted, pass the paradox in a formulation like ‘exhaustive analysis’. There is, however, detailed discussion of several issues pertaining to the children’s progressive mastery of Portuguese, as well as of what their trilingualism may reveal about their mastery of language. The book proposes a general frame that appears to allow the children’s progressive linguistic development, gleaned from a sample of their productions. Filling this frame with the detail of finer brushstrokes must come later, because detail can only be understood if the foundation makes good sense. The children’s productions discussed here concern a limited amount of their linguistic abilities, that is besides given from a restricted perspective that is self-imposed, due to space constraints. Insight into language is given as it emerges for the children, as far as we outsiders can tell from their productions and how we best see it fit to interpret these. At all times, we must bear in mind that descriptions of child uses of language concern a process of exploration, not a final product. Children are learning to appropriate a tool in a way that serves them and their needs as social beings, not providing researchers with ready-made uses of it. The everyday uses of language that this study draws on appear ideally suited to capturing child modes of linguistic appropriation, for at least two reasons. One is that these uses reveal spontaneous tackling of linguistic challenges and of metalinguistic abilities to deal with them, as and when they occur, thereby providing insight into how language is falling into place for the children. The other reason is that children’s everyday uses of language are those that parents and caregivers are exposed to, and react to as spontaneously, linguistically as otherwise. By capturing linguistic interaction and feedback of this kind, this study hopes to contribute to a broadening of the gauges that guide assessment and opinions about child linguistic development, among linguistically untrained parents and linguistics researchers alike. This book also attempts to contribute thoughts and data to several issues within child multilingualism, a research area that has gained momentum in recent years. In particular, by addressing the perceived strategies of children progressively working their way through several languages, it is hoped that a fresh insight into child language and into child multilingualism can be gained. Not least, this study will attempt to
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show that child multilingualism, with its necessary exploration of the accidental limits within which particular languages happen to vary, is the ideal ground in which to look for features that may define the nature of human language. One final note: the book will of course be fully enjoyable by readers with at least some knowledge of linguistics and of the three languages involved in this study. For the benefit of those who may not have such knowledge, descriptive technicalities will be kept to a minimum, and English glosses are given throughout.
Chapter 2
Issues in Bilingualism and Bilingual Acquisition The children in this study are bilingual because they use more than one language in their daily interaction with other people. They are also primary bilinguals, because they have used more than one language daily, receptively and productively, from birth, being exposed to Portuguese and Swedish from their mother and father, respectively. This chapter discusses a number of assumptions, whether stated as such or not, that shape research on (child) bilingualism, and that are relevant for the appreciation of data presented in later chapters. The chapter concludes with the presentation of the research questions that guide the present study. In what follows, I take the prefix bi- as synonymous with the prefix multi- , on my own assumption that there may be a difference between the use of one single language and the use of more than one, but not between the use of two languages and the use of more than two (though see Hoffmann (2001) for a different view on this issue).
Bilingual and Monolingual Lingualism The definition of a child as bilingual suffers from the same nebulosity as the definition of any language user as bilingual. In the available literature, the characterisation of a bilingual ranges between the extremes proposed by Weinreich (1953) as a user of two languages and by Bloomfield (1933) as a native-like user of two languages. The one makes no distinction between, say, primary bilinguals and adult guest-workers in an adopted country, the other in fact dodges the issue by laying the burden of proof on a previous definition of the term ‘native’. One added complication to the controversy surrounding the definition of bilingualism is that there seems to be a reluctance to accept a bilingual as a native speaker of two languages. The implicit assumption seems to be that bilinguals are one thing, native speakers are another. Both definitions besides stumble on the problem of how to quantify the degree of fluency in each language, in order to draw comparisons between their use. In addition, the term bilingual (along with its cognates) is used to label both individual speakers and countries, individuals or groups of people that acquire several languages from birth, as well as those who learn a new language through schooling, or through settling in a different country (see Fishman (2000) for discussion of different scopes of this term). 13
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Clearly, each one of these is a different ‘bilingual’, although findings about each bilingual type tend to be generalised to bilinguals as a whole, by virtue of the use of a single label to identify them all. Bilingualism versus dual monolingualism One way of starting discussion on this issue is perhaps to clarify what bilingualism is not, according to the consensus in the literature. A bilingual is not the sum of two monolinguals, hence bilingualism does not consist in a cumulative repertoire of different languages. If taken seriously, this insight means two things: one, that bilingualism and monolingualism are two distinct uses of language each in its own right, and two, that monolingual uses of language cannot be compared to bilingual uses of language, nor vice versa . Nevertheless, a large proportion of research on bilingualism appears to pay simple lip-service to the lack of a clear-cut basis for comparison, and proceeds to compare bilingual and monolingual populations, experimental or otherwise, by eliciting or gleaning features said to characterise the linguistic proficiencies of one group as opposed to the other, in the same language(s). In common practice, these comparisons in fact take bilinguals as dual monolinguals, i.e. as users of one single language twice over, not as users of two languages, with the purpose of assessing bilingual proficiency against monolingual proficiency. Adding to the terminological confusion about the term bilingualism , or perhaps because of it, the bulk of the literature on bilingualism besides ascribes heuristic usefulness to analytical frameworks that are monolingualbased. The difficulties with which monolingual approaches to bilingualism are fraught stand out from one recent monograph, Muysken (2000), where a (re)analysis of previous and current work on codemixing is attempted from within a framework designed to account for one single linguistic system. It is in fact the lack of an independent measuring tool that has sanctioned the choice of monolingualism as a norm from where control populations are drawn, and thereby the treatment of any differences from the norm as deviations. The implicit assumption that exposure to one single language is a guarantee of excellence in linguistic competence also goes unchallenged. Granted, the view of monolingualism as the norm originally stems from either monolinguals, or from researchers who subscribe to monolingual theories of language, or both. But treating difference as anomaly is of course the domain of ideology, not of science. Stating that children exposed to one versus more than one language go through different experiences, including linguistic experiences, is like stating that growing up as an only child versus a sibling is a different experience. Or like comparing the linguistic performance of Mandarin-
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speaking children and Portuguese-speaking children to conclude that the former, but not the latter, have perfect command over lexical tones whilst the latter, but not the former, are experts in verbal inflection. The difference is obvious because neither the populations nor the variables are comparable. It is clear that as much insight into bilingualism can be gained from monolingual-based theorisation as into siblinghood from within a framework designed to characterise an only child. The same imbalance would emerge from assessing monolingual competence against an assumed bilingual norm, an issue which several researchers are acutely aware of. One interesting example is provided in Watson (1991), who reports the results of an instrumental experiment on production of voice onset time (VOT) values across monolingual and bilingual speakers. Findings were that English /French bilinguals tended to produce voiceless stops in a similar way across the two languages, as opposed to monolinguals in each of the languages, indicating an economy in the use of articulatory routines. Watson (1991: 41) first concludes: ‘Without matching exactly the norms of monolinguals of his or her age group, [the bilingual] finds a way of remaining within the limits of acceptability’ (emphasis added, MCF); and later adds the proviso that makes true sense of his findings: ‘Because the [VOT discrimination] tests carried out have taken as their starting point features known to be salient for monolinguals, they have revealed when bilinguals do not use such features. They have, inevitably, been less effective at revealing what other features, less salient for monolinguals, they use instead’ (p. 45). In other words, the real finding of this study is that monolinguals and bilinguals use different strategies to achieve the same communicative efficiency. The value of experimental data in furthering our understanding of bilingualism is in itself controversial. Muysken (2000: 34) repeatedly acknowledges the dearth, despite all appearances, of data on bilingual use, but nevertheless suggests that the gathering of bilingual corpora ‘has reached the limits of its usefulness’ and proposes a shift of focus towards experimental techniques. Watson (1991), on the other hand, notes that experimental situations can only in a very limited way reflect real-life uses, or presumed bilingual shortcomings in everyday interactions. Romaine (1989: 88) makes a similar point: ‘The types of tests used in experiments may not be generalisable to a bilingual’s day-to-day communicative interactions’. Monolingual versus bilingual speed of response to stimuli, for example, addressed in the countless studies spawned by Hamers and Lambert’s (1972) bilingual adaptation of Stroop tests, may provide data that are neatly differentiated among the two experimental populations, but is a marginally interesting finding for our understanding of bilingualism versus monolingualism in everyday use of language, because speed is not a relevant parameter in ordinary situations, and neither are immediate responses. There is no known
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correlation between, say, experimentally measurable response times and the purposes of everyday communication, which is what language is for. The questions therefore remain of what exactly these experiments are looking for, and what exactly is it that they find. The relevant finding from Hamers and Lambert’s (1972) experimental paradigm is not the statement of a difference in response time, it is the attribution of that difference to speakers’ access to one versus more than one language during language use. Although this finding is apparently baffling to some researchers, e.g. Muysken (2000), it matches what, I would surmise, is the everyday experience of any bilingual, defined as above in relation to the children in this study. In fact, how could it be otherwise? If you have more than one language, having mental access to all your languages is as natural as having mental access to all your children when you have more than one child. So the question also remains of what is it that comparisons between monolingual and bilingual populations are trying to show. One thing is providing evidence for the commonplace observation that monolinguals and bilinguals are different, in several different ways. Quite another is using that evidence to infer sanction to take one type of ‘lingualism’ as subordinate or less ‘lingual’ than the other. At best, bilingualism emerges as an exotic version of monolingualism, or as atypical in some way. Compounding normative views of monolingualism, the stem lingualism is commonly used to mean the same as the word monolingualism , raising questions about the need for two separate terms to designate the same construct, roughly defined as ‘ability to use one language’. I would suggest that lingualism can be usefully reserved as shorthand for ‘language faculty’, Saussure’s (1915/ 1969: 25) ‘faculte´ du langage’, whereas prefixed variants of this stem account for the number of particular languages, Saussure’s (1915/1969: 25ff.) ‘langue(s)’, that human beings happen to have at their disposal for reasons of birthplace, parentage and other incidentals that have nothing to do with language itself. At worst, bilingualism is viewed as a deviation with suspected pathological implications for the overall development of bilingual children. Stances of this kind are found, for example, in the titles or table of contents of several publications, such as Bishop and Mogford (1993), with one chapter on child bilingualism on a par with chapters on child deafness, blindness and Down’s syndrome; McDaniel et al . (1996), a volume of nearly 400 pages, featuring one single index entry for ‘bilingualism’, cross-referred to the chapter titled ‘Assessing morphosyntax in clinical settings’; or Oller (2000), where exposure to different languages is treated in the same chapter as prematurity and extreme poverty as factors affecting the development of babbling. The facile conclusion extracted and circulated from authoritative accounts such as
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these has bilingualism as a condition to be feared or, at best, to be addressed by specialists, an urban myth that finds acritical echo among popular views on bilingualism and bilingual acquisition and, more seriously, among educators (one relevant episode concerning the family in this study is discussed in the third section of Chapter 9). Wholesale subscription to these views, as unsettling as the academic formulations that spawn it, is found in a cursory look at questions from anxious parents of prospective bilingual children, archived at the Linguist List’s Ask-a-Linguist online consultation service (Linguist List, ongoing), and searchable online by topic. Invariably, the parents’ major worries cluster around two questions, whether their children may, if raised bilingually, suffer irreparable linguistic and overall developmental delays, and whether the linguistic development of their own children shouldn’t best be handled by speech pathologists. An interesting intellectual exercise would be to adopt the converse approach, and assume bilingualism as the norm in studies on lingualism. Going by numbers and percentages as indicators of theoretical pondus, this is in fact the credible approach, in that the majority of the world’s population is constituted by bilinguals and multilinguals (Fishman, 2002; Romaine, 1989; Snow, 1988). The view of bilingualism as one form of monolingualism has allowed researchers to feel free to moot issues and research questions about bilingualism that would simply make no sense if asked of monolingualism, as in the following random sampling from the literature. Hoff (2001: 375) wonders whether ‘bilingual development affect[s] the development of competence in each language’. This question cannot be answered, because bilingual development necessarily involves development of competence in each language. The strangeness of the question is evident if we rephrase it as whether monolingual development affects the development of competence in one language. Bhatia and Ritchie (1999: 569), who deal with bilingualism both as a special kind of lingualism and as an instance of monolingualism, state that bilingualism is too complex a ‘phenomenon’ and that only when monolingualism is ‘fully understood’ can the understanding of bilingualism begin. One wonders first, whether a ‘full’ understanding of bilingualism should take methodological precedence over our queries about monolingualism. One must next conclude that, given the necessarily partial accounts of monolingualism that have been made available, and that go on being made available, throughout several centuries of studies on language, Bhatia and Ritchie’s formulation is in fact equivalent to saying that there is no point in even attempting to understand bilingualism, nor indeed monolingualism. Finally, the chapter titled ‘The bilingual child’ in Grosjean’s (1982) monograph on bilingualism discusses at length how children become bilingual but, to my knowledge, no monograph on monolingual acquisition addresses the reasons and modes of becoming
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monolingual. We may want to start asking questions the other way around, for example, why is a monolingual monolingual? How does a child become monolingual? Any monolingual will answer questions such as these by saying that they speak one language because they have no need to speak more, or that they are monolingual because there was one single language in their linguistic environment. The conclusion is that bilinguals and monolinguals alike speak exactly the number of languages that they need to speak, and that they acquire these languages for exactly the same reasons. In Mackey’s (2000: 26) words, bilinguals are ‘individuals who have reasons for being bilingual’. The same is true of monolinguals and their monolingualism. Other research agrees that there is no fundamental difference between monolingual and bilingual acquisition (e.g. Genesee, 1989; Goodz, 1994; Kessler, 1986; Swain, 1977). Findings similar to those concerning variation within ‘the limits of acceptability’ (Watson’s 1991: 41 term, see above) could be predicted of speakers, adult or child, exposed to different varieties of the same language, although I know of no research on this topic. In both cases, exposure to variation is broad, whether allophonic, grammatical or lexicopragmatic, because languages are not monolithic. In both cases, the resulting perceptual, productive and pragmatic tolerance in the use of language need not mean defective perceptual, productive and pragmatic finesse. An interesting comparison between monolinguals and bilinguals then concerns not their respective repertoire in the one language that they have in common, but their adequate or inadequate use of linguistic resources for purposes of communication, regardless of language. This is what communicative competence is about, in Gumperz and Hymes’s (1972: vii) sense of ‘[w]hat a speaker needs to know to communicate effectively in culturally significant settings’. Acquiring language means learning to navigate linguistic resources, whether monolingual or bilingual. There is no difference between learning to use ola´ ‘hi’ in Portuguese and hej ‘hi’ in Swedish adequately, and learning to use ola´ and prazer em conhecer ‘how do you do’ in Portuguese adequately, except that bilingual children need to do both (see also Genesee et al . (1996), Gumperz & Hymes (1972), for a general account of bilingual communicative competence). Many authors have questioned the assumption that bilingualism is a form of monolingualism. Romaine (1989: 282) observes that ‘a reasonable account of bilingualism cannot be based on a theory which assumes monolingual competence as its frame of reference’. Skutnabb-Kangas (1981) argues that comparing bilinguals to monolinguals is simply not fair. All the more so where control groups of monolingual adults are used to assess bilingual children’s productions, as reported in Watson (1991: 39/40), since it is also clear that multilingual children, like any other children, are in the process of acquiring their languages. The issue here is
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that there are no independent criteria, quantitative or qualitative, against which to judge both monolingual and bilingual proficiency. Approaching particular language uses with analytical tools that are attuned elsewhere predictably blinds the researcher to the features that make those uses specific, and worth investigating. A methodological choice taking monolingualism as gauge risks ending up as a normative choice, much like the norm of Latin grammar did for early analyses of English. The declared object of analysis will, predictably, not fit the analytical mould, in an instance of what could aptly be termed the ‘Ugly Sisters Syndrome’ that, just as futilely, insists on forcing experimental objects into a Cinderella slipper that was designed for other users. What can be said is that bilingualism is no different from monolingualism as far as the acquisition and command of language use is concerned. Differences arise with uses of different languages and in different languages. Mixed speech and bilingual fluency One striking feature in the speech of bilinguals, child or adult, is the occurrence of mixes. Mix is a word that has gained widespread use in the literature on bilingualism (and that I also favour) to designate features ascribable to more than one language in one same utterance. In what follows, the term mix and its variants are used as a cover term to refer to what is variously called in the literature codeswitches, codemixes and blends, terms that, with corresponding definitions of the linguistic processes involved, have been proposed in order to distinguish among each type of multilingual use of language (see Pfaff (1979) for a similar use of the term mix, and Myers-Scotton (1993), Romaine (1989), for a review of terminology). The negative connotation of the qualifier mixed against its opposite ‘pure’, in collocations involving language as elsewhere, aptly serves the common view of mixes as linguistic stigma, in the tradition of lingualism as synonymous with monolingualism. This tradition has deep roots that go back to Ancient Greek thought, from which current thought inherited the labelling of anyone whose speech is unintelligible to educated monolinguals as a modern-day ‘barbarian’, i.e. a ‘deficient’ (Appel & Muysken, 1987: 3) or a ‘semilingual’ (Romaine, 1989: 232ff.) user of language. ‘Mongrel-lingualism’ (Low & Brown, 2005: 32) is another label that refers to mixed uses of language. The judgements of value involved in the negative connotations of all these terms are conspicuous, pointing to the fact that the convention that acceptable users of language use one language only at a time is just that, a convention. The issues here may lie in what we want the word ‘acceptable’ to mean, and to whom, exactly, are monolingual uses the only uses of language that are acceptable. Certainly not to bilinguals.
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Mixes have puzzled researchers and parents alike (see Harding and Riley (1986) for a review of opinions) who appear unacquainted with what I would call the ‘expat-speech’ that characterises anyone, including fully articulate monolingual adults, who has lived for any length of time in a country where a foreign language is spoken. An Englishman who has visited Portugal is likely to use the Portuguese word bacalhau when describing local staple food for other English speakers, and define it as ‘dried salted codfish’, which is also a translation of the word but does not mean the same. In the same way, Westerners in Singapore will order laksa in a restaurant, not ‘noodles in spicy coconut milk’, or discuss the amount of money to include in each hong bao , not ‘red envelope’, over Chinese New Year. It is, I would argue, impossible not to mix in a multilingual environment, whether constituted by a native and a foreign language or by two parents that speak two different languages. When mixes end up becoming part of a given language by overall consensus, they are given the more reassuring label borrowings, a word that lacks the connotations of impurity and confusion associated with the word mixes . Although in the terminological disguise of borrowings, ‘English’ words like pizza, coleslaw, genre, robot, lingua franca , orangutan or smorgasbord remain mixes, regardless of labels. These are words that belong to other languages, and that are used even by self-proclaimed purists. In print, their foreignness is sometimes indicated by visual conventions like italics or quotation marks. In monolingual speech, their integration into an utterance goes as unmarked as other mixes from bilinguals. Despite their generalised presence in all languages and among all so-called monolingual speakers, mixes produced by acknowledged bilinguals fuel the view of bilingual speech as semi-lingual in that they are seen as evidence of deficient command of the two languages. If one language encroaches, as it were, upon the other, there are gaps in one language that must be filled by bits and pieces of the other. Although current research agrees that the interplay between the languages so used is not random, there is nevertheless a hint of tension and unnaturalness associated with mixing, whereby bilingualism comes to be viewed not as an instance of a dual use of language but of a duel between languages, as in the title of MyersScotton (1993). Again, bilingualism emerges as a disruption of mono lingualism: one language is there instead of the language that should be there. Many studies on child bilingualism have it that in order to rise to the status of fluent speakers, bilinguals must demonstrate the ability to erase from their speech all traces of their bilingualism, i.e. precisely those that surface in the form of mixes. Bilingual mixes at times appear, from the very literature that purports to study bilingualism, as an irksome nuisance that the researcher must attempt to dispose of through reanalysis or relabelling of data in order to obtain neat findings that
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conform to the adopted analytical frameworks. For example, Muysken (2000: 30) paradoxically attempts a typology of codemixing on the premise that ‘we can imagine there to be various strategies to neutralize mixing and make it less offensive’ to the monolingual-based grammar that moulds his analysis and whose role appears to be that of ‘circumventing’ the facts of language whose fundamental impossibility is assumed by the same grammar. De Houwer (1990: 30) in an otherwise lucid review of studies on child bilingualism, makes the puzzling comment that Swain’s (1972) collection of data, which involves two monolingual speakers of two different languages in simultaneous interaction with the children in the study, had a recording setting that was ‘not very natural, in that it probably was very different from any other social situation the children had found themselves in before’. Interaction with speakers of different languages at the same time is precisely the natural everyday setting of bilingually raised children such as the ones in the present study. Bilingual children will alternate languages in order to communicate effectively with interlocutors that are identified with each of the languages, because bilingualism necessarily involves more than one language. This apparent tautology needs explicit stating, particularly in the light of recent research addressing the modes of activation of the bilingual’s languages and language processing mechanisms, and how these affect language behaviour in everyday situations. Grosjean (2001) found that there is a cline in the degree of activation of each language of a bilingual, whose magnitude wanes and waxes depending on factors such as situation, alertness and, crucially, interlocutor(s) and their own language mode(s). His finding of a clinelike, not an all-or-none, access to each language also independently confirms earlier research about the bilingual’s constant simultaneous access to both languages, discussed above. That is, a bilingual cannot ‘act as’ a monolingual, as little as a monolingual can ‘act as’ a bilingual, or as little as siblings and only children can act as one another, for the purposes of research or otherwise. It is up to the researcher to decide what the focus of the research is, and collect data accordingly, not up to the bilingual to provide monolingual or bilingual data on request. Studies whose purpose is to extract, as it were, the two monolinguals from within a bilingual individual are as interesting as studies of the modes and purposes of child language alternation in everyday situations. These are two quite distinct research topics, which require distinct methodologies and serve distinct research goals. The language(s) of bilinguals Several reasons for the occurrence of bilingual mixes have been discussed in the literature. Interestingly, mixes in the earliest stages of
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acquisition have been used as evidence for two conflicting lines of argumentation, falling within what is known in the literature as the ‘one system’ versus the ‘two systems’ that are assumed to underlie the two languages of young bilinguals, respectively. From the one-system side, the rationale is that two separate systems would give rise to two separate productions, and thus to absence of mixes (one early study is Volterra & Taeschner, 1978). From the two-systems side, the argument is that incipient command over two separate systems calls for communicative strategies that make use of whatever linguistic resources are available to the child, resulting in mixes (one early study is Lindholm & Padilla (1978), see also Genesee, 1989). The controversy about whether young bilinguals process their languages from within one single linguistic system or several arose with the first systematic studies on bilingualism, particularly Leopold’s (1939 /1949) detailed study of the use of German and English in one child. The issue has also been addressed, for later bilingualism, by Weinreich (1953), from his observations of language use in Switzerland. There is a wealth of past and current research and research reviews on this issue, often with contradictory findings. Major claims can be gleaned from recent contributions, some of which include state-of-the-art attempts at neuroimaging the ‘bilingual brain’ (Cutler et al ., 1989; Genesee, 1989; Genesee et al ., 1995; Hernandez et al ., 2000; Johnson & Wilson, 2002; Maneva & Genesee, 2002; Mishina-Mori, 2002; Paradis, 2001). Grosjean (1985) provides generalised discussion of the issue beyond childhood bilingualism, and Mishina-Mori (2002) gives a comprehensive review of the issues that have aroused researchers’ interest. ‘One-system’ approaches to child bilingualism
The one-system view of bilingual acquisition is a corollary of the broader assumption discussed above, that the natural condition of mankind is to be monolingual, and that language therefore means one language. Leopold’s (1954: 32) statement that ‘[t]he natural thing for both children and adults seems to be to operate with one language system’ leaves no doubt about this assumption. The stance has found considerable reinforcement through the fundamental ambiguity of the word language itself in the current (meta)language of science, English (see discussion in the second section of Chapter 1). The task that faces bilingual children is thus not so much that of acquiring language, like their monolingual peers, but of differentiating between their languages. Data for studies along this research paradigm often concern early lexical productions, whose clearly mixed nature progressively wanes as the realisation of two surrounding languages is said to dawn on the children. Other studies take for granted the acquisition of a critical mass of words,
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variously set at between 50 and 100, and focus either on grammar, often taken as synonymous with syntax, or on pragmatic uses of language as sources of evidence for what is termed language differentiation, or language separation. One example of the former is Lebeaux (2000); one example of the latter is Nicoladis and Genesee (1996: 461), who suggest that ‘bilingual children do not differentiate pragmatically’ before the first words, the implicit reason for this being that there is nothing for the child to choose from. The consensus seems to be to approach the use of two languages from the perspective of one of them or of a merged version of both. For example, Watson (1991: 35) argues that bilingual children start off with an ‘averaged system’, although it is unclear what that system can be averaged from, because the children are in the process of acquiring their languages. Bilingual acquisition is taken to proceed by weeding out of each language the intrusive features of (presumably) the other. Bilingual ‘differentiation’ is therefore achieved when bilinguals show evidence of monolingual mastery of both their languages, usually gauged through comparison with monolingual peers. Implicit in formulations and approaches like these is the view that a bilingual worthy of the label must be equally competent in both languages, i.e. a ‘balanced bilingual’ who not only has fluent mastery of two languages, but equivalent mastery in both. A bilingual is thus a dual monolingual, in the sense suggested above: fluent bilinguals are those who speak two languages fluently, not those who mix fluently. The process of language differentiation itself is, however, left quite obscure in this literature. For example, Arnberg (1985: 7) states that the process is dramatically accelerated after ‘the point of ‘‘insight’’ or bilingual awareness’, but gives no clue as to what may trigger it. ‘Early’ in formulations like ‘early bilingual awareness’ is another label whose scope is rather obscure, although most research sets the productive emergence of lexical or grammatical equivalents that can unequivocally be ascribed to one or the other of the languages as evidence of the landmark transition that defines awareness of two languages, and therefore evidence that the child is operating with two systems (Arnberg, 1985; Redlinger & Park, 1980; Taeschner, 1983; Vihman, 1985; Volterra & Taeschner, 1978. See also Meisel (1989) for insight into this issue). The onset of differentiation appears in fact to coincide with the point in linguistic development from which researchers can start matching their informants’ productions with what they are able to recognise from sanctioned descriptions of the target languages in question. What is clear from one-system approaches to child bilingualism is that either (a) there appears to be no way for bilingually raised children to communicate effectively before differentiation or, in all likelihood, to understand attempts at communication directed to them. Such a
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suggestion of impaired daily communication during the long months that it takes for a child to acquire words and/or grammar must, I suspect, sound quite exotic among real bilingual families in the real world. Or (b) communication proceeds effectively during the nebulous predifferentiation period, in which case we are not told why the child should feel the need to differentiate between the languages. Continuing with the intellectual exercise suggested above, the normative assumption of one linguistic system for bilinguals must entail that monolinguals make do with half a system. But the major problem with one-system views of mixes, as I see it, is that they rest on a paradox. The coexistence of mixes with a single system is clearly contradictory, in that you must have unmixed, separate things, including linguistic systems, in order to be able to mix them. Mixing from a single source does not make sense, unless that single source is itself assumed as mixed. If so, concluding in favour of a ‘mixed system’, whatever that may mean, on the strength of mixes, because mixes are assumed to stem from a mixed system, is a reasoning that is at best uninteresting and at worst circular. The paradox is encapsulated in the positing of a bilingual ‘unified system’, in the wake of Leopold’s (1939 /1949; 1954) proposals, a formulation that in fact denies the duality expressed in the prefix bithough apparently attempting a synthesis of the contradiction between its inherent plurality and the singularity of the word system . Given the extraordinary impact of Leopold’s impressive study, it is no wonder that its findings gained undisputed wholesale acceptance, complete with assumptions and conclusions. ‘Two-system’ approaches to child bilingualism
As noted above, mixed child speech has also been used to prove the claim that bilingual children start off their linguistic lives with two distinct linguistic systems. I have myself argued elsewhere (CruzFerreira, 1990) that lexical mixes, for example, may constitute proof of very early bilingual awareness, or cannot at least be used as evidence for one single system, in that the choice of a mixed word in all likelihood has to do with developmental reasons. Differentiation in production is a factor not only of cognitive development but also, crucially, of articulatory sophistication. Pearson and colleagues (Pearson & Navarro, 1998; Pearson et al ., 2001) report on how phonological immaturity may preempt attempts at assessing bilingual differentiation in young children, a point that has strong support in the literature (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1996; Genesee, 1989; Grosjean, 1982. See also Kent & Miolo, 1995). In the case of bilingual children, early words may be called upon to do work in two languages. Towards the end of their first year, all three children in this study used, for example, the Portuguese word da´/da/‘give (me)’ with both parents, while stretching towards the object that had aroused
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their desire. That is, they mixed a Portuguese word into Swedish dialogues with their father. The Swedish equivalents of this word, fa˚r jag /fofr j"(g)/ or kan jag fa˚ /kanf j"(g) fof/, were well known to the children, who responded competently to them. These equivalents are clearly more complex articulatorily, and awareness of the different complexity of the equivalents in the two languages cannot be excluded as a likely reason for the children’s choice to ‘mix’ in this and similar cases. The children also used Swedish words like da¨r /dæfr/ ‘there’, titta! /''tItfa/ ‘look!’ or klocka /''kl&kfa/ ‘(wrist)watch’ with both parents (Portuguese equivalents: ali /gli/, olha! /g&·/ and relo´gio /‰(‹)gl&iw/, respectively). As soon as the children were able to pronounce the ‘difficult’ member of the equivalent pair, they started using it with the right parent in a matter of days, reserving the ‘easy’ one for the other parent. Where the articulatory make-up of equivalent words proved equally simple, or equally complex, along the children’s development, both were used with the right parent, e.g. mais /majS/, bola /gb&l/ in Portuguese, and mer /mefr/, boll /b&lf/ in Swedish, ‘more’ and ‘ball’, respectively. Examples such as these support the view that vocal tract maturation answers for much early bilingual mixing. My interpretation of data of this kind is that by choosing to say the word, the children are attempting to keep a dialogue going. Faced with words that are impossible to articulate in the language of the exchange, the children could also have chosen silence. By choosing to say the word that they can pronounce, the children are making a decision based on what is pronounceable versus unpronounceable, among alternatives that serve the same pragmatic purpose in the two languages. Professional translators know that the meaning is sacred, though the words are not. The children’s strategy appears to indicate their realisation that the meaning is indeed sacred, but not the language: the communicative need takes precedence over it. By the same token, children who are not yet able to drink from a glass on their own will lift an empty glass to their lips while making sucking noises. That is, they will choose from among the actions that are required for drinking from glasses, the ones that they can faithfully reproduce. Strategies of this kind are no different either from the ones apparent from monolingual children who address their father as ‘mummy’ or vice versa , or who use ‘you’ for ‘me’ at the stage of acquisition of personal pronouns (cp. Genesee’s (1989) view that language mixing is a similar acquisitional strategy to lexical overextension in monolingual uses of language; see also Romaine (1989), especially chapter 4). These are features of language use which are also found in the data from the children in this study (see the second section of Chapters 7 and 8). The children are certainly aware that different words are used around them to address mum, dad, themselves and interlocutor(s), and may be using these words
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interchangeably because of difficulty in realising which word means what. For monolingual children’s data of this kind, I know of no claims in the literature that their lexical or morphological fields are mixed up or undifferentiated, although what these children are doing is, strictly, mixing ‘wrong’ words into their speech. The difference in accounts of bilingual children’s productions lies in the analysis, not in the data. In monolingual crossovers of this kind within one language, the learning is stressed, by the use of labels like ‘overextension’ to describe these child productions. In bilingual crossovers across different languages, the undifferentiating is stressed, by the use of labels like ‘mix’. In both cases, the children are in fact testing, in order to learn to find their way along adequate uses of language. Any insight that child mixes may be credited with contributing to the long-standing one- versus two-systems controversy must plead for the two-systems side. But the two-systems approach is not without its controversies either. Even scholars who subscribe to it, and that conclude for early bilingual awareness, feel the need to gauge bilingual competence against monolingual competence in two languages (e.g. Quay, 1995), usually by means of frameworks used in contrastive linguistics studies. The issue of lexical equivalents is one case in point (equivalent morphology and syntax have served similar assessment purposes, though it is clear that both develop after the first words). The bilingual child is not only expected to be able to pronounce the experimentally required words in both languages, but is besides required to engage in an extremely sophisticated task of word-equivalence search, in apparent oblivion of the fact that bilingualism means nonequivalent use of two languages. If both languages were used in equivalent ways, there would be no need for two languages: one would be enough to satisfy communication purposes, a point that is variously addressed along this book (see Chapter 11, in particular). The title, and the focus, of Hoffman’s (1990) autobiography, Lost in Translation , gives a significant indication of the doubtful merit of equating bilingual competence with translation competence, or with equivalent competence in two languages, whether lexical, grammatical or discoursal (see also Altarriba, 2003). Interestingly, and despite the emphasis on eliciting proof of bilingual equivalence from young bilinguals, none of the analytical frameworks spawned by Poplack’s (2000) seminal study attribute an equivalent status to the two languages of a bilingual (one example is Myers-Scotton, 1993). Bilingual studies, and bilingual people through them, find themselves therefore in a Catch-22 situation. Bilinguals are required to provide evidence of equivalent mastery of two languages, whereas descriptive models allow only for hierarchical analyses of the status of those languages. In other words, if bilinguals show dominance of one language, their bilingualism is questionable, but if they show
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equivalence across their languages, their bilingualism cannot be accounted for by available models. As bilinguals are not monolinguals either, it appears quite hopeless to define their status as language users at all. Clearly, an account of child bilingualism on its own terms is called for. The issue may well revolve around where to look for evidence, in that communicative competence, bilingual or otherwise, need not be equated with lexical competence. The labelling of pre-word child productions as ‘prelinguistic’ or ‘preverbal’ is well established in the literature (e.g. Golinkoff, 1983; Petitto, 1988), besides tallying with biblical formulations about the cornerstone of emergence of order (‘In the beginning was the Word’). Kent and Miolo (1995) argue against the legitimacy of these labels, showing how early phonetic abilities relate to language development. Insight into the central role played by prosody in child productive competence is attested at least from Stevenson’s (1893) report. Another early study, Lukens (1894: 437), notes that ‘tone and gesture [. . . make] distinctions of thought long before they are represented by separate words’. More recently, Dromi (1987) insists that knowledge of words alone constitutes insufficient evidence of language learning. By avoiding drawing an arbitrary line of legitimate evidence at stages of lexical acquisition, taking instead into account the language resources manifested in the whole of the child’s early production, the issue of equating bilingual language acquisition with replication of two target monolingual systems, and the associated ‘one- versus two-systems’ issue may turn out to be no issues at all. This point is addressed in detail in Chapter 5, opening presentation of data for the children in this study.
The ‘Buffet Effect’ in Bilingual Acquisition It is perhaps relevant to point out at this stage that the apparently clear-cut concept of ‘a language’ is in fact quite fluid. One take on this issue is that of Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), in terms of focused versus diffused uses of language. Users of a diffused (variety of a) language may agree upon uses that are unknown, or unacceptable, to users of a focused variety and vice versa , although both groups use the ‘same’ language. We may know, for example, what Portuguese is (said to be), according to standard descriptions, or to descriptions of standard varieties of the language, which amounts to much the same. But this also means that when we talk about Portuguese we are talking about language standard(s), not about the language as an open-ended means of expression and communication. The fluidity of language boundaries is well illustrated in titles of research papers like ‘English as a Chinese language’ (Yajun, 2003), ‘English as an Asian language’ (McArthur, 2003), ‘Camfranglais: A novel slang in Cameroon schools’ (Kouega, 2003) or
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‘Euro-English: A Swedish perspective’ (Modiano, 2003), all concerning English and all included in a recent issue of English Today. It is this fluidity that enables children to explore their language(s) in what makes up the process of language acquisition. Their primary task, as trainee users of language, is to hack into the code(s) that enable socialisation, by all means at their disposal. Exploration of language is, as already noted in the second section of Chapter 1, a lifelong process, although adults have been persuaded that the processes described by labels like ‘language acquisition’ or ‘language learning’ are beyond their reach (see the second section of Chapter 9 for discussion). If speakers stopped acquiring language beyond childhood, no adult would be able to understand and enjoy the novel, creative uses of language with which human beings are faced every day. In Bloomfield’s (1933: 46) words, ‘there is no hour or day when we can say that a person has finished learning to speak, but, rather, to the end of his life, the speaker keeps on doing the very things which make up infantile language-learning’. Children do with their language(s) what they do with their toys: they take them apart to see how they work. Crystal (1996: 6) defines the ‘business of grammar’, i.e. the exploration of linguistic patterns, precisely as ‘taking a language to pieces, to see how it works’. The difference between child and adult users of language is that the former do this overtly. Bilingual children are at freedom to explore language not only from within each of their languages, but across them and, more importantly, beyond them. A mix need not necessarily be an import, as-is, from one language to another. It may, rather, result from the reworking, into a larger puzzle, of a likely missing piece that reasonable generalisation of particular linguistic uses in one language may predict as usefully functional across the board. One example from the children in this study is their selective generalisation to Portuguese of uses of English intonational patterns, discussed in Cruz-Ferreira (1999b), resulting in productions that do not match linguistic uses in either of the languages involved. Mixes arise out of the limits within which each language happens to vary, and with which the children are unfamiliar because the languages are new to them. It is in this sense that what I propose to call the Buffet Effect may, I believe, provide a more accurate approximation than ‘differentiation’ to what may be going on in bilingual language acquisition. The process has more to do with finding a match, often by copying and pasting across languages, than with circumscribing linguistic territory. Just like uninitiated guests at international food festivals, faced with rich but novel gastronomic choices, may have trouble deciding whether a dip goes with the main course or dessert, or may choose to sample the salad intended for the fish with a meat course, so bilinguals draw on the whole array of linguistic choices that are available
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to them, and try them out in various combinations in order to get their message through. In both cases, only the pieces of different puzzles are available to the sampler, with no key provided. In both cases, the question is how to fit those pieces together to make up a pattern that is sanctioned by experienced users. Mixes do not, however, define bilingual speech. Mixes do not appear either to be favoured, in absolute terms, over monolingual production. Goodz (1989) reports bilingual children’s preference for monolingual over mixed utterances in judgement tasks, and the children in the present study react with bafflement to their own mixed utterances, when these are played back to them. Mixing is a linguistic habit on a par with the habit of speaking one single language. Bilinguals mix in bilingual settings, but not when interacting with monolinguals (see Genesee, 1989; Grosjean, 2001). The reason that bilingual speech tends to be equated with mixed speech lies in the curiosity that mixed speech has aroused among researchers. Research into bilingualism has accordingly focused on mixes, to the detriment of bilinguals’ monolingual productions, which are assumed as linguistically less interesting. The present study attempts to redress this imbalance, through the overview of the children’s use of Portuguese given in Part 2 of this book. The main focus of this study concerns the investigation of the strategies that the children resort to in order to be able to engage in communication about what interests them, be it objects, people, thoughts or language itself. The children’s monolingual management of one of their languages is duly analysed against the background of their multilingualism, in order to enable generalisations about language-independent linguistic competence among young multilinguals. On the other hand, there can be no linguistic development independent from social and cognitive development, as there is no social and cognitive development without language. The core research questions guiding the present study can thus be summarised as follows: (1) Is there a fundamental difference between the children’s use of monolingual and multilingual acquisitional strategies? (2) What role do acquisitional strategies play in the children’s overall linguistic, cognitive and social development? The next two chapters provide detail on the three child informants and on the database used in this study, respectively.
Chapter 3
The Children The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to provide some information on the family and linguistic background of the children in this study. Secondly, to discuss general features of the children’s personalities and modes of interaction that may reflect upon their ways of dealing with language. These may in turn help us understand their approaches to socialisation through language and their strategies (or absence of these) to make themselves understood. The broad picture outlined here is progressively fleshed out along the book, with additional details provided as relevant.
Family Background Karin, Sofia and Mikael, in order of appearance, are siblings in an upper-middle-class household. Karin and Sofia were born in Sweden, in September 1986 and July 1988, respectively, Mikael was born in Portugal in October 1990. Their father is a native speaker of (Central Standard) Swedish, with a postgraduate degree in economics, and their mother is a native speaker of European Portuguese (Lisbon dialect), with postgraduate degrees in linguistics. From (and before) birth, the children were exposed to Portuguese and Swedish according to the oneperson one-language principle that the parents have adhered to since then. The parents, who both come from families that are natively monolingual, are fluent in one another’s language, which they started learning as adults. They are also fluent users of English, this being the language in which they started communicating with one another. Communicating in a third language that is foreign to them was in fact the reason that led both parents to opt for learning the other’s language, a few months into their marriage. Learning proceeded first through school tuition, and later through continued contact with speakers of these languages. Not least, proficiency in these foreign languages came naturally from the regular use of each of them with the children at home. The mother acquired French from age 3, when her family was posted for three years to a French-speaking African country, and she later attended a French-medium school in Lisbon for the ten years of primary and secondary schooling. Her school subjects included French, Latin, German and English language, literature and culture. The father lived in two English-speaking countries for short periods of time while growing up, and his school subjects included French, Spanish, German and 30
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English. The parents’ proficiency in their native languages is unaffected by several years of living abroad that includes daily contact with other languages. The family keeps regular contact with Sweden and Portugal, and with speakers of Swedish and Portuguese, as detailed below. Besides Portuguese and Swedish, the children also had early exposure to English, from exchanges with English-speaking guests or from social gatherings involving Swedish and Portuguese relatives or friends, who use English to communicate among themselves. In all exchanges between the children and Portuguese or Swedish relatives and friends the one-person one-language principle is easily maintained. The children have been exposed, from birth, to several accents of Swedish and Portuguese, the latter including Brazilian Portuguese. Due to the father’s professional commitments, the family has had several moves to different countries. The chronological summary below highlights the different languages that the children have been exposed to, and Table 3.1 gives the same information in schematic form, for ease of reference.
Table 3.1 Summary of the family’s moves and of the children’s languages of schooling (from) Date
Country
Karin
July 1986
Sweden
1;1 /1;9, Sw playgroup
Sept 1988
Portugal
3;0 /3;9, Sw kindergarten
Nov 1990
Austria
4;2 /5;9, Gm kindergarten
3;1 /3;11, Gm kindergarten
July 1992
Portugal
6;0 /6;9, Sw Grade 1
4;1 /4;11, Sw kindergarten
Aug 1993
Hong Kong
7;0 /7;9, Eng Grade 2
5;1 /5;11, Eng kindergarten; Eng reception/ Grade 1; Eng Grade 1
3;1 /3;8, Eng kindergarten
Aug 1994
Singapore
from 8;0, Eng Grade 3
from 6;2, Eng Grade 2
from 3;11, Eng nursery
Sw, Swedish; Gm, German; Eng, English
Sofia
Mikael
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32 .
.
.
.
.
.
July 1986. Two months before Karin’s birth, the parents moved from Copenhagen (Denmark) to the south of Sweden, where the family set up their permanent home. From October 1987 to June 1988, Karin, aged 1;1/1;9, attended a local Swedish-medium playgroup, where she spent an average of 15 hours/week. September 1988. Seven weeks after Sofia’s birth, the family moved to the Lisbon area in Portugal, first to Estoril and later to Cascais. From September 1989 to June 1990, Karin 3;0 /3;9, attended kindergarten at the Swedish School in Carcavelos, also in the Lisbon area. November 1990. Three weeks after Mikael’s birth, the family moved to Perchtoldsdorf, in the Vienna area in Austria. From November 1990 to June 1992, and from September 1991 to June 1992, Karin 4;2/ 5;9 and Sofia 3;1 /3;11, respectively, attended a local Germanmedium kindergarten. July 1992. The mother and the children moved back to Portugal. From August 1992 to May 1993, the father was posted in the USA and travelled to Portugal for short weekend visits on an irregular monthly basis. From September 1992 to June 1993, Karin 6;0/6;9 attended Grade 1, and Sofia 4;1 /4;11 attended kindergarten at the Swedish School in Carcavelos. August 1993. The family moved to Hong Kong. From September 1993 to June 1994, Karin 7;0 /7;9, attended Grade 2 at a British school. During this period, due to progressive proficiency in English and on her teachers’ advice, Sofia was successively upgraded, in each term of the academic year, from a Montessori kindergarten, to reception/Grade 1, and then to Grade 1 at the same British school as her sister. Apart from two months of tuition in English, one hour/ day, five days/week, for Karin (from 6;8) and Sofia (from 4;10) in Portugal, when the family had confirmed the coming move to Hong Kong, this move marks the beginning of the children’s regular contact with English. Karin (from 7;0) and Sofia (from 5;2) had private English tuition for two hours, three times a week, for four months after the move to Hong Kong. Tuition was discontinued on the advice of the tutor, who saw no need to go on. For Mikael, English was the language of his first school ever, where from November 1993 to June 1994 (aged 3;1 /3;8), he attended the same Montessori kindergarten as Sofia. At this English-medium school, both Sofia and Mikael had exposure to Cantonese through songs, counting and nursery rhymes. August 1994. The family moved to Singapore, where they have lived for over 10 years at the time of writing. The children have attended two English-medium international schools, Karin from 8;0 in Grade 3, Sofia from 6;2 in Grade 2 and Mikael from 3;11 in nursery. Both
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Karin (from 8;2) and Sofia (from 6;4) had private English tuition for three months, two hours twice weekly. English tuition was never found necessary for Mikael. It should perhaps be noted that the rapid changes of country over short periods of time was not deliberate, but a consequence of unexpected work-related postings. In particular, the reason why the two girls had schooling in German was that the family had been guaranteed a stay of several years in Austria at the time of moving to that country. From the age of 6, all three children have attended Swedish Supply School in the different countries where the family lived, once weekly for two hours. Swedish Supply schools are taught by native speakers of Swedish, and schooling sessions are conducted entirely in Swedish. They include practice of oral and literacy skills, as well as discussion of historical, geographical and cultural issues involving Sweden. From age 12, the children switched to long-distance schooling in this language, provided by Sofia Distansundervisning from Swedish Grades 7 through 9 and by Va¨rmdo¨ Distans from then on. Both schools are headquartered in Stockholm. Schooling takes place via the internet, and covers advanced oral and literacy skills in similar topics concerning Swedish and Scandinavian languages, literature and culture. When living in Europe, the family travelled to Sweden for the summer vacation and to Portugal for Christmas, or vice versa . After settling down in Asia, the family travels to both countries for either the summer or Christmas. Through these regular visits to both countries the children are as familiar with the culture of Portugal as they are with that of Sweden, although they have no formal schooling in Portuguese. Formal education has mixed effects, as far as intuitions about language and language use are concerned. Knowing how a language should be used, or spelt, according to school-transmitted standards, affects speakers’ judgements about their own and others’ uses of that language, as Labov’s (1972a; 1972b) research has amply demonstrated. More recently, Gillis and De Schutter (1996) found significant discrepancy between the linguistic intuitions of literate and preliterate children, and attributed its causes to literacy. The uses of Portuguese by the children in the present study are therefore largely unhindered by educational or other culture-bound judgements. Their receptive and productive use of written Portuguese was mostly incidental, e.g. through story books or the mother’s insistence that shopping lists and notes addressed to her should be written in that language, and became more regular only recently, through the use of email and online chat messages with their mother. As far as exposure to other languages is concerned, through schooling, the picture is different for each of the children. This is because the
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children attended two different schools at the time (though both international, and both English-medium), and because of curricular changes in one of the schools, that imposed particular languages as compulsory from one year to the next. All three children started curricular lessons in Mandarin at school from Grade 6 (Karin from 10;0, Sofia from 9;2, Mikael from 9;11), that are ongoing at the time of writing. Karin had two years of curricular Latin in Grades 5 and 6, Sofia had three in Grades 4 /6. Sofia had two years of curricular French in Grades 6 and 7, Mikael had one in Grade 4. The children are, of course, exposed to the local languages spoken in Singapore, the main ones being Mandarin, as well as other Chinese languages, Malay and Tamil, not least through the radio and television. The children are also familiar with different accents of English, native as well as non-native, including through the family’s two Filipino live-in helpers, one in Hong Kong, one in Singapore. At the time of writing, Karin has moved to Sweden (from age 16), where she pursues the International Baccalaureate at an English-medium boarding school in the Stockholm area. Sofia and Mikael, still in Singapore with their parents, will follow suit in due course. The children have always lived with both parents, and have always taken an active part in the family’s life. Occasionally, the children have stayed with relatives other than the parents in either Portugal or Sweden, for 2 /3-week periods. With these exceptions, and the family’s two yearlong stays in Portugal, exposure to Portuguese continues largely through the mother and the children themselves. The mother stayed at home during the children’s first years before the start of their regular schooling, and continues to be the main caregiver. The children are therefore mostly exposed to Portuguese at home. In order to counterbalance this asymmetry, compounded by the regular absences of the father due to business travel, the parents chose to address one another in Swedish in the presence of the children.
A Few Issues in Development The children’s overall development follows typical standards, whether linguistic, physical or intellectual (but see the section on ‘Developmental feature or idiosyncrasy?’ in this chapter). One feature that has clear relevance to language learning and that is shared by all three children, perhaps because of the frequent moves that were part of their early lives, is an active willingness to become part of new surroundings, physical as well as linguistic, whether in early childhood or at the time of writing, aged 17, 15 and 13, respectively. There was never any need, for example, to inculcate in the children, or even explain to them the requirement to learn a new language in connection with a
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move to a country where the language was unknown to them. They appeared to take it for granted that different countries use different languages, and that the way to feel welcome in a new country is to make its ways your own, including linguistic, by learning them. In the process of learning languages, all three also made clear their awareness that the prosodic features of a language, like rhythmical patterns and intonation, constitute its linguistic name-card, as it were. Learning and probing of a new language consistently proceeded through early exploration of, and play with, its salient prosodic features. For example, six days after her arrival in Austria, Karin (4;2) entertained herself by ‘speaking’ German to herself, with nonsense segmental strings that reproduced the prosody, as well as the diphthongs, of the Wienerisch dialect. The extent to which the children’s use of similar, or distinct, strategies in their approach to language can be ascribed to falling in with peer-initiated practices or to individual features is discussed below. The sibling effect Being individuals, the children of course have different personalities. Socialisation is clearly a non-negligible factor in overall development, including development of personality traits. Early socialisation naturally draws on the twin bonds that have been described as central in human interaction, the parent/child bond and the peer bond (Keesing, 1981). The latter is of particular interest among peers in the same household, apparent through what can be termed the ‘sibling effect’. This has been addressed in the literature in two distinct but complementary ways, one discussing parental behaviour towards individual children in multichild families, the other focusing on the effects of siblinghood among the children themselves. The detailed observation of parent/sibling interaction lies outside the focus of the present study, although the parental side of the sibling effect appears to be clearly present in this family too, not least for the obvious reason that interaction between multiple siblings and one parent is of the one-to-many kind, which is by definition unbalanced. Studies on parent/child interaction among multichild families accordingly come to the expected conclusion that interaction in a child /parent dyad is quite different from interaction in a child/sibling/parent triad (Barton & Tomasello, 1991; 1994; Breland, 1974; Oshima-Takane & Robbins, 2003). These studies report different levels of parental attention, linguistic or otherwise, to first-borns versus later-borns, inviting the coupling of differential parental attention with siblings’ perceived (dis)favouring in their parents’ eyes. What emerges from the children in this study is that parental attention per se seems to be a subsidiary issue, or one that may be used if found useful to achieve their prime goal, which is the sorting out of their own peer relationships. As soon as Sofia reached an age that
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enabled her to engage in play, Karin started favouring her sister’s company over her parents’. The same is true of both girls and Mikael. Play or linguistic interaction with parents continued to be prized, particularly where it involved skills that the children had yet to acquire, like reading books or drawing objects, but peer interaction was clearly privileged. The forms of sibling rivalry that are apparent in these children do not seem directed at securing parental attention, in that they concern, rather, their disputation of peer rank and order. Studies on multichild families also agree that factors like birth-order, size of the family and sibling sex all contribute their share of differential effects in child development, linguistic or otherwise. The children’s characteristic personalities are nurtured by factors such as their sex and birth-order, that result in quite different culture-bound expectations and associated behaviour. Expectations concerning birth-order, for example, were expressed by the children themselves throughout their lives in different ways. The eldest child assumes the expectation of garnering a form of respect from younger siblings that is similar to that which is owed to other elders. Being also the only child for a period of time, short though it may be, the eldest child appears more prone to perceiving younger siblings as a kind of territorial threat. Karin often resorted to re-establishing privileges that might be at risk of loss through making it clear to her siblings that the inexperience that goes with young age was a hindrance to the understanding of what was required for effective interaction with other people. One of her favourite strategies was to invent complicated rules for a game of her own devising, painstakingly teach only a few of these rules to her siblings, and then start the game in such a way that it required immediate application of a rule that was known to her alone, dismissing her siblings’ bafflement on account of their lack of commonsense knowledge about game rules. The middle child, being second-born, may not feel particular threats to privileges associated with birth-order, but is otherwise expected to hang in the delicate balance between solidarity with the older or the younger sibling. Sofia made good use of this expectation in her own favour, threatening to go play with Mikael instead of Karin, or vice versa , whenever her partner of the moment refused to comply with her own demands. The youngest child, in turn, is expected to assume its status as lowest in the pecking order, and the ‘baby’ in the family. Mikael also devised his own ways of using this expectation in his favour, by willingly playing the helpless one when it came to matters like shared tidying up of playrooms or helping out with household chores. He would simply refuse to comply, invoking privileges entailed by his tender age. In cases such as these, the children are calling upon the factors that they know make them unique individuals among their siblings, and attempting to demonstrate the
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decisive power of that individuality. The children appear to understand what parents and researchers alike know for a fact, that siblings are not equals, not just because they do not perceive themselves as equals among themselves, but because they do not want to be perceived as equals. Their competition for pole position is accordingly individual and against peers, not with them, and concerns hierarchy, not parity. Cutting across these expectations are issues of sex, in the sense that girls are expected to behave differently from boys. A child who assumes an expected dominance because of birth-order may see that privilege attenuated because of being a girl, with younger male siblings who assume dominance because of sex. Expected solidarity, also based on birth-order and/or sex, in turn arouses differing expectations, defining lines of alliance versus conflict that vary according to the nature of the issue in question, a desired goal or, often, the mood of the moment. It is sometimes the case that girls should team together against the boy because they are girls and they are older, whereas at other times it is the case that the two younger ones should unite against a bullying older one, or that the oldest and the youngest should make it clear to the middle one that she is the odd-one out because she is the middle one, regardless of sex. Unless, of course, it is the case that all three should present a common front of resistance against a harassing parent or outsider, thereby honouring siblinghood allegiance. The children’s own sorting out of these issues among themselves took place with minimal active intervention from the parents, that was exerted only in cases of threatened and actual physical or emotional violence among the children. Besides effects on overall development, the effects of sibling presence and/or sibling input on child speech are well attested in the literature, although their interpretation is still a matter of controversy. Wellen (1985) focuses on younger siblings’ apparently uncontested deprivation of beneficial opportunities for language learning because of the presence of an older sibling, whereas Dunn and Shatz (1989) find that younger siblings elbow their way, as it were, to their rightful place in interactional triads by means of conversational intrusions. Woollett (1986) agrees with Wellen that interaction with an older sibling is admittedly less centred on assumed linguistic needs of a younger one, as is also reported by HoffGinsberg and Krueger (1991), but she counter-argues that sibling interaction creates an environment that is otherwise richer and thereby equally conducive to linguistic development of younger children, a point that is supported by Barton and Tomasello (1991) and Oshima-Takane et al . (1996). One robust finding concerns the imitation, by younger siblings, of linguistic and other behavioural patterns initiated by older siblings. Examples from the children in this study are their initial use of Portuguese among themselves, which was the language that Karin understandably chose to address Sofia from her sister’s birth, or their
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idiosyncratic form of address to their mother. Their Portuguese word ma´mi , despite its phonetic similarity with the English word ‘mummy’, appeared in their speech long before English did, borrowed by Karin at around age 3 from her favourite kindergarten teacher (herself a Swedish /Spanish bilingual), whose children addressed her by this name. Sofia and Mikael naturally followed suit. Some of the children’s uses of language are thus peer-bound, pointing to the children’s openness to influence by their siblings, which may strengthen their language learning through the widening of linguistic models that they deem acceptable. Developmental feature or idiosyncrasy? The issue of models, addressed in greater detail in the next chapter, moulds research into language development by providing guidelines for establishing a common ground of linguistic material that the learning child is assumed to target. Individual variation among children can thus be accounted for in ways that provide a reasonably general explanation of the learning process. But there seems to be a fine line separating what can be safely counted (and probably dismissed) as pertaining to idiosyncratic uses of language that may be deemed irrelevant to the overall acquisitional picture, and what pertains to acquisitional processes that can legitimately add to our understanding of child language. Among the data for the present study, one case in point concerns one possible exception to the generally healthy development of the children. Sofia, the latest speaker of all three, was diagnosed at age 4 with 40% deafness due to recurrent middle-ear infections for which she had been receiving regular medication since babyhood. Diary notes report, from age 0;11, that she spoke little, and an entry at age 2;4 observes that she had ‘very few words’ and ‘very slurred speech’. There is no record of suspected deafness then, or later at age 3;3 when it is noted that Sofia does not respond to calls from afar. This and her lack of interest in forms of socialisation that involved verbal communication were ascribed to her characteristic absent-mindedness and her preference for physical activities, especially involving handiwork, in which she could immerse herself for hours. Deafness was clearly suspected first at around age 4;3, when Sofia started positioning herself so as to see her interlocutors’ faces during verbal exchanges, or grabbing and turning their faces towards herself, in all likelihood in order to be able to lip-read. Reports from kindergarten confirm likely deficiencies in hearing, in that they point out that Sofia consistently refused to participate in activities like, for example, story reading. This involves listening only, in that everyone sat on the floor facing the teacher, whose face was lowered towards the book that was being read. Her refusals were attributed to some
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‘unsociability’, that was also said to show in the playground through impatient tantrums whilst interacting with peers. She underwent grommet and adenoid surgery twice, first in Portugal at 4;9 and later in Singapore at 6;2, when the problem was solved. The noteworthy consequence of this problem was that up to the age of 10 her delivery was rather slurred in both Portuguese and Swedish, whereas her delivery in English, which she started learning with improved hearing (from 4;10), was faster and clearer from the very start. This point is interesting in that early child deafness, whether temporary or more enduring, may go undetected, particularly if mild and related to ear infections, as was Sofia’s. Its consequences in speech production may be attributed to some other reason, as was the case for Sofia before the signs of hearing disorder were too obvious to be dismissed as something else. Boysson-Bardies (1999: 93), discussing the effects of profound deafness on child speech, also notes that ‘it is less often realized that more modest levels of hearing loss or repeated middle-ear infections during the first two years sometimes entail a lasting deficit in language reception’, that may distort linguistic development. Given circumstances like this one, it is difficult to decide whether features that appear to be part of a child’s personality, like impatience or a preference for lone play that were ascribed to Sofia’s, indeed result from nature or nurture. Sofia’s peers would certainly lose interest in a prospective playmate who, for example, does not respond to calls or keeps grabbing at their faces for reasons that are not made clear. Her ‘preference’ may therefore be a result, instead of a cause, of problematic socialisation of this kind. Whichever the case may be, a number of strategies in her approach to language appear to be idiosyncratic, and could probably be related to her early hearing difficulties. They are noted where relevant along this book. But it is also true that all three children’s development in their two native languages proceeded differently. That is, it is not possible to establish, from their combined data, one single portrait of developmental patterning in, say, Portuguese. Put another way, it is open to question whether each of the children’s individual approaches to their languages should count as typical, and on what grounds. This is one of the reasons why I opted for a cross-sectional analysis of selected features of Portuguese, in Part 2 of the book, instead of a chronological overview of the children’s development in this language. Individual quirks that percolate through to the children’s individual modes of language learning might otherwise risk being mistaken for features of language, or of language learning instead. The interest of the present study may lie precisely in that it aims at giving the overall picture that emerges from their development as competent users of language, despite the idiosyncrasies of each of their three languages and despite the children’s own idiosyncrasies.
Chapter 4
Data Collection and Analytical Choices This chapter deals with the database on which the present study draws, detailing modes and purposes of data collection. In the light of these purposes, the choices that shaped data collection and analysis are presented, as are a number of limitations. The final section gives an extensive discussion of the conventions used throughout this book.
The Database The database comprises spontaneous production data, spanning the birth of all three children up to age 10, in various situations involving monologue or exchanges with various interlocutors. Occasional diary note-taking is ongoing at the time of writing, with the children aged 17, 15 and 13, respectively, chiefly concerning anecdotal observation of types of mixes in their speech. Modes of data collection Data were collected through audio recordings, video recordings and diary notes made by the children’s mother, who is also the researcher and competent in the three languages involved in this study, as a user and as a linguist. Audio recordings were made on cassettes on portable Sony tape-recorders with a flat microphone featuring adjustable sensitivity. Video recordings used Sony Fe/Cr Hi8 Handycams. The full set of data concerns a total of around 22 hours of audio recordings, 24 hours of video recordings, and several hundred pages of diary notes. The diaries include details on date, location, interlocutor and situation, as well as the reasons for particular recordings, where relevant. Extensive diary entries also record progress in other developmental areas, including comments on personality traits, habits, hobbies, motor skills and anecdotes. Diary notes were taken mostly in conventional notepad-andpen form, but also with the aid of a Dictaphone, which was found ideal for quick recording of observations whenever access to paper and pen was impractical for some reason, for example, while driving a car. Dictaphone notes were put down on paper as soon as possible after recording and the tapes reused. Diary notes were particularly important for the recordings made of Karin up to the age of 1;6 because the family did not own a video recorder until then. They were also found vital for the recording of feedback that was sought on the children’s proficiency in 40
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Swedish, and later in English. Aside from the mother’s own judgement, assessment in these languages relies on comments from Swedish relatives and friends, and later, for both Swedish and English, on school reports. The cumulative information gleaned from all of these collection modes was found invaluable to approximate a picture of the children’s productive linguistic ability. In the first months of the children’s lives, typical recording sessions took place with the child safely lying down and playing on its own or interfacing with one parent or relative. Later, the tape recorder was either openly displayed during interactions between the children and adults, or slipped in an inconspicuous place where the children were busying themselves or being attended to. Recording sessions last any time from 15 minutes, particularly before the one-word stage, to over one hour, in sessions when the tape-recorder was left on with the children on their own. The earliest vocalisations were captured chiefly through taperecording, whereas the focus shifted to video recording from around age 0;6, where situational detail was deemed to start playing a crucial role in attempting to provide interpretations for the children’s speech(-like) productions. The need for situational detail is true of any collection of speech data involving very young children, in that their productions tend to be strongly linked to the particular context in which they are uttered. It is particularly true in a study like the present one, involving bilingual children and, therefore, their attempts at communicating in different languages from a very young age, as will be discussed in Chapter 5. Conventional recording sessions were held until the children reached their 11th birthday, on a rough monthly basis during the children’s first two years. From then on, recordings were made on no regular chronological basis, focusing instead on capturing uses of language in as diversified situations as possible, for example, lone play with favourite toys, homework sessions with one parent, dinner-time conversations with all five members of the family present, play with English monolingual peers at different stages in the children’s progressive mastery of this language, or the children watching a TV programme or playing a card or board game on their own and commenting on it. The setting of the upper age limit for data collection at 10 is arbitrary, and largely based on the very practical reason of emerging sheer impossibility to keep up with, and physically store, significant samples of the children’s linguistic abilities. There is, however, sporadic mention of data from the children’s current uses. For obvious reasons, the data do not include confidential exchanges, when the children bare their hearts to one parent. Throughout the whole set of recordings, care was taken not to disrupt the naturalness of the exchange, as well as to avoid having the
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child regard the session as a tedious forced-regurgitation of skills for the purposes of show-off. From the outset of the first words, recordings were also made whenever new linguistic traits emerged in the children’s speech, for example, a new use of intonation or a new grammatical or lexical overextension. Typically, these followed rather extensive periods of repetition and experimentation with variations on a basic pattern already acquired and documented in a previous recording, whose form and scope were duly noted in diaries. Repetition of this type is particularly true among the children’s first attempts at communicating, during the pre-word stage, when the children appeared to settle for formulaic productions, as it were, that were found to elicit a favourable response from interlocutors or that otherwise satisfied their communicative needs. Each child has a dedicated set of tapes and diaries. Their tapes cover a roughly equivalent amount of time, and similar interactional situations. There is some degree of overlap in data from all three children across tapes, which makes it difficult to give the exact breakdown of recording times for each child. One approximation can be given from the Childes files that are published on these children (Cruz-Ferreira, 2000a), containing 31 files spanning the children’s first year, corresponding to approximately two hours of recording per child. Overlap is particularly true in recordings made after the birth of the second child, for the reason that it was often impossible to completely screen off one toddler while recording the younger sibling, or vice versa . Intrusive contributions of this kind from older siblings and, later, from younger ones too, are of course also part of the database. The database contains data on the children’s acquisition of Portuguese, Swedish and, from 1993, English, with comparatively more data involving Portuguese. There are also recordings of the children’s use of German and two Chinese languages, although of a mere anecdotal nature. Reasons for the primacy of Portuguese among the data are that this is the children’s first unmarked language, the one that they started off using among themselves, and that the investigation of the acquisition of Portuguese in a multilingual setting constitutes the main focus of the data collection. The data reflect in their vast majority instances of spontaneous, natural speech interaction. There are also cases where the child was specifically asked to speak (or sing, or read) ‘for the record’, for example, to say the names of colours or animals in a picture book, by means of elicitation prompts such as ‘What’s this? Whose is that? Can you say. . .?’, or to sing the different language versions of ‘Happy Birthday to You’. Recordings encompass a broad spectrum of situations, aside from the recordings made to capture specific progress, which were made at home. They include indoor and outdoor solitary play and play with other children, adult /child interactions, festive gatherings with
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family and friends, outings, and daily routines such as meals, the child dressing up on its own, or crawling up a flight of stairs unaided. Data also feature instances of making acquaintance with adults and children, interjections, voice modulations and strategies to call the attention of distant hearers, and strategies to overcome background noise. The primary concern with data collection was to gather as broad a range of productions as possible, that would do justice to the child’s communicative abilities at each stage in development. Choices in data collection: Limitations and purposes Any collection of data of course involves a set of choices, which constrain the ways of querying the data according to the purposes that the data will serve. In other words, a collected set of raw data is in fact not raw at all, in that it has already been shaped by specific aims and guided by specific hypotheses. The same can be said of the transcription methods adopted, as discussed below. There is no ideal form of gathering data, as there is no ideal form of analysing data. This is also the reason why it is often not possible to use the same database for different purposes. Data that were collected, and transcribed, or coded, with one purpose in mind may accordingly include no relevant information for another. For example, most of the available databases for the early acquisition of particular languages make no mention of prosodic features of the children’s speech, relevant though these may be for interpretation of the data. Or collections targeting the development of inflectional markers, say, may have very little if anything to show on, say, the acquisition of narrative skills at the same stages. One clear shortcoming of the present database is that the mother was present during most of the data collection, including as video-camera operator in sessions when the children were interacting with speakers of their other two languages. Exceptions are those cases when the tape recorder was operated by other adults interacting with the children, or was left on where the children were busying themselves on their own. One matter that would deserve investigation is therefore whether and how the mother’s presence may have affected the children’s use of language. This matter has to do with the ‘Observer’s Paradox’ entailed by Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle within quantum physics and first noted by Labov (1972b) for fieldwork in linguistics: the act of observing affects what is being observed. The matter also has to do with the broader issue of ascribing representative status to corpora of data. By its nature, the setting of the scene for data collection contains an element of artificiality, even where attempting to capture natural speech, whose effect on language use cannot simply be disregarded. In overt recording sessions, it was found that one way of minimising this effect was to make
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the children clearly aware of the presence of recording devices from the very beginning. The children were also allowed to investigate these devices’ many interesting clicking sounds and flashing lights on their own, with the result that they soon lost interest in them and came to view cameras and tape-recorders as another detail of their routine. Instances where the children deliberately playacted for the camera or the taperecorder were duly noted in the diaries, because playacting is also one way of using language that can be interesting to investigate. As far as I could ascertain from daily interaction with the children, the collected data do reflect a fair sample of their everyday uses of language, and can in this sense be reasonably taken as representative. As said above, several recordings contemplate features of language that the mother perceived as new. In addition, any recorded sample of child speech is, of course, a sample, and cannot obviously claim to encompass total child production. This raises the matter of reliable quantification of sampled data, including dating of acquired linguistic features or items. We can neither be sure of exactly when a new word, phoneme or grammatical feature makes its way into a child’s passive or active repertoire (but see Quay (1995: 379) for the dating of several child words down to the day of acquisition), nor of how it got there. We cannot therefore be sure whether the new feature is new at all at a particular point in time, nor whether its first appearance in production or comprehension is significant in itself, or for the language on which the researcher is focusing. This is particularly true of multilingual children. A new inflection, say, in one language may not mark a morphological breakthrough in that language and be instead the result of, say, a covert realisation that syntax, as opposed to morphology, plays a central role in another language for the coding of semantic roles. As argued in Chapter 2, multilingual acquisition can in fact be best understood from a multilingual, not a monolingual, perspective. Because we cannot have access, by means of recordings or otherwise, to the whole of the child’s linguistic production or exposure to language, at home or otherwise, what we can do is propose legitimate projections on the basis of data that were sampled at a particular point in time and in a particular situation (see Tomasello & Stahl (2004) for discussion). Quay’s (1995) study, for example, provides conclusions about bilingual lexical development from a sampling carried out in the living-room at her child’s home, where the child was made to play with the same toys over several recording sessions. De Houwer (1990: 107) also provides detailed quantification of the lexical inventory of a bilingual child sampled through 19 one-hour tape-recorded sessions at the child’s home, extrapolated as follows: ‘Based on the investigator’s familiarity with the situation and using the adults’ utterances in the transcript, an estimate was then made of whether the respective translation equivalents were ever used in the
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child’s home or school environment’. Problematic issues in quantification of child data are discussed along this book, where relevant. Most of the video and tape recordings in the present database were also made at home, whereas diary notes were comparatively more used in outings. The routine nature of home settings and outings, which involve mostly close relatives and friends, certainly affects language use, particularly formulaic. The family setting that enables capture of naturalistic data at leisure is also one of the drawbacks of this type of collection, in that the children will act exactly as children do at home. They throw tantrums or leave for their own rooms and toys halfway through a recording elsewhere in the house, they try to disrupt by all means at their disposal the perceived momentary full attention given to a sibling involved in an attempted recording, older siblings insist on showing off their ability to babble like younger siblings who, in turn, imitate them, and younger siblings let themselves be distracted or intimidated into silence by the hostile glares and actions of older siblings as soon as recording devices are turned on. In addition, the database contains, for example, no recordings of the children socialising with friends at friends’ homes, or in outings with friends. There are no recordings either of the children’s first uses of English, and of their progressive development in using this language in English-only situations, because English was initially a school-language for these children. No recordings were made at school, whether Swedish or Englishmedium, except in what concerns public events such as school plays, year-end celebrations or school Open Day. Given the show-like nature of these events, and given that the children in this study never attended a Portuguese-medium school, these data need not concern us here. The children’s uses of language in the crucial environment of schooling, particularly where their third language is concerned, cannot therefore be ascertained from speech data in this database. However, given that schooling in English started at ages above 3, the children were able to describe their experiences with their new language. These data form part of the discussion in this book. A further drawback of spontaneous speech collections is the jumbledup type of data that results. These data need repeated sifting through and meticulous tabulation before any sense can be made of them. Naturalistic data are untidy in another sense too, in that they inevitably contain large amounts of noise due to several sources of interference, from background noise that often is noticed first during review of a recording, to disruption caused by normal household goings-on. Noise is indeed one of the reasons for controversy surrounding the use of naturalistic data, in that data of this kind lend themselves awkwardly, if at all, to instrumental analysis. But it is also the reason why diary data are crucial in collections of this type. The value of diaries, usually kept by parents,
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for the study of child language appears nowadays to be disparaged, for two related reasons that point to a judgement of diary instruments as old-fashioned. First, because they constitute the earliest form of data collection. Darwin (1877) reported on his son’s early speech, in what is arguably the first diary study on child language. Other diary-based classics followed, including Stern and Stern (1900 /1918), Leopold (1939 /1949) and, more recently, Brown (1973). Second, because diary reports involve no high-tech beyond paper and pen. Current availability of recording devices of various electronic sophistication has had several effects on data-based research on language, among them that no researcher worthy of the name would want to abstain from incorporating them in their fieldwork. Handwritten diary data thereby appear largely irrelevant, at best as secondary, at worst as anecdotal. On the other hand, Braunwald and Brislin’s (1979) guidelines on systematic gathering of data by means of diaries show the key role played by this collection method in studies on child language, and Dale et al . (1993) argue that parent reports are ideally suited for the purposes of gathering the large amounts of data required to make sense of individual variation in language development. The issue is not one of analytical method but, again, one of purposes. Instrumental analysis is sometimes said to provide ultimate sanction for speech data, through an assumed inference that equates technology with accuracy. This statement needs qualifying, at the risk of otherwise becoming a technology-age variant of the ‘Because-it’s-there’ effect of Himalayan fame. Instruments may guide a search for knowledge, along the lines devised by their human programmers with human-driven purposes to approach information, but the search for knowledge is not in their use. Beveridge’s (1950: viii) observation, at the very outset of his monograph on core requisites of scientific investigation, that ‘the most important instrument in research must always be the mind of man’, remains as cogent today as it was over half a century ago. In the case of speech, instruments help us hear, but they cannot help us understand what we hear. If they could, the meaning of, say, the gift of an engagement ring in several Western societies would be explained by the series of concatenated movements involved in offering and receiving it. Whilst the gestures are observable, their meaning is not, because it is the domain of interpretation. The nature of the present study, including its emphasis on phonetic features of the children’s speech, has little use for acoustic treatment of either noisy or noise-free data in it. The analysis uses human built-in technology, human ears, because natural speech is meant to be heard by human ears. In Oller’s (2000: 106) words, ‘[a]fter all it is real listeners who must be the ultimate determiners of what counts as speech and what does not.’ Put another way, ‘our linguistic sense interprets from the acoustic material only that which is significant’
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(Cruttenden, 1994: 24). An auditory analysis of data collected for treatment through electronic filters would be equally incongruous and unreliable. Any collection of data therefore constitutes one source of controversy, in any study on speech, child or adult. A recent survey of research issues involving linguistic fieldwork, from choice of informants to practical issues concerning data gathering, gives a welcomingly candid account of the pitfalls involved in various modes of data collection (Newman & Ratliff, 2001). In a detailed review of studies in bilingual acquisition, De Houwer (1990) reiterates the dependency of gathered data upon variables that range from the time of day when collection takes place to the recording setting itself. Data-based studies are, by their nature, approximations to the whole from where they are sampled, and any conclusions that attempt to make sense of the data in question may be legitimately generalised but are necessarily tentative. Being a sampling, data-based studies are therefore partial, in both senses of the word. They are a part of a much larger whole, of which, in turn, only a subpart ends up being used and accounted for through generalisations and conclusions. Some data are disregarded, some are downright discarded for several reasons, including absence of intrarater agreement in transcription, as mentioned below. Data-based studies are also one-sided in that collecting data is equivalent to sampling according to expectations, which are, by definition, biasing. Expectations decide what is observable in the data. In that observers are often specialists, biasing observation towards the area of specialisation and any preconceptions within it becomes a greater, not a lesser, risk. Accuracy is the one available to the researcher, and is not necessarily a constitutive feature of the data themselves. Analysing data is finding matches for these expectations, and deciding which of these matches strike the researcher as worth reporting. The same informants may produce different data with different collection methods at different times, as reported for example by Slobin and Welsh (1973), and different analyses, at times contradictory, may be proposed for similar datasets. This is the case for the antithetical claims that children’s bilingual mixes constitute evidence both of one single underlying linguistic system (Vihman, 1985) and of early linguistic differentiation (Lindholm & Padilla, 1978) or, strikingly, for Quay’s reanalysis of Vihman’s (1985) data, quoted in Deuchar and Quay (2000: 50), that concludes for around 50% of translation equivalents in a bilingual child, against Vihman’s proposed 10%. Partiality is also a necessary consequence of the fact that no data-based study of child speech can credibly claim to be exhaustive, regardless of type of data or claimed analytical accuracy. Even large amounts of informants, or of data, which may allow for comfortable generalisations are no antidote against this fact. Statistical analysis is usually invoked as
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the ultimate criterion of reliability but, as discussed in Woods et al . (1986), it can be applied to samples of different sizes with different results, and significance in turn depends on the type of test that is used to treat the data, because different tests use different kinds of information. On the other hand, data from single children are taken to provide grounds to found or to undermine theories, as in the studies by Halliday (1975) or Peters and Menn (1993). Assuming particular data and particular analyses as representative, and providing arguments for this assumption, cannot detract from the inherent variability among language uses and language users. In the words of Dale et al . (1993), ‘[a] comparison of two or three children acquiring one language, with two or three children acquiring a different language, has only limited interpretability in the absence of information about variability among children acquiring those languages.’ These are commonplace observations in the literature. They constitute both the limitations and the strengths of fieldwork-based research. Every child, like every language, has a story to tell. The point I wish to make is that the present study is to be taken exactly as what it purports to be: one attempt at making sense in a particular way of one particular set of data. This study attempts to provide qualitative insight into the strategies that guide multilingual children in their acquisition of language. The sampling of the children’s uses of Portuguese in a multilingual environment contemplates not so much a chronology in the acquisitional process, or an accumulation of acquired features, as a broader picture of language acquisition , i.e. of how the children make the language their own. The focus is on mastery of language in everyday settings, because these are the settings that prompt tapping of natural linguistic resources and strategies available to the children at each stage. Resorting to naturalistic data for this account is, however, a choice that is not necessarily self-evident. In more than one way, it is in fact an inevitable consequence of the mobility of the family, particularly around the times when the children were born and, for related practical reasons, of the inaccessibility to experimental facilities where controlled data might be elicited from these children. On the other hand, controlled experimentation usually has the purpose of checking particular findings or hypotheses that emerge from more or less casual observation in the natural environment of the informants. Given the novel nature of the scope of this study, opting for the breadth afforded by naturalistic data seemed a reasonable research option. Findings and claims are of course open to alternative interpretations of the data given here, and to (dis)confirmation afforded by other data from other multilingual children.
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Analytical Choices Audio and video tapes were reviewed no later than 24 hours after recording, and supplemented by diary notes that include details on date, location, interlocutor and situation. The data were transcribed auditorily as soon as possible after recording, and a second independent transcription was made within 2 /4 weeks later. Transcription progressed at an overall average rate of about 30 minutes for each minute of recorded speech. Both transcriptions are rechecked during coding into CHAT format for inclusion in the Childes database (MacWhinney, 2000b), which is ongoing. Given that other transcription-skilled users of the three languages in this study are not readily available, the multiple reviews to which the data are being subjected seemed to be the next best choice to attain some reliability in transcription. Inclusion of sound files in the Childes-coded data is also ongoing, and their availability will enable a more rigorous assessment of the proposed transcriptions. Where there was gross discrepancy between transcriptions, for example, one child word is ascribed to a different language in each transcription, the data were discarded in the analysis and coded as unintelligible speech in the transcription. Data transcribed with more minor discrepancies, for example, a palatal versus a postalveolar fricative, are kept, and the discrepancy noted in the discussion. Otherwise, the data are transcribed in full, including instances of blurred speech or nonspeech sounds, with notes giving additional information on e.g. time of day, mood of the child and interlocutor, and child actions or comments before and after the recording session. In this book, the data that were chosen to represent exemplary tokens of the children’s language use and strategies are presented in an edited form that enables as easy reading as possible whilst preserving accuracy. Sources Claims about the structure of each language are based on major reference works available for each of the languages, adapted where necessary to ensure analytical uniformity in this book. These references are Cunha and Cintra (1984) and Mateus et al . (1994) for Portuguese, Hedelin (1997) and Teleman et al . (1999) for Swedish, and Quirk et al . (1972) and Wells (2000) for English. Adult speech, and child speech that can safely be recognised as (renderings of a) target, are transcribed according to the conventions in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association for Portuguese and Swedish (Cruz-Ferreira, 1999a; Engstrand, 1999). Analyses of the intonation of these two languages follow Cruz-Ferreira (1998) and Ga˚rding (1998), and analyses of English intonation follow Hirst (1998).
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Intonational notation draws on the British nuclear analysis described in Crystal (1969) and Halliday (1967); see also O’Connor and Arnold (1973). Basic assumptions are that speech can be usefully divided into tone groups (also termed intonation groups, or breath groups), and that each tone group contains a major pitch obtrusion, the nucleus (also termed nuclear syllable , primary accent ), that contributes to the meaning carried by the tone group. Division of utterances into tone groups is addressed in Halliday (1967) as matters of tonality. Tone groups are principally demarcated by pause, as well as by other features that in some way disrupt utterance rhythmicality like, for example, very fast tempo. The differential placement of the nucleus within the tone group, Halliday’s tonicity, plays role in achieving differential meanings in some languages, like English and Swedish. Choices in tonicity are unavailable in Portuguese, where the nucleus occupies a fixed position at the end of the tone group. The type of pitch obtrusion occurring at the nucleus, Halliday’s tone , is taken as the decisive factor of intonational meaning, particularly where choices between rising versus falling tones are concerned (detail on these choices is given in the first section of Chapter 6). Prenuclear uses of pitch occurring in the head of each tone group contribute additional shades of meaning. Intonational heads are taken to begin on the first stressed syllable within the tone group. For discussion of this and other analytical approaches to intonation see Cruttenden (1997).
The choice of target forms As noted in Chapter 1, matters of analysis of child speech are not independent from major assumptions behind first, the models that are chosen to represent adult speech and second, taking child utterances as targeting the adult model. In other words, the child grammar, or mastery of the language, will change according to what is taken as adult target, because the rules linking child renditions to targets are different for dictionary-like and life-like targets. Depending on the models, the child will be said to have acquired, or not acquired, particular features of the language that is being modelled. The reference works quoted above are therefore to be taken quite literally as ‘references’, i.e. as sources of findings and associated terminology that describe the current data in usefully clear ways. It should be kept in mind that the children in this study are not alone in being exposed to different varieties of their three languages, and in having experimented with, for example, different accents of each at different times in their lives. I take for granted the usefulness of these references in describing general features of the languages in question, in the spirit of Bolinger’s (1998) similar claim
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about common features of intonation among American and British varieties of English. Another relevant issue concerning the modelling of child speech is that models are necessarily abstract, whereas everyday uses of language are concrete manifestations of it that may have no formal counterpart in accepted models. Language users do not necessarily speak, nor listen, nor acquire language by means of the abstract forms of language that are encapsulated in grammar books or pronunciation dictionaries published about the language, regardless of their usefulness for descriptive or applied purposes. Over two decades ago, Temperley (1983) made a similar observation in a study concerning second-language teaching of English, commenting that the transcriptions of actual homophones like tents /tense or acts /axe in most dictionaries disregard their actual pronunciations to follow the spelling-based habit of seeing the words in each pair as different words. In fact, actual language use seems at times to constitute an obstacle to a desired theoretical neatness that appears to be pursued for its own sake. For example, Lust et al . (1999: 443) commend analytical approaches that ‘bypass children’s performance’ in order to infer ‘grammatical competence’ and contend that ‘with all comprehension tasks, the researchers must extricate the pragmatic factors from syntactic factors as possible determinants of the child’s response’ (p. 446), although the converse extrication of syntactic factors from pragmatic ones does not seem to play role in their recommendations for assessing child comprehension. It is not necessarily the case either that a child’s ‘representation’ of an adult target is the same as a grammarian’s. As Clark (2003: 768) argues, ‘few linguists have spent much time looking at language acquisition itself, preferring to debate the logic of the enterprise within linguistic theory. They have tended to ignore findings from studies of acquisition that are inconsistent with their favourite theories. In short, they have not recognized that describing a language is not the same as describing the process by which people acquire it.’ Two recent publications, Bybee (1998) and Barlow and Kemmer (2000), among others, attempt to redress the imbalance provided by generalised attention to strictly formal modelling of language and language acquisition by focusing on usagebased models that may capture how speakers, young and old, actually speak and understand language. Real-life uses of language are the ones addressed in the present study too. The adult forms assumed to be targeted by the children are the colloquial ones used in everyday interaction, and child renditions are accounted for accordingly. One example may clarify these points. The children pronounce forms of the Portuguese verb estar /Star/ (which roughly corresponds to nonpermanent meanings of ‘to be’) with and without the initial fricative /S/. Both variants are found in the pronunciation of other speakers surrounding
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the children. Child forms that preserve the fricative cannot therefore be claimed to deviate from the underlying CV structure that has been postulated for Portuguese syllables, and that children detect from ‘the properties of the input’ according to Viga´rio et al . (2003: 818), because similar forms occur in the input itself (see also Freitas, 2000). Conversely, child forms that omit the fricative cannot be taken as truncations that are, say, claimed as avoidance of a word-initial consonant cluster because, here too, the children produce as they hear produced (see Cruz-Ferreira (1999a) for other colloquial pronunciation features of educated Portuguese). The point is that child forms cannot be evaluated by assuming a target from a ‘standard’, or other models, that are not available to the child. Throughout this book, uses of the term ‘target’ correspond to forms as spoken in the family, that may or may not correspond to standard analyses in the literature.
Conventions This section details conventions that are used in the presentation of examples, including printing conventions, and their rationale. Format of examples Examples of child data are numbered consecutively throughout the book, according to the chapter where they are included. Beside the example number, the initial identifying the child in question is given, K(arin), S(ofia), M(ikael), followed by the child’s age in the standard format ‘year;month’. One (hypothetical) example 6 in Chapter 4, concerning Mikael at age eight months, would be coded: (4.6) M 0;8 Being typically developing children, their language uses share many features. In a few cases, discussion involves productions that were common to all three, at roughly the same age. Examples of these are coded ‘KSM’, with the symbol ‘9/’ preceding the age code to indicate the approximate age of production of the forms in question where relevant. Studies about one or more languages written in another language raise practical problems for both writer and reader, particularly if the languages being studied are unknown to readers. I will assume that this is the case, and will therefore provide translation of the examples throughout, with additional comments where deemed necessary for the reader’s comfortable understanding of the point in question. This will in turn prove cumbersome for readers familiar with the language(s), and repetitive where similar words or expressions are translated in the same way. On the other hand, overall translation avoids readers’ back-andforth searching for the first translation of a word or expression along the
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book. In order to minimise tedious reading, the notation used in the Childes database for translation of examples appeared ideal. Translations are given in a dedicated separate line, that the reader may therefore skip at will. With few exceptions, examples are adapted, for the purposes of this book, from the Childes coding conventions (MacWhinney, 2000a), as follows. Speech lines are indicated by an asterisk, preceding a three-letter code that identifies each speaker. Standard notations are: *KAR: *SOF: *MIK: *MUM: *DAD: *GMP: *GMS: *GFS:
Karin Sofia Mikael mother father Portuguese grandmother Swedish grandmother Swedish grandfather
Nonspeech lines are preceded by the symbol %. In the order in which they appear in examples, they give: %sit: %gls: %eng: %pho: %int: %mod: %act: %com:
the situation where the exchange is taking place a gloss of nonstandard child forms an English translation of the examples a phonetic transcription of utterances an intonational transcription of utterances the target model of child forms activities or actions during the exchange various comments and explanations
Adult utterances, and child utterances recognised as (renderings of) target forms, are given in the standard orthography of each language. A form of ad hoc ‘baby orthography’ is also used for child connected speech that, although replicating target utterances, distorts segments and prosody beyond any readable use of coding conventions for truncated child utterances. In these cases, standard orthography is given in the %gls line. It is hoped that the use of ‘baby orthography’, indicated by double quotation marks, will be easily understandable by native readers of this book who may not be familiar with phonetic transcription. One example concerning Portuguese is: *SOF: mama˜, ‘‘klhi klhko´’’ ? %gls: mama˜, a Karin esta´ na escola? %eng: mummy, is Karin at school?
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Conventional labels follow the general use in available literature. In examples, the following additional conventions indicate, with xxx representing orthography and 333 representing phonetic script: Ptg
Portuguese text, given in italics
Sw
Swedish text, given underlined
Eng
English text, given in unformatted font
lit.
literal translation, in glosses
tg
tone group
fm.
feminine gender
mc.
masculine gender
sg.
singular form
pl.
plural form
yyy
a nonlexical utterance
0
silence
B/— /
unfilled pause
B/333 /
filled pause (with the appropriate phonetic symbol representing the sound that fills the pause)
x(x)x
in orthographic examples, optional form, e.g. (the) tree, for the forms ‘the tree’ or ‘tree’
3(3)3
in phonetic transcriptions, optional pronunciation, e.g. [fæk(t)s], for [fækts] and [fæks] for the word ‘facts’
x[x]x
in orthographic examples, truncated (child) form given where relevant, e.g. t[r]ee pronounced tee , as a (child) form of the word ‘tree’
[333]
phonetic transcription of child forms and other nonstandard forms
/333/
phonetic transcription of target forms
[. . .]
data omitted from the original Childes files
‘‘xxx’’
forms given in nonstandard or ‘baby orthography’
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‘xxx’
an English gloss, following each example in the text
*xxx*
blends, involving features of more than one language in one single linguistic item
x/x
in glosses, sequential ordering of morphemes
x/x
in intonation transcription, sequential tone of each syllable, or of each tone group
3#3
in transcribed examples, tone group boundary
g333
a following stressed syllable, including in Swedish words bearing accent 1
''333
Swedish accent 2/double tone
Phonetic transcription Several examples include phonetic and/or intonational transcription, wherever the sound component of the utterances is decisive for the points in question. Transcription also allows the reader to check the legitimacy of my interpretations of child productions, given that child forms, particularly early ones, can deviate greatly from targets. Transcription is also used for adult utterances with characteristic features of child-directed speech, or otherwise nonstandard. Phonetic transcriptions use the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), including where other languages besides the ones primarily addressed in this book are concerned (Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, 1999). The usefulness of transcribing child speech by means of the IPA, a script that was designed to represent adult speech, has been questioned by several researchers. This is particularly so in what concerns the speech of very young children. In some of the earliest child productions, it is not always clear, for example, whether a sound is a vowel or a consonant, a central distinction assumed in IPA analyses of speech. Halliday (1975: 13) argues that the earliest expressive system available to children is one of ‘vocal postures, including the two components of articulation and intonation’. IPA notation is therefore too specific, in that it gives ‘bundles of contrastive phonetic features which make up the elements of the adult sound system’ (p. 13) and fails to account for the postural nature of the general configurations taken up by infant articulatory organs. Oller (2000) notes that the (mis)use of phonetic transcription for early infant vocalisations presumes well-formedness where, he argues, none is to be
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found. Proof of IPA inadequacy in characterising infant sounds lies in what Oller (2000: 4) calls the ‘phonetician/reader test’, where phoneticians’ readings of transcriptions of infant sounds are found to resemble those sounds only indirectly. No matter how well founded, criticism of IPA adequacy does not obviously solve the matter of how to represent infant speech, which I deem crucial in an account of linguistic development. Bearing in mind its shortcomings, I nevertheless chose to provide IPA transcription of my data. First, because there are, to my knowledge, no alternatives to represent infant speech in a more satisfactory way. And second, because IPA script, like all matters of representation, gives an approximation to the facts. A phonetic symbol is no more vague than a label like ‘coo’, that I also use to describe some of the earliest vocalisations of the children in this study. Most of these vocalisations contain large amounts of uvularlike frication and very few of the velar plosives followed by rounded high back vowels suggested in the label ‘coo’. Equivalent onomatopoeic labels in other languages similarly represent the phonotactics of the adult language, not the nature of infant vocalisations. The French label ‘arrheu’ (Boysson-Bardies, 1999, passim ), for example, while containing a representation of a uvular-like fricative, in turn suggests a front rounded vowel quality following the consonant that is not necessarily present in these children’s earliest vocalisations. IPA transcription is here used with no assumption that the sounds so transcribed meet criteria for distinctiveness in early productions, and simply as a convenient approximation to an auditory impression. Discussion of problematic sounds occurring in examples is given where relevant. A narrow representation of actual speech events is attempted, including of babbled speech, while compromising with readability. In transcriptions of babble or otherwise unintelligible speech, the symbols used represent standard IPA values. For example, the IPA symbol [3] represents a vowel with a similar vowel quality to one mid-central vowel found in Portuguese and Swedish. In target-like child forms, this vowel is transcribed with [ ] in Portuguese and with [3] in Swedish; in babble, only the symbol [3] is used. In the text, child forms and adult nontarget forms are transcribed in between square brackets, and target forms in between slants. All target forms, in the text or in the %mod line of quoted examples, concern the everyday, colloquial forms that the children are exposed to, as discussed above, and are transcribed accordingly. Unless otherwise noted in the %mod line, child utterances show target-like phonetic and prosodic properties of the language in which they are uttered, including in instances of multilingual mixes. Specific issues of transcription concern: a
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Diphthongs. Vowel sequences are taken as diphthongs if both vowels accommodate one single pitch. The glide segment of the diphthong is transcribed with [j] or [w], which therefore represent vocoids. Hence, e.g. [aw] represents one syllable, [au] represents two. Obstruents. Voiced obstruent symbols that are marked devoiced, e.g. [d ], indicate voiceless lenis articulations. Syllables. For the purposes of stress assignment, intervocalic consonant sequences are syllabified as onsets, according to the phonotactics of the language involved in the case of adult and target-like child forms. This is one choice among many possible, and does not imply sanctioning one type of syllabification in child speech. Two adjacent identical vowel symbols indicate that the child pronounced the vowel as two syllables. Stress. Pitch obtrusion usually makes it clear which syllable is being stressed. Other cues to stress are duration and intensity at the syllabic peak. Lexical stress is marked with [g] before the affected syllable. Words. A space delimits what was interpreted as a word or a phrase within the same tone group, in child or child-directed speech, even when not corresponding to these constituents in target forms. Coarticulation. Superscript symbols indicate a resonance of the sound represented by the superscripted symbol, that often corresponds to a secondary articulation imposed on surrounding segments. For example, a transcription like [ggatuS] gatos ‘cats’, phonologically /ggatuS/, indicates that both [t, S] are labialised. The fronted and lowered high back unrounded vowel that has been discussed as the default vowel of Portuguese (Mateus & Andrade, 2000) is here transcribed /i¯/, the symbol that is most current for this vowel in the literature on Portuguese. The same vowel is transcribed /C/ in CruzFerreira (1999a). Default vowels of Portuguese are discussed in the second section of Chapter 6. Intonational transcription The %int lines transcribe uses of pitch, adapting the principles of nuclear notation discussed above and described in the Childes CHAT Manual (MacWhinney, 2000a). Transcription includes indication of voice quality (e.g. creak) and paralinguistic features (e.g. tempo) where relevant. Although the IPA provides symbols for the transcription of intonation, these are far from having acquired the standard status attributed to the IPA symbols for transcription of segmental units of speech (roughly,
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vowels and consonants). Those symbols also generally involve the addition of diacritics to basic segmental symbols. In the case of Portuguese, this would result in several diacritics added on to one same segment symbol (e.g. the diacritic [ˆ] for a falling tone added on to the diacritic [~] that indicates a nasalised vowel), which would unnecessarily burden the transcription and defeat its purpose. One additional problem is that children do with tones what they do with segments: they try them out by approximation ending up with utterances that remind of some recognisable adult tone. For the sake of readerfriendliness, I chose a working form of transcription that involves rather straightforward conventions. Where needed, detail is added in words to particular examples in the text. Falls, rises and levels are relevant for the transcription, as is the register from which they start and at which they end. Tones are identified by the initial letter in their label, as are registers, and transcribed by means of abbreviated paired symbols. In simple falling, rising or level tones, the first symbol denotes the high, mid or low register at which the tone starts, and the second symbol denotes the type of pitch movement, falling, rising or level. The one exception is the Portuguese extra-low fall, see below. High , mid and low are relative terms: a mid pitch level denotes the speaker’s average tone range, as it is impressionistically detected in regular contact with any speaker. Laver (1994: 457) accounts for the typical pitch range of particular speakers as their ‘linguistic range’, defined as ‘variation within phonologically relevant pitch in unmarked, neutral conversation’. High and low are accordingly defined in relation to mid for each speaker. The first section in Chapter 6 gives a brief description of the shape of each nuclear tone in Portuguese. The conventions are as follows:
Simple falls
Simple rises
LF
low-fall
MF
mid-fall
HF
high-fall
eLF
extra-low fall
LR
low-rise
MR
mid-rise
HR
high-rise
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Complex tone
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LL
low-level
ML
mid-level
HL
high-level
RF
rise-fall
Other conventions are: preH: prehead, unstressed syllables before the first stressed syllable in the tone group; H: head, which begins on the first stressed syllable in the tone group and stretches up to the nuclear syllable. These symbols always follow symbols indicating pitch start or type, so that confusion between the H denoting ‘high’ and the H denoting ‘head’ is avoided. Examples of their use are: LpreH: low prehead HpreH: high prehead LH: low head HH: high head FH: falling head Transcription of each tone group (tg) is given on successive lines of the %int tier. Prehead, head and tone are separated by / signs in the transcription. One example is (6.15). In babbled speech, no assumption is made concerning the existence of an intonational nucleus. Transcription of babble concerns pitch height and movement on each babbled syllable, according to similar conventions. The main difference is that the ‘/’ sign here indicates syllable boundary. One example is (6.8).
Chapter 5
Speaking Languages, and Talking about Them The picture that emerges from these children’s data is that becoming bilingual appears to entail the ability not only to express themselves in two languages, but also to express themselves about the languages around them. Each ability reveals a different way of making sense of language, and a different kind of insight into it, in that there is a difference between knowing how to use something, knowing what that thing is, and knowing about what makes that thing usable: knowing how to drive a car is different from knowing what a car is, or how it works. Whether taken individually or together, these abilities also show awareness of the two distinct languages that the children deal with. In this discussion, I take the word awareness in a pragmatic sense, referring to features of the children’s linguistic and overall behaviour that are compatible with their interpretation as indices of each of the children’s languages. I am neither assuming conscious or unconscious knowledge, on the part of the children, that would allow manifestation of this awareness, nor their will to manifest it as such. In other words, I cannot legitimately say that I know why the children behave in the ways they do, linguistically as otherwise; I can only offer one plausible interpretation for their behaviour. Insight into the plurifunctionality of language, of which metalinguistic ability is an exponent, is acquired after the ability to communicate through it. Halliday (1975: 42) sets it at the stage of acquisition of a lexicogrammatical system that allows the child ‘to mean two things at once’. Although Halliday’s proposal concerns monolingual acquisition, it can be usefully extended to include the ability to use one language to enquire about another, or about itself. Talking about language is not a straightforward matter, for children as well as adults, if the ‘language’ to do so is not there. Even where some kind of metalanguage is accessible, using language to talk about itself involves a degree of overall cognitive ability that very young children have yet to reach. Nevertheless, their nonlinguistic behaviour may provide clues to their linguistic awareness. Linguistic comprehension abilities, for example, need not be stated in any linguistically overt way to be acknowledged as such. The children in this study can be said to be passively bilingual from around 0;8, when they started imitating the sound of a clock or pointing at an object when asked to do so in both languages. Body language, gestures, expressions 60
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of anger and happiness form part of a child’s overall communicative kit, both as sender and receiver, and need therefore to be taken into account if overall insight into child communicative ability is to be gained. Bishop (1997) described how young children rely on nonverbal signs that are addressed to them, including facial expressions, to interpret communicative exchanges. Children will, naturally, make use of these for their own expression too. Abundant research by Acredolo and colleagues further shows that the development of symbolic gestures is a typical feature of early infancy (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988; Acredolo et al ., 1999; Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1998), besides focusing on the importance of actively encouraging infant nonverbal modes of communication that keep communicative exchanges going despite articulatory immaturity (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1996). Although these studies concern representational uses of language, there seem to be no reasonable grounds on which to think differently of children’s metalinguistic uses. Nonverbal behaviour is in fact an ancillary communicative tool at the disposal of anyone with limited verbal abilities, as any monolingual visitor to a foreign country, for example, is well aware of. This chapter deals with the ways that the children found to work their way up linguistic competence in two languages. Their uses of language give a number of clues as to how they may be signposting their way along each language, thereby showing awareness not only of two languages but also of which one is required in specific communicative situations. The following sections deal with uses of language attributable to one or the other of their languages, and with manifestations of the children’s metalinguistic ability, i.e. the ability to use language to talk about language. Strategies for signalling language or referring to it are discussed in separate sections for practical reasons only, and labelled according to what struck me as their central characteristics. The order in which they are presented does not necessarily reflect chronological order. There is of course interplay among these strategies at different stages, and for different purposes, along the children’s linguistic development.
Signalling Different Languages Very young infants have limited ways of expressing themselves, or so it is generally assumed. Interpretation of infant behaviour, including vocal behaviour, necessarily takes an adult’s perspective on what is being expressed. It therefore remains moot whether the limitation lies with infant expressive ability or with adult interpretive skills. What infants are trying to express may not be what we think they are expressing, nor what we are looking for, whether ‘we’ are parents, linguists, or both. As Halliday (1975: 61) put it, having ‘language’ is not synonymous with having ‘a linguistic system in the adult sense’. Conversely, infants’
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reactions that are deemed quirky or unaccountable, or that simply go unnoticed, may in fact have a clear reason behind them. The following subsections report on a number of strategies, linguistic or otherwise, that appear to signal early bilingual awareness. Refuse to accept one particular language One strategy concerns a ‘strange behaviour’ on the part of the children in this study, detected at age 0;4, whose reason I can only ascribe to a matter of language, and that I interpret as their earliest demonstration of bilingual awareness. As noted elsewhere, the mother was largely in constant contact with the infant children throughout the day, and there was, naturally, a lot of talking going on, involving the mother, to the child, or to and from siblings, all of it in Portuguese. One of the highlights of the children’s day was their father’s homecoming in the evening, which usually meant lengthy sessions of rough play and giggles. At age 0;4, the children started freezing in place, as it were, in the mother’s arms, instead of reaching out to their father as usual. They would turn to stare intently at the mother’s mouth as she used Swedish to address the father, frowning and firmly refusing to cuddle either parent until something else was made to catch their attention. For a few weeks, the children’s disquiet at the mother’s use of Swedish was clear. They seemed to be trying to make sense of the unusual speech coming from her, or reacting to the fact that the mother, at that particular time of day, started using two different ways of speaking. Support for this interpretation comes from research showing infant sensitivity to features of language, including in utero (Lecanuet, 1998), particularly early sensitivity to differential uses of prosody (Boysson-Bardies, 1999). Boysson-Bardies (1999: 55) further reports that ‘at four to five months [infants] connect sounds with movements of the mouth’, which explains the children’s staring reaction. In addition, DeCasper and Fifer (1980) showed that infants recognise their mother’s voice, whereas Moon et al . (1993) found that very young infants are well aware of their mother’s language, even if spoken by other female speakers. Because human voices speak in particular languages, the mismatch between the familiar mother’s voice and the unexpected features of another language is then a likely cause of the children’s upset. Violated expectancies have been shown to cause similarly strong reactions in infants as young as 0;2 (Tronick et al ., 1978), including frowning and gaze aversion. Karin and Mikael who, at this age, lived in non-Portuguese speaking countries, had similar reactions while in outings with their mother, whenever she used the local language. Much later, the children manifested their unease in similar behavioural ways upon hearing a ‘wrong’ language from someone, as will be discussed below.
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Use carriers of language-specific prosody During the pre-word stage, and at the outset of the one-word stage, the children systematically explored the signalling of the language of the exchange by means of prosody. This is not surprising, given evidence that adequate prosodic features are in place in children’s production well before the first words appear (Crystal, 1979; Kaplan, 1970; Li & Thompson, 1978), which of course is true of bilingual production too, though the investigation of early uses of prosody has so far lagged behind for bilingual infants. The findings from one recent study, Snow and Balog (2002), appear to contradict the claim that uses of prosody precede those of other linguistic features. Drawing on monolingual infants’ data, the study sets out to (dis)prove claims, from developmental theories of intonation, that linguistic pitch patterns reflect biological or emotional ‘natural tendencies’. Children’s data were compared to adult models, and no significant matches were found on the basis of, among others, the tonal meanings ascribed to particular patterns in adult speech. The present study is not concerned with investigating child /adult matches, because issues of pitch use in young bilinguals are not necessarily developmental. The prosodic features of early bilingual speech may instead provide clues to differential treatment of each of the languages. This is particularly so where the prosody of the languages in question is quite different, as is the case for Portuguese and Swedish. That is, the point is not whether these children’s productions match an adult Portuguese or Swedish model, the point is that the children have different productions for each language. All three children developed what I would call language-specific connected-speech routines, a set of strings used in speaker-directed babbled dialogue, of which the following examples are representative: (5.1) S 1;1 Ptg Sw
[k·k·gk·k·] [hitihiti''hiti]
(5.2) M 0;9 Ptg Sw
[db·gdb·db·] [mpampa''mpa] j
j
j
Each string replicates phonetic, rhythmical and intonational patterns typical of the children’s two languages. Sofia, the latest speaker among the children, made consistent use of this strategy for several years, even after acquiring command of vocabulary and grammar that would apparently inhibit the need to use it (see the section on ‘Use any language-specific device’ in this chapter for examples). The Portuguese
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reduplications in (5.1) and (5.2) contain no vowels, replicating the typical patterns of vowel reduction and/or omission in the language, discussed in the second section of Chapter 6. They feature the penultimate stress typical of the language, as well as the palatal lateral that is phonemic in Portuguese and nonexistent in Swedish. The Swedish utterances feature distinctly articulated vowels and a token of accent 2 on the last reduplication, as well as, in (5.1), the Swedish glottal fricative nonexistent in Portuguese. Mikael’s Swedish utterance in (5.2) is in all likelihood an overextension to dialogue fashioned from one of his favourite words in this language, lampa /''lampa/ ‘(electrical) light’. The data show that the children favour one or the other of the types of utterance illustrated in (5.1) and (5.2) in their interaction with speakers of either Portuguese or Swedish, respectively. At this stage, these utterances are used to solicit response from caregivers, or as a way of initiating or sustaining dialogue. They were soon found to be an extremely effective means of achieving these purposes, because adult listeners reacted with full attention to what sounded like fluent use of language. Such utterances were also directed at objects that the children associate with each of the languages. In lone play, for example, the children addressed in Swedish a toy that was given to them by a Swedish speaker. Make each language maximally different Differential use of prosody coupled with phonetic strategies affecting single segments is apparent in these children’s renderings of nearhomophones in the two languages. Articulatory ease has led some authors to claim that pairs of near-homophones constitute the most difficult words to learn correctly by a bilingual, giving rise to the easy way out of using one of them in both languages (Grosjean, 1982; Lindholm & Padilla, 1978; Quay, 1995). Observations such as these also fuel the controversy about a bilingual child’s underlying one versus two linguistic systems, discussed in the first section of Chapter 2, particularly in that the claim is made about words that also have equivalent referents in both languages. The children in this study appear to follow the exact opposite strategy. Compare: (5.3)
K 1;8 Ptg Sw
[gnn] [nagnu]
banana banan
/bgnn/ /bagn"fn/
‘banana’
The Portuguese word features omission of the first (unstressed) syllable, preserving the vowel qualities of the resulting disyllable. The Swedish word preserves the number of syllables of the target, and substitutes [u] for /"f/. Both truncations are disyllabic, and their
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differentiated stress patterns preserve the targets’ lexical stress pattern. Besides the differential use of stress according to language apparent in (5.3), the child appears to be trying to achieve maximal articulatory differentiation between the words as well. At age 1;8, Karin had already acquired the Swedish rounded back vowel /"f/ in words like mat /m":t/ ‘food’. Its replacement by the back vowel [u] in (5.3) cannot therefore be accounted for in terms of difficulty of articulation, and appears instead to serve two purposes: one, to suggest the back quality of /":/, and the other, to achieve contrastive purposes between otherwise too-similar targets in each language. A similar strategy of maximal differentiation is used by Karin and Mikael in the words for ‘hotel’, which have the same stress pattern in both Portuguese and Swedish. The target Portuguese word is pronounced with a dark /l/, included in the transcription below, whereas the Swedish one has a long clear /l/. The children attempted a replication of the distinct lateral resonance in each language in: (5.4) K & M9/1;6 Ptg [tow] hotel />o/ ‘hotel’ Sw [toj] hotel /h>olf/ Differentiation of similar-sounding targets in the two languages is consequent in the children’s data at later ages too. A few examples from Sofia’s repertoire are, including renditions of her own name: (5.5) S 2;8 Ptg [kugdilu] crocodilo /krukugdilu/ Sw [k3gdil3n] krokodilen /kr&k&difl3n/
‘crocodile’
Ptg Sw
[gnn] [agn"fjn]
banana banan
/bgnn/ /bagn"fn/
‘banana’
Ptg Sw
[gm] [ag":mi]
salame salami
/sglm/ /sagl":mı/
‘salami’
Ptg Sw
[gi] [''ia]
Sofia Sofia
/sugfi/ /s&''fi:a/
‘Sofia’
The children’s attempts at clearly separating their languages in production, according to interlocutor, can sometimes take unexpected turns that share similarities with instances of hypercorrection. In the following episode, Karin has asked for the name of a Mickey Mouse soft toy:
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(5.6) K 1;11 *MUM: %eng: *KAR: %pho: %mod: %com:
*KAR: %eng: %pho: %mod: %com:
*MUM: %eng: *KAR: %com: *KAR: %eng: %com:
e´ o Rato Mickey. diz la´, Rato Mickey. it’s Mickey Mouse. say Mickey Mouse. ‘‘Ta´to’’ Mickey! gtatugmike ‰atugmikj Karin repeats her form several times, and suddenly falls silent. Her next utterance is a rendition of a Sw expression well known to her. tack sa˚ mycket! many thanks! tatu''mYke gtak: gso:''mYk:3 Karin utters the Swedish line once, under her breath. There was no more talk of Mickey Mouse until a few days later, when the toy was being used again. Mother asks Karin its name. e quem e´ este? and who is this? ‘‘Ta´t’’ B/— / Karin attempts the first syllable of her earlier rendition of the toy’s name. ‘‘bida´da!’’ thank you! Ptg ‘‘bida´da’’ [bigdad] is Karin’s current rendition of obrigada /&bRiggad/.
In this example, the familiar Swedish expression for ‘thanks’ appears to have been assumed as the toy’s (Portuguese) name, which was new to the child, because of phonetic similarity, and probably stored as such by the child. Because other toys are named by translation equivalents in each language, e.g. Ptg ca˜ozinho and Sw vovve for ‘doggy’, and Karin had no way of knowing that Rato Mickey is a proper name, she accordingly produced a plausible Portuguese equivalent of the assumed Swedish name when asked to refer to the toy. That is, the toy was renamed because of avoidance of a Swedish expression in the child’s Portuguese. Use any language-specific device During the transition to the one-word stage, and at the outset of this stage, the children’s solution to problems of lacking vocabulary further argues for their early awareness of the two systems. When engaged in dialogue in a language in which some word failed them, the children
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resorted to two main types of strategy. One, a prosodic strategy exemplified in (5.7), appears to be extended from their earlier strategies, in (5.1) and (5.2), in that they also involve the use of a carrier of languagespecific prosody. (5.7) M 1;2 %sit: %act: *DAD: %eng: *MIK: %pho: %act:
Father is reading a picture book with Mikael. Father points at a fish. vad heter det? what’s that? yyy. ''3f3f Mikael points at the fish too, and bounces in synchrony with the two syllables of his utterance.
At the time this dialogue was recorded, Mikael already knew the Portuguese word peixinho /pjgSiłu/ for ‘fish’, which he pronounced [pigin|]. The Swedish word is fisk /fIsk/. In equivalent situations in g dialogues with their mother, one example of a carrier is the vowel [~], which is a vowel of Portuguese. In both cases, the children resort to a nonsense carrier that enables the humming of a tone or intonation pattern that is typical of the language in question. A different kind of strategy, a lexical strategy, is exemplified in: (5.8) K 1;7 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %act: *MUM: %eng: %act:
*KAR: %eng: %pho: *MUM: %eng:
in the kitchen, at snack time. [ma]ma˜, pa˜ozinho. mummy, bread. m~ # p~gðı˜f Karin whines and slaps the bread cupboard with both hands. quer pa˜ozinho? mama˜ da´. you want some bread? mummy gives. Mother takes a slice of white bread from the cupboard and gives it to Karin. Karin puts both hands behind her back. na˜o! no! gn~ffu na˜o quer pa˜ozinho? you don’t want bread?
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%act:
Karin points at the bag containing skorpa, Swedish wheat-based hard bun halves. *KAR: este! este! %eng: this one! this one! %pho: /ift | # /ift |
Karin pronounced Ptg este with a high-falling tone, in both instances. The kind of bread that the child wanted is a favourite treat, and the Swedish word skorpa /''sk&rpa/ is therefore well known to her. In equivalent situations in dialogues with their father, one example of a carrier is Sw den /don/ ‘this one’, as in the following example: (5.9) K 1;9 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %act: %com: *MUM: %eng: *DAD: %eng: %act:
*KAR: %eng: %pho: %com: *DAD: %eng: *KAR: *DAD: *KAR: %pho: %com: [. . .]
at dinner. da´, a´gua, mama˜. give (me), water, mummy. da # gag˜w # mgm~ Karin raises her empty glass towards Mother, with both hands. Mother is heavily pregnant and does not feel like stretching across the table to reach the jug. pede ao papa´, o papa´ da´. ask daddy, daddy gives. vad a¨r det du vill, gumman? what is it you want, darling? Karin turns the glass towards Father and opens her mouth briefly to form an [a] sound. She then hesitates and lowers her face, looking embarrassed, as she stretches the glass further towards Father. den. this. don Karin’s word is hardly audible. vatten. water. 0. vatten. vatte[n]. gvat3 Karin’s word is hardly audible.
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%com: Karin looks embarrassed throughout the whole exchange with Father. *DAD: ja, vatten! %eng: yes, water! %act: Father pours water into Karin’s glass. *KAR: vatte[n]! %pho: gvat3 %com: Karin says the word loud and clear. Both Ptg este and Sw den have similar, indefinite, referents. In examples like these, the children use language-specific generic words as substitutes for vocabulary that for some reason fails them. This strategy is in fact well documented for fully competent adult speakers too, monolingual or otherwise, as shown in the predominance in everyday discourse of carriers like Eng ‘thingummy, you-know-what’, Ptg coiso/coisa ‘thing’, or Sw grejen, mojan ‘thing’. For a recent discussion of the cross-linguistic use of these carriers, see Linguist List (2003a). Given that the mother is the primary caregiver, the children knew more words, and more household-related words, in Portuguese than in Swedish. This is the reason for another of their strategies, which seems to play an ancillary role particularly in dialogues with their father. When unsure about a Swedish word, or about the proper response to their father’s queries, they resorted to answering in Portuguese, but turning to stare at their mother, the ‘proper’ recipient of this language. This turn-tostare strategy was used from around 1;6 also to enquire about uses of language, or to confirm these, and very often at the dinner table, the commonest situation where the children had simultaneous access to both parents for an extended period of time. The children would point at objects on the table, or simply utter words of each language, while turning to face the speaker of each of the languages. The strategy of replacing an unknown or forgotten word in a language by language-specific carriers is used for quite a long time. Examples (5.10) to (5.13) concern lexical substitutes from the same language, which are deemed equivalent in meaning. In the data, most of these examples involve Swedish, the language that was less accessible to discuss daily happenings: (5.10) K 2;8 %sit:
reading a book about ocean life with Father, who points at a turtle. *DAD: vad a¨r det? %eng: what’s this? %act: Karin is silent for a while.
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*KAR: Fifi kissar da¨r. %eng: Sofia pees there. %com: Karin has apparently forgotten the Sw word for ‘turtle’, sko¨ldpadda, but remembered that Sofia has a turtle-shaped potty. She uses this shared knowledge with her father to answer him, besides using the father’s usual form of address to Sofia, Fifi. (5.11) S 2;10 %sit: Sofia is going through a stage of fearing going to the toilet alone, and she repeatedly explains her reasons to Mother. *SOF: esta´ la´ um monstro. %eng: there’s a monster in there. [. . .] %sit: Sofia seeks Father’s help to use the toilet. *SOF: kom da˚, pappa, ‘‘fanten’’! %eng: come on, daddy, elephant! %com: the features of an elephant, Sw elefanten, are comparable to those of a monster, whose Sw word is monster. (5.12) S 4;4 %sit:
the children are having biscuits with Zodiac signs on them for snack. Sofia chooses one with her own Zodiac, Cancer, and Father asks her what her sign is. *SOF: det a¨r B/— / Sebastian. %eng: it’s B/— / Sebastian. %com: Sebastian is the name of the crab character in the Swedish version of The Little Mermaid cartoon video.
(5.13) M 3;3 %sit: at home, with the children’s Portuguese grandmother and her sister visiting. The family are chatting together. *DAD: och vad gjorde du i skolan idag? %eng: and what did you do in school today? *MIK: jag ritade mamma, pappa, mormor och B/— / den da¨r. %eng: I drew mummy, daddy, granny and B/— / that one.
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%act: Mikael points at his great-aunt. %com: the children’s word to address and refer to their great-aunt is Ptg titi , a word well known to Mikael. They have had very few occasions of discussing their aunt in Swedish. Missing words can also be replaced by a word from the other language, that for some reason is more readily accessible during the ongoing exchange, or whose equivalent is unknown in the language of the exchange. In these cases, the children adapt the word’s original pronunciation to fit an accent that is deemed suitable in the language of the exchange. Examples are: (5.14) K 3;3 %sit:
*KAR: %eng: *GPS: %eng: %com: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %com: *GPS: %eng: %act: *KAR: %eng: %pho: (5.15) S 2;8 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %pho: %com:
Christmas time, at the children’s Swedish grandparents’. Karin is intrigued by a soft drink that she has not tasted before, but that looks like cola. farfar, a¨r det cola? grandpa, is it cola? det a¨r julmust, Kajsa. it’s julmust, Kajsa. the grandfather regularly addresses Karin by the nickname Kajsa. julmust?! vad a¨r det? julmust?! what’s that? for julmust, [''jflmPst] Sw julmust translates literally as ‘Christmas juice’. barndricka till jul. children’s Christmas drink. Karin turns to Mother. mama˜, e´ *julmust*! e´ para meninos! mummy, it’s *julmust*! it’s for children! for *julmust*, [gjumust]
showing Father her drawings. titta, pappa, *peixe*. look, daddy, fish. for *peixe*, [''pjS‹]. the Ptg and Sw words for ‘fish’ are peixe /gpjS(‹)/ and fisk /fIsk/, respectively.
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(5.16) M 3;1 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %com:
reading a book about ocean life, with Father. [. . .] och da¨r kommer *tubaronen*. [. . .] and there comes the shark. for *tubaronen*, [tuba''ron3n] the Ptg and Sw words for ‘shark’ are tubara˜o /tubgR~w ˜ / and haj /hajf/, respectively.
In her blend in (5.14), Karin used a single accent, [u] vowels, and the characteristic velarised [] that occurs in Portuguese codas. Sofia and Mikael used a double tone in their words in (5.15) and (5.16). Sofia pronounced her word with two clear syllables, in order to accommodate the Sw tone, whereas she regularly pronounced it with one syllable in Portuguese. Mikael’s word has the Portuguese nasalised diphthong of the stressed syllable converted to a Swedish-like vowel, and added Swedish morphology in the suffixed definite article -(e)n. In all cases, the blend sounds like a word of the language in which the children are communicating at the moment. The reasoning seems to be that so long as the accent of an utterance matches a language, then the utterance is in that language: accent preserves language intactness, despite the mix. It is precisely the same strategy that accounts for borrowings as well-formed, legitimate words of the recipient language, as noted in Chapter 2. The strategies in (5.10) to (5.13) show a similar purpose, with what could be termed intralanguage mixes: in both cases the appropriate word is missing from the children’s utterances, in both cases they seek ways to remedy the glitch by means of language-specific devices (for further discussion of this strategy, concerning the children’s monolingual uses of Portuguese, see Chapter 8). Sofia, in particular, made liberal use of language-specific strategies. What is idiosyncratic in her data is that she simultaneously preserved her earliest prosodic strategies in full working condition until quite late. At the transition from the one-word stage, she would talk non-stop, like her siblings, only with profuse use of ‘words’ like [gbøli], [''t"fha], or [dk] and [g·] alternating with different vowels, reduplicated or otherwise. These sequences, spoken on her skilled uses of intonation, gave a perfect impression of fluent Swedish or Portuguese connected speech. Later, at one same developmental stage, her data show a puzzling mixture of fully lexical sentences and of sentences with filled-in sentential slots. In the following examples, speech marked ‘yyy’ corresponds to single or reduplicated instances of [k·] and [''hiti] in Portuguese and Swedish utterances, respectively:
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(5.17) S 2;8 %sit: tucking a teddy-bear in bed. *SOF: [o] ursinho [es]ta´ [a dor]mir. %eng: teddy-bear is asleep. %sit: *SOF: %eng: %com:
seeing Mikael asleep in the living-room. [Migue]la˜o yyy [dor]mir? is Mikael asleep? Sofia uses the form Miguela˜o ‘big Mikael’, that Mother uses for Mikael’s Portuguese name, Miguel .
(5.18) S 3;0 %sit: warning Karin, who is misbehaving. *SOF: [a] mama˜ fica [zan]gada [con]tigo. %eng: mummy will be angry with you. %sit:
helping Mother prepare raclettes for dinner, which involve melting cheese, describing how the dish is made. *SOF: yyy queijo, yyy quente. %eng: yyy cheese, yyy hot. (5.19) S 3;0 %sit:
Father and Karin are engaged in some rough play. Father suddenly bursts out laughing. %act: Sofia rushes in to them. *SOF: [vad] gjorde Karin? killa[de] pappa? %eng: what did Karin do? tickled daddy? %sit:
*DAD: %eng: %act: *SOF: %eng:
Father, Karin and Sofia are playing on the floor. Father starts crawling towards both girls, threatening to tickle them. nu kommer jag och killar dig! I’m coming to tickle you! Father looks at each girl in turn, and at the last minute chooses Karin as his ‘victim’. pappa yyy Karin! daddy yyy Karin!
Sofia’s data show that these uses are not language-bound, but rather a generalised feature of her use of language, that could be speculatively related to her personality, her partial deafness at this age, or both (see
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Chapter 3). Chapter 6 gives a more detailed account of all three children’s use of fillers. Mikael’s data show one other use of a lexical strategy, during the period when the children were living in Portugal with their mother and the father was based in the USA. The father came home for short 2-day visits roughly every month, and these visits became the only regular source of Mikael’s Swedish between the ages of 1;9 and 2;7. His ability in this language quickly fossilised, lexically and grammatically. When faced with the need to use Swedish, for example when picking up his sisters at Swedish School or when meeting a Swede while out shopping, Mikael’s strategy consisted in actively repeating what he could remember of the language. He would himself take the initiative to face his first chosen interlocutor, discharge his repertoire of the moment as fast as he could, and immediately turn to the next interlocutor to repeat the whole procedure, whether that person was in the same group as the first and had therefore heard it already or not. One typical example is (5.20). While the fully baffling effect of his behaviour on his interlocutors can only be ascertained by imagining the interplay of Mikael’s nimble body language and delivery, each utterance is given in a separate line as usual, for clarity. (5.20) M 2;6 MIK: %eng: %act: *MIK: %eng: %act: *MIK: %eng: %act: *MIK: %eng: %com: *MIK: %eng: *MIK: %eng:
hej! hi! Mikael stretches two fingers to indicate his age. Micke sa˚! Mikael like this! Mikael points at his shoes. skorna! the shoes! Mikael looks up and points at the sky. da¨r ‘‘plinnplan’’! there aeroplane! the Sw target for ‘aeroplane’ is flygplan. sa˚ da¨r, va? so, right? hejda˚! bye!
Mikael used this same strategy on the phone with Swedish relatives, including his father, which must have been extra bewildering because of the absence of visual clues. He did this cleverly too, in quick succession to retain attention and without giving his interlocutors time for a
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response, which he probably guessed would force him to engage in a ‘real-life’ use of the language that he knew he would not likely be up to. What is interesting in these data is that Mikael did not choose silence, or Portuguese, over whose vocabulary and grammar he had gained perfect command with the stay in the country, although he knew that a few of his interlocutors could speak Portuguese too. I cannot tell whether he was aware of any risk of language loss during this period, and chose to activate the language whenever he had a chance in order to retain some grip on it; or whether he realised that he was not making much sense, which was often patent from the facial expression of his interlocutors. Mikael’s purpose appears to have been to show that he knew that the situation demanded Swedish, that he knew which language that was and, not least, that he was a sociable individual. The examples in this section show that mixing does not seem to be a prime choice for these children at these stages. Their strategies were in all likelihood supported by the parents’ consistent practice of person / language separation (see Chapter 10). Taken together, prosodic and lexical strategies make it clear to the listener which language the children are attempting to communicate in, at any time, including from a very early age. The strategies allow the children to keep to one language with the means at their disposal, thereby keeping features of each language intact. It is interesting to note that none of the children’s choice of carriers in examples such as (5.8) or (5.13) could be counted as translation equivalents of the lacking words. The clear language-specificity of these carriers would therefore be lost in analyses that take lexical doublets as prime markers of bilingual awareness. These strategies besides show the children’s awareness that in order to learn how to talk, you need to talk, and to keep talking, which is what children do anywhere, in any language, whether tackling one or more of them.
Referring to Language(s) The children were also able to talk about their languages, and in fact keen on doing so in several different ways, providing a different kind of evidence for their realisation of different surrounding languages. The use of language to refer to language involves quite a sophisticated cognitive ability, that can nevertheless be manifested where lexical, or even articulatory ability is lacking. In other words, there is no need for an agreed-upon metalanguage, in order to be able to talk about language: any use of language will do. The children found their own metalinguistic devices to ask questions about their languages, or to comment on them. With different means at their disposal at different developmental stages, they accordingly resorted to different kinds of strategy.
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Use the language to refer to it Like the one discussed in the previous section, this strategy also makes use of language-specific devices, in that a particular language is used to identify that language. The difference lies in its purpose: whereas use of the language signals the language of the exchange for the benefit of the interlocutor in examples like (5.9) or (5.15), it refers to a language in the examples below, often making up for the missing name of the language itself. That is, not knowing, or not being bothered to say, the name of the language, the children make their awareness of it known by speaking that language. This strategy thus involves the use of devices that are characteristic of a language to refer to that language. Examples are: (5.21) M 1;10 %sit: two months after the move from Austria to Portugal, the children settle in front of the TV, to watch a video. For the first time since the move, Karin and Sofia choose the version of the Swedish story ‘Nils Holgersson’ that they used to watch in Austria, and which is dubbed in German. Mikael stares and listens motionless for a few minutes, and then reacts, addressing Mother. %act: Mikael points at the TV. *MIK: e´ yyy? %eng: is it yyy? %pho: ot3gjak&p %int: HH/LR ending in high. *MUM: o que e´ [t3gjak&p]!? %eng: what’s [t3gjak&p]!? %com: Mother is very puzzled, and repeats what she thought she heard. *MIK: yyy. %pho: d &fx %int: HH. %com: Mikael sings the last note of ‘Bruder Jakob, schla¨fst du noch?’, the German version of the traditional French nursery song ‘Fre`re Jacques’, that he knew well from his stay in Austria. He sings it in the same way that he used to do it while in that country. The video that the children were watching does not include this song, nor any mention to it. Mikael resorted to it to confirm whether the language in the film, that he had not heard since the move to Portugal,
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was the same as in the nursery song that he was familiar with. His way of doing this consisted in using his renditions of the phrase ‘Bruder Jakob’ as [t3gjak&p] in a query, and of another salient word of the song, ‘noch’ /n&x/, in singing. That is, he used what he knew was German, and could remember as such, to refer to the language itself. Other examples of a similar strategy follow. (5.22) K 2;6 %sit:
Mother and Karin are in the same room, at home. The radio starts playing one of Charles Aznavour’s songs. Mother calls out to her own mother, who is in another room, and who is a fan of this French singer. *MUM: ma˜e! e´ o Aznavour! %eng: mum! it’s Aznavour! *KAR: yyy. %pho: s"˜ gty‰gto˜ gto˜
In Portugal, as in Sweden, the media transmit songs, films and sometimes other programmes in several different languages. Television programmes are not generally dubbed in either country, including child programmes. Karin regularly watched on TV the French-language cartoon series The Adventures of Tintin , which was meant for older children and broadcast in French with Portuguese subtitles. Included in the opening theme of each episode was the phrase ‘Les Aventures de Tintin’ /lezavA~gty‰ d3gto˜ gto˜ /. Upon hearing French on the radio and her mother’s French word, Karin chose to reproduce this phrase from the same language, with the exact intonation pattern used by the French announcer. (5.23)
K 2;6 DAD: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *KAR:
har vi na˚[go]n film till ikva¨ll? have we got any film for tonight? vill du se A Fish Called Wanda? do you want to watch A Fish Called Wanda? hello! yes!
At this age, Karin consistently used the utterance ‘Hello! Yes!’, which she pronounced in English, to refer to this language. She responded in the same way also when she heard English-accented Portuguese, whether on TV or otherwise.
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(5.24) M 3;1 %sit:
in the car with Mother, on their way to the first scheduled practice of a Christmas show organised by the Swedish School, and led by a Swedish lady called Gunilla. *MIK: a Gunilla fala como? %eng: how does Gunilla speak? *MUM: a Gunilla fala como o papa´. %eng: Gunilla speaks like daddy. *MIK: ela fala jaha? %eng: does she speak jaha? %pho: gol gfal j"fgh"f
The Sw word jaha is a very common phatic device in dialogues, and therefore quite salient for listeners. Mikael used it in his utterance as a way of naming the language he was interested in. Technically, examples such as (5.21) or (5.24) count as mixes. The children switch language in mid-utterance. However, the way in which the ‘intruding’ words were used points instead to a strategy to find out or confirm information, not to a bilingually confused mind. The children are quite clear about which language is which, and about how to use each one in pragmatically effective ways. One language must be used according to the interlocutor of the moment, another can be used to inquire about itself. Use speakers of each language as symbols for each language A few months into their second year, all three children started making extensive use of questions like Ptg Papa´ diz? or Sw Sa¨ger mamma? ‘(How) does daddy/mummy say?’ to elicit equivalents in the other language from each parent. These questions were either preceded or followed by a word, or words, that they already knew in the language of the exchange, or by pointing at a relevant object while asking the question. From the grammatical and intonational make-up of these questions, it is unclear whether the children are using them as yes/no or wh-questions, an ambiguity contemplated in the given English gloss. The mother generally interpreted these as information-seeking questions, in all likelihood assuming that the children knew that daddy would use a different word. An answer like ‘Daddy says */’ has an equally inconclusive status as a yes/no or a wh-answer. These questions show that the children are clearly aware that both parents speak both languages, but that they nevertheless insist on finding out about how to use words and expressions of each language.
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Their quest in fact began before they could ask questions like these. The children resorted to body language and/or intonation to signal the purpose of their utterances. A sample of examples follows. (5.25) M 1;5 %sit:
Mikael is having his nappy changed, Mother and Father are with him. %act: Mikael pulls off one of his socks and looks at Mother, waving the sock. *MIK: ‘‘peia! peia! peia!’’ %eng: sock! sock! sock! *MUM: meia! e´ a meia do Miguel! %eng: sock! it’s Mikael’s sock! %com: ‘‘peia ’’ is Mikael’s rendition of Ptg meia . He singsongs the word for a while, playing with the sock. %act: Mikael looks at Father and shows him the sock. *MIK: ‘‘peia’’? *DAD: strumpa. pappa sa¨ger strumpa. %eng: sock. daddy says strumpa. *MIK: ‘‘bumpa! bumpa! bumpa!’’ %act: Mikael singsongs his rendition of Sw strumpa as before, playing with the sock.
(5.26) M 1;10 %sit: at home, with Mother and Father. Mikael is examining a candle in his hand. %act: Mikael shows the candle to Father. *MIK: [v]ad a¨r det? %eng: what’s this? *DAD: ett ljus. %eng: a candle. *MIK: ett ljus? %eng: a candle? *DAD: ja, ett ljus. %eng: yes, a candle. *MIK: jaha. %eng: [phatic expression, roughly equivalent to ‘I see’.] %act: without pausing, Mikael shows the candle to Mother. *MIK: o que e´ i[s]to? %eng: what’s this?
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*MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng:
uma vela. a candle. [u]ma vela? a candle? e´, e´ uma vela. that’s right, that’s a candle. ah. [phatic expression, roughly equivalent to ‘I see’.]
The words for ‘candle’ were both new to Mikael, and the mother decided to check how things were going, a while later into Mikael’s same questioning session: (5.27) M 1;10 *MUM: como e´ que o papa´ diz vela? %eng: how does daddy say vela ? *MIK: ett ljus! The equivalents of ‘mum/dad says. . .’ can be said to function as labels for the languages themselves. The children’s later use of these expressions seems to have the purpose of allowing them to mix languages intentionally, in a way that they deem legitimate. In the following example, Karin makes it clear that she does not know a word in one language, by announcing it explicitly: (5.28) K 3;7 %sit: Karin is brushing her teeth and explains to Father that toothpaste is good for your teeth. Father asks why. *KAR: mamma sa¨ger flu´or. %eng: mummy says fluoride. By naming the language user, and ascribing responsibility for the use to her mother, Karin’s own use of that language when addressing her father is sanctioned. In parallel with the emergence of querying strategies like ‘mummy/ daddy says. . .’ that identify each parent with one language, the children’s second year also marks a stage where they made clear their need to categorise people in general according to language, and where they started doing so overtly. Particularly where new acquaintances were concerned, they demanded this kind of information as a prerequisite for engaging in verbal communication with them. Mikael’s request in (5.24) shows the endurance of this strategy over time. Armed with this knowledge, the children then actively used either Swedish or Portuguese
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without hesitation. The children had plenty of evidence, not least from their parents, that the same person can use, and does use, several languages. Their requests for words in the other language from each parent clearly show this awareness. However, they appeared to require and expect consistency from outsiders to the close family circle, particularly when they addressed the children themselves. One example of a thwarted expectation was given by Karin, aged 2;8, when a few of the Swedes living in Portugal, having greeted her parents in Swedish and being therefore labelled as such, proceeded to greet her in Portuguese. Karin’s reaction was first one of bewilderment, and then bashfulness. She hid behind her mother, holding on to her with her face covered, and refused to answer until repeatedly addressed in Swedish by the same people. Her show of discomfort bears many similarities to the one described in the first section of this chapter for all three children at around age 0;4, for similar reasons of breached expectation concerning language use. The children applied the same language separation when speaking on the phone, whether for real or in play, and to their toys, that they addressed in Swedish or Portuguese, depending on the language spoken to them by the giver. Incidentally, this includes the language used by Santa Claus, who proffered presents in Portuguese when visiting in Portugal, or in Swedish when in Sweden. In his case, being addressed in two different languages by the same ‘adult’ caused no disruption among the children’s attempts at categorising and making communicative sense of people through their use of a particular language. Santa Claus, as a ‘provider’, appears to have been ascribed the same multilingual status that the children allow of their parents. Make use of translation The children’s expression of their realisation of two surrounding languages by means of lexical equivalents in production appeared later than other ways of indicating bilingual awareness, and later for the two girls than for Mikael. Assigning territory to each language by means of translation emerges simultaneously with the word-querying strategy addressed in the previous section. Examples of their first spontaneous translations are: (5.29) M 1;5 %sit: Mother is giving Mikael a shower. He has been having a stomach upset, and soiled his clothes. %act: Mikael follows the dirty water down the drain with his gaze. *MIK: hejda˚, co´co´! %eng: bye-bye, poo.
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%act: *MIK: %eng: %com:
Mikael looks up at Mother. co´co´ baja papa´. poo baja daddy. Sw baja is the colloquial word used by Father for bajsa ‘pass motion’.
I cannot tell whether Mikael had been considering his predicament in Swedish, the language in which he initiated his first utterance, or whether he realised that he had used the two languages in that utterance. In any case, his second utterance appears to attempt a repair, or an explanation, by providing an equivalent word to the Portuguese one that he first used. Another example from Mikael at the same age is: (5.30) M 1;5 %sit:
Mother dresses Mikael in his pyjamas, which have a printed teddy-bear. %act: Mikael pulls excitedly at the printed teddy-bear. *MUM: veˆs? e´ o pijama do ursinho. e´ lindo? %eng: see? it’s the teddy-bear pyjamas. is it pretty? *MIK: yyy. %pho: ·fa·fa·fa·fa *MUM: ursinho. sabes dizer ursinho? %eng: teddy-bear. can you say teddy-bear? [. . .] %com: Mikael repeats his utterance several times, getting more and more agitated. Mother repeats the word ursinho very clearly each time, persuaded that the reason for his upset is that he is unable to say it. Mikael finally yells. *MIK: yyy papa´!! %eng: yyy daddy!! %pho: ·fa·fa pgpa %com: Mikael is furious now. Mother suddenly realises that he meant to say the Sw word for teddy-bear, nalle /''nalf3/ *MUM: isso! o papa´ diz nalle! %eng: that’s right! daddy says nalle.
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%com: Mikael’s fury collapses instantly, and he repeats his last utterance several times in a singsong. Other examples of strategies involving translation are: (5.31) K 2;2 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %com:
Mother is helping Karin put on her socks. meinha. o papa´ diz ''stlumpa''. sock. Daddy says ''stlumpa''. the Sw target word is strumpa.
(5.32) K 2;2 %sit: %act: *KAR: %eng: %com: *DAD: %eng: *KAR: %com:
at dinner. Karin points at a meatball and addresses Father. vem det? who (is) that? Karin uses vem ‘who’ for vad ‘what’. det a¨r en ko¨ttbulle. ko¨ttbulle. kan du sa¨ga ko¨ttbulle? it’s a meatball. meatball. can you say meatball? m! Karin nods and utters [mf] on a high-rise, a typical Sw phatic device to acknowledge understanding. She does not repeat the Sw word. %act: Karin turns to Mother. *KAR: ‘‘a`moˆngaga’’! %eng: meatball! %com: Karin has recently learned the Ptg word, almoˆndega .
(5.33) S 2;7 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %pho: %com:
playing ball with Mother. bola a` Sofia! ball to Sofia. gb&wagi Sofia repeats her utterance every time she catches the ball. %act: Sofia suddenly stops, looks at the ball and then up at Mother. *SOF: papa´ yyy boll. %eng: daddy yyy boll. %pho: pgpa ··· b&lff %mod: for Sw boll /b&lf/
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In (5.33), Sofia uses a very clear /l/ in the Swedish word, and adds extra length to it. She also uses her favourite ‘default’ palatal lateral to signal a lexical or phrasal gap that she does not know how to fill, or does not find relevant to do so. (5.34) S 2;8 %sit:
*SOF: %eng: %pho: %mod: *SOF: %eng: %pho: %mod:
(5.35) S 2;8 %sit: %act:
*SOF: %pho: *SOF: %pho: %com:
Sofia is playing teatime with Mother and Father. She pours some ‘coffee’, and serves first Mother and then Father. [es]ta´ [a]qui. cafe´. here it is. coffee. for cafe´, [k‹g‚o] kgfo [var]sa˚go[d]. kaffe. be my guest. coffee. for kaffe, [gka‚3] gkaff3
Sofia is playing with a rag doll, pretending to change its nappy. Sofia looks up at Mother and Father in turn, as she utters each of the following words, both meaning ‘nappy’. ‘‘fa`linha ’’. faglił ‘‘belo¨j’’. b3gløj the target forms are Ptg fraldinha and Sw blo¨ja.
One of the children’s favourite pastimes, at this stage as well as later, was in fact to play games involving naming objects, actions and states of mind in both languages, among themselves or with the parents at either the asking or the answering end. One example is (5.27). Mikael was particularly enthusiastic about this kind of entertainment, on his own or with partners: (5.36) M 1;6 %sit:
Mother is helping Mikael put on his shoes. Mikael has asked several questions about how daddy says several words, and asks his next question in the same way.
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*MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: %com: *MIK: %eng: *MIK: %eng: [. . .] %com:
(5.37)
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mama˜ [s]ko? mummy ‘shoe’? como e´ que a mama˜ diz sko?? enta˜o na˜o sabe? how does mummy say sko?? don’t you know? this is a very well known word to Mikael. [sa]pato! shoe! mama˜ k[l]ocka? mummy (wrist)watch? Mikael is requesting to have the game played the other way around, with Mother providing Portuguese equivalents of Swedish words instead.
M 2;0 %sit: [. . .] *MIK: %eng: *MIK: %eng: [. . .]
Mikael is playing alone in his room. papa´ diz carro? bilen! daddy says ‘car’? bilen! papa´ diz pa´pa? mat! daddy says ‘food’? mat!
Given the one person /one language policy adopted in the family, the children are aware of the need to use the appropriate language with the appropriate person. On the other hand, despite their knowledge that both parents understood both languages, the children also know that some speakers of the one do not understand the other. There is therefore a need to bridge the language gap between speakers of different languages, in cases where communication in one language may risk short-circuiting speakers of the other out of the exchange. One example is: (5.38) K 1;10 %sit: chatting with her Swedish grandmother in the diningroom, Karin asks Mother for some water. *KAR: mama˜, a´gua? %eng: mummy, water? %act: Mother starts walking towards the kitchen, and Karin turns to her grandmother. *KAR: det a¨r vatten. %eng: it’s water.
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%pho: dogvat3n %act: Karin nods towards her grandmother several times as she speaks.
Acting spontaneously as simultaneous interpreters involves the same kind of awareness of impending communicative breakdown that these children, like monolingual children too, detect in child /adult interaction. Siblings often offer spontaneous recasts of younger (or older) siblings’ utterances whose delivery is deemed to fall short of straightforward interpretation. One later example from the data involves English, and the first Portuguese /English mix in the data, in Sofia’s line: (5.39) K 4;10 S 3;0 %sit: unknown to Mother, Karin and Sofia have just watched a cartoon film featuring Casper, the friendly ghost. The film is spoken in English, with Portuguese subtitles. Sofia reports to Mother. *SOF: ‘‘ta´vas ’’ yyy. %eng: you were yyy. %pho: gtavS foningdid %com: the gloss above concerns the mother’s interpretation of the word ‘‘ta´vas ’’ as estavas , a form of the verb estar ‘to be’. *MUM: eu estava o queˆ? %eng: I was what? *KAR: na˜o! o fantasma. o Gasparzinho diz yyy. %eng: no! the ghost. Casper says yyy. %pho: for yyy, [foningdid] %com: ‘‘ta´vas ’’ is Sofia’s current rendition of the word fantasma /f~gtam/ ‘ghost’, and well known to Mother. Both girls are attempting a rendition of Casper’s motto ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’.
The children interpreted for one another in this way on several occasions, as they do, still today, for friends or relatives from both sides of the family, and for English-speaking peers visiting the family’s home. Switching languages also became a strategy indicating which language they deemed was the suitable one in a particular exchange. The second section of Chapter 10 provides a discussion of this issue.
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Use the name of the language, or the word ‘language’ itself Languages are not only things that can be talked about, they are also things that have names, just like a doggy or a potato chip does. Naming a language by name of course involves awareness that such things as ‘languages’ exist at all. This does not seem to be an obvious realisation among monolingual children, as illustrated in an anecdote reported in Hoff (2001: 367), where an English-speaking child aged 5 responds to a friend’s remark about speaking another language and English with the question ‘What’s English?’. The one language that one speaks does not necessarily need to be talked about. In contrast, bilingual children will naturally be inclined to name their languages, because they hear them named around them, and to use the word for ‘language’ itself, for similar reasons. From age 2;4, Karin, the most vocal of all three children in these matters, found great pleasure in repeating utterances like the following: (5.40) K 2;4 *KAR: Karin fala ‘‘pucugueˆs’’ e sueco. %eng: Karin speaks Portuguese and Swedish
%sit: reporting her Swedish monologues to Mother. *KAR: Karin esta´ a falar com a Karin em sueco. %eng: Karin is talking to Karin in Swedish.
*KAR: Karin fala ‘dua lı´ngua’. %eng: Karin speaks two language[s]/tongue[s]. %act: Karin sticks the full length of her tongue out and points at it. %com: Ptg lı´ngua means both the linguistic and the anatomical tongue. All three children spent long periods of time talking or singing to themselves in both languages, often repeating their renditions of whole dialogues that they heard at home or elsewhere. A few months after Sofia was born, it suddenly dawned on Karin that a babbling baby must also eventually start speaking, in tongues: (5.41) K 2;5 *KAR: mama˜, o que e´ que fala a Sofia? fala sueco e ‘pucugueˆs’? %eng: mummy, what does Sofia speak? does she speak Swedish and Portuguese?
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*MUM: a Sofia fala como tu, fala sueco com o papa´ e portugueˆs com a mama˜. %eng: Sofia speaks like you, Swedish with daddy and Portuguese with mummy. Karin appeared satisfied with her mother’s answer. One immediate effect of it was that she started generalising her use of Swedish to Sofia, from her predominant use of Portuguese with her sister up to then. The children’s apportioning of linguistic space to each of their languages is detailed in Chapter 10.
Discussing Language and Language Use As stated in Chapter 3, the children in this study had early exposure to several languages, and to several varieties of the same language. Not least, exposure came from child videotapes owned by the family, originally recorded or dubbed in the children’s two languages. Whether recreational or educational, these videos included several different varieties of both languages. The children’s sensitivity to differences among languages and language varieties appears to be particularly attuned to features of accent, or other features of sound, which were the first features of speech that they found it relevant to comment on. Characterising language varieties The children’s intimate association between a language and the person who speaks it or the event in which it took place, addressed in the section on ‘Use the name of the language, or the word ‘language’ itself’ in this chapter, holds for language varieties too. For example, Karin and Sofia would play out their own versions of favourite child films in the Swedish or Portuguese accents of the source, e.g. Brazilian for the Portuguesedubbed version of the cartoon video Sleeping Beauty, or the Southern Swedish sma˚la¨ndsk accent for ‘Teskedsgumman’ (Mikael was never very keen on cooperating with his sisters in these activities). The following are examples of their characterisation of language features, all concerning accents. (5.42) K 5;2 %sit: at home with Mother, Karin imitates the Scanian accent (ska˚nska) used in the Southern part of Sweden where the family has their permanent home. This is not the accent used in the family. *KAR: estou a falar sueco assim. %eng: I’m speaking Swedish like this.
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(5.43) K 5;9 %com: watching The Little Mermaid, a Swedish-dubbed video. *KAR: a sereia fala sueco sem Brasil. %eng: the mermaid speaks Swedish without Brazil. In these examples, the words assim and Brasil appear to be used to indicate particular accents, in different ways. In (5.42), the name of the accent is replaced by a generic word, assim , whereas in (5.43) the word Brasil seems to be used as a synonym for the word accent . The mermaid character speaks the same variety of Swedish that is used in the family. The phrase ‘without Brazil’, which is likely to be synonymous with ‘without accent’, reflects the perception, common among adults too, that one’s own way of speaking is accentless / or that there are accentless ways of speaking. A similar view, of one’s own language as some form of standard, shows in: (5.44) K 5;3 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: *MUM: %eng: *KAR: %eng:
calling to Mother from another room. como e´ que se escreve ‘escola’ em ‘‘talianska’’? how do you spell ‘school’ in ‘‘talianska’’? for Karin’s last word, [talgj"fnska] que lı´ngua e´ essa?? what language is that?? e´ aquela lı´ngua que parece assim um portugueˆs esquisito. it’s that language that sounds like funny Portuguese.
In Karin’s first utterance, the last word appears to refer to Italian, given her later comment concerning the similarity of the two languages. The way she pronounced it sounded definitely Swedish, although the Sw target is /Italgjefnska/. I cannot otherwise tell why Karin chose to use the Swedish word for the language, and I have likewise no suggestion about why Karin should want to spell this particular word in that language. The first comparison with English comes from Sofia, when she had just started having private tuition in this language: (5.45) S 4;10 %sit:
Mother has just taught Sofia the English word ‘paper’. *SOF: parece cola, na˜o e´, ma´mi? tape. %eng: sounds like cola , doesn’t it, mummy? tape. %com: Sofia uses the Ptg word cola ‘glue’ for fita-cola ‘sticking tape’ and for ‘glue’.
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*MUM: %eng: *SOF: %eng: %com:
e´ parecido, e´! brincaste com fita-cola na escola? it does! did you play with tape in school? na˜o. ‘‘Nina´to’’ deu. no. Nina´to gave (me). ‘‘Nina´to ’’ [nignatu] is Sofia’s rendition of her English tutor’s name, Renato /‰(‹)gnatu/.
This was the first time that the mother heard the word ‘tape’ from Sofia, and she assumed it had been learned at Swedish School. Swedish also has a word tejp, with the same meaning as English ‘tape’, and with almost identical pronunciation, /tojp/. Her reference to her tutor, who engaged Sofia’s attention in class by indulging her interest in handicraft, including paper, scissors and tape (see Chapter 9), is the reason why I interpret Sofia’s comment as referring to English. (5.46) M 5;4 %sit:
*MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: %act:
Mikael is watching a favourite video of a football match, privately recorded in Portugal. For the first time, he watches it through to the interviews with players and fans at the end. One of the speakers uses a Northern Portuguese accent, that contains several diphthongs for single vowels used in the family’s dialect of the language. porque e´ que ele fala assim? why does he speak like that? e´ do Norte. no Norte falam assim. he’s from the North. that’s how they speak there. Mikael repeats some of the words he just heard, in his own accent and in the accent that is new to him.
[. . .] *MIK: e´ como o Fem Myror! %eng: it’s like ‘Five Ants’! %com: ‘Five Ants’ is the shortened title of a series of Swedish educational videos (Fem Myror a¨r Fler a¨n Fyra Elefanter ‘Five Ants are More than Four Elephants’), spoken in the ska˚nska dialect of Swedish that is characterised by diphthongs for single vowels used in the family’s dialect of the language. %act: Mikael proceeds to repeat different Swedish words, in his own and in the ska˚nska accent.
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Commenting on non-native uses of language The issues of linguistic norms, illustrated in examples (5.43) and (5.44), and of what generally counts as correct or acceptable use of each language appear to be very much on the children’s minds. Being native speakers of their two languages, they are naturally aware of their parents’ non-native productions in them. Pointing these out, imitating them and laughing at them soon became an all-time favourite with the children, which continues up to today, at the time of writing. The following examples concern Portuguese and Swedish, although the parents’ English has also been the object of the children’s mirth from the start of their schooling in this language. (5.47) K 2;9 %sit: *MUM: %eng: %pho: %mod: %com: *KAR: %eng:
Karin and Mother are recalling the summer vacation in Sweden. e veio o Carl. and Carl came too. for Carl, [kal] k"fl Karin frowns and sits still for a short while. na˜o e´ [a], mama˜, e´ ["f]. it’s not [a], mummy, it’s ["f].
Karin’s correction removed the wrongly pronounced vowel out of its phonological context in order to provide its target pronunciation. It is interesting to note that Karin never attempted to correct in this way the same Swedish vowel in the first syllable of her own name, in all likelihood taking her mother’s version of her name as a sanctioned Portuguese word. In fact, Karin’s name is Swedish, not Portuguese, and the mother consistently pronounces it with Portuguese vowels (and stress pattern) as [gkaRin], not in Swedish as /''k"frIn/. The children find it relevant to comment on non-native features of accent whenever these occur, as a later example from the same child illustrates: (5.48) K 7;4 %sit:
the family are gathered at home, with Portuguese relatives. Karin addresses Mother. *KAR: porque e´ que o papa´ fala ‘‘bra`sileˆro’’? %eng: why does daddy speak Brazilian?
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%com: Karin uses her own rendition of a Brazilian accent in the word ‘‘bra`sileˆro’’ [bRazigleRu] ‘Brazilian’, whose European target is brasileiro /bRzigljRu/. In (5.48), Karin is commenting on the unreduced quality of most of her father’s Portuguese vowels, one salient feature characterising difference between European and Brazilian varieties of the language (see CruzFerreira (1999a) and Barbosa & Albano (2004), respectively). She may also be following her strategy, in (5.43), of identifying what she perceives as accented versions of Portuguese with a Brazilian version of it. Another example, with the children aged 6;2, 4;4 and 2;1, respectively, concerns the absence of voiced sibilants in Swedish, and their father’s devoicing of Portuguese voiced sibilants: (5.49) %sit:
*DAD: %eng: %pho: %mod: %act:
%com:
the family are having dinner at the home of the children’s Portuguese grandmother. Father addresses the children’s uncle. passas-me o queijo, faz favor? could you pass the cheese, please? for queijo ‘cheese’, [gkjSu] gkju Karin and Sofia start giggling and jutting their chins out towards Father. Mikael joins in, probably out of peer solidarity. Father pronounced the word queixo /gkjSu/ ‘chin’, for ‘cheese’.
The children’s sensitivity to peculiarities of accent also shows in their ability to reproduce characteristic features of different accents, as in (5.42) and (5.46) above. The following example concerns the Swedish version of their uncle’s name: (5.50) K 2;4 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho:
looking at family photo albums, with Mother. tio Ze´. o papa´ diz ‘‘momo Se’’. uncle Ze´. daddy says ‘‘momo Se’’. for Ze´, [zo] for Se, [se] %com: both versions of the name are pronounced targetlike. Sw ‘‘momo’’ [gmImI] is Karin’s truncated rendition of Sw morbror /gmIrbrIr/ ‘uncle (lit. mother’s brother)’.
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(5.51) M 5;9 %sit: chatting with the children’s Swedish grandmother, Mother mispronounces the word fyra ‘four’ as [''fira] and immediately corrects herself to the target [''fyfra]. Mikael addresses his grandmother. *MIK: mamma kan inte prata svenska. %eng: mum can’t speak Swedish. *GMS: kan hon inte?? %eng: can’t she?? *MIK: nej. hon sa¨ger [''fira]. %eng: no. she says [''fira]. Given that the mother was speaking Swedish, Mikael’s comment is probably best interpreted as meaning that his mother can speak Swedish, but not properly. The children can also perceive the lack of propriety in their parents’ non-native use of languages as a source of embarrassment. For example, at age 4;6, while out shopping with her mother during the family’s stay in Austria, Karin self-consciously corrected her mother’s use of the High German word Bro¨tchen ‘bread roll’, to Semmel , the word used locally. The father reported a similar episode while out with the children in Portugal. At the end of a transaction that he conducted in Portuguese, Sofia addressed the shop assistant in what the father interpreted as an attempt at excusing his nonstandard use of the language: (5.52) S 4;9 *SOF: %eng:
ele e´ sueco. he’s Swedish.
Language, like everything else made available to children, is also the object of play, whether for simple entertainment, as in (5.37), or to openly make fun of somebody else’s uses, as in (5.49). The first deliberately humorous episode involving English comes from Sofia: (5.53)
S 4;10 %sit: *SOF: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *SOF:
after her third English private tuition session. ja´ sei falar ‘‘ingueleˆs’’. now I know how to speak English. ah sim? enta˜o fala la´. really? let’s hear it then. *queres um sweetie*?
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%eng: %act:
do you want a sweetie? Sofia bursts out in giggles.
The question in Sofia’s last utterance was consistently used by the children’s doctor, who is an Englishman, at the end of each consultation. He used English with the mother, but spoke Portuguese to the children, with English vocabulary mixes and a heavy English accent. Sofia’s utterance faithfully reproduces the question and these features of his speech, including the aspirated word-initial [kh] and alveolar approximant [¤] in Ptg queres , as well as his intonation pattern. Other nontarget productions, including siblings’ own mixes, continue to be immediately remarked upon: (5.54) K 14;3 M 10;2 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %com:
at dinner. ma˜e, passas-me o *cucumbro*? mum, can you pass the cucumber? Mikael unwittingly pronounces the Eng word ‘cucumber’ with Ptg morphology and accent, [kugku˜bRu], for Ptg pepino /p(‹)gpinu/. %act: Mother stares at Mikael, puzzled. Karin starts giggling. *KAR: o Miguel quer o *cucumbro*. na˜o percebes? %eng: Mikael wants some *cucumbro*. don’t you get it? %com: Karin pronounces *cucumbro* with extra stress. [. . .] %act: later, at dessert, Karin passes some pineapple to Mikael. *KAR: Miguel, queres *pinea´plo*? %eng: Mikael, want some pineapple? %com: Karin deliberately mispronounces Eng ‘pineapple’ with Ptg morphology and accent, as [pinigaplu]. The equivalent Ptg word is anana´s /ngnaS/. *MIK: what? *KAR: se queres *pinea´plo*. ha´ bocado querias *cucumbro*. %eng: whether you want some *pinea´plo*. you wanted *cucumbro* a while ago. %com: Karin addresses Mikael in Portuguese, so that her joke can make sense. The children’s common language at this time is English.
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Finally, the children also delight in speaking their languages with different accents. Whereas early examples of this may be ascribed to their having heard the languages spoken in this way, as discussed at the beginning of the previous section, they later create their own accents, for the sheer pleasure of sounding funny. One example is: (5.55) K 10;9 %sit: [. . .] *KAR: %eng: %com:
Karin is packing for the summer vacation in Sweden. e tenho que levar o *fato de banho*. and I must have my swimsuit. Karin pronounces Ptg fato de banho /gfatu d(‹)gbłu/ ‘swimsuit’ with a mock-Swedish accent as [''f"to de ''bało], giving extra emphasis to this word in her utterance.
From the very beginning, language and language uses constituted a practically inexhaustible source of play and amusement among the children. This is compounded by the fact that they can draw on several different languages for entertainment, a privilege that is aptly described in the title of Clyne’s (1987) study of a bilingual child, ‘Don’t you get bored speaking only English?’ The examples in this section show the children’s awareness of typical characteristics of different languages and language varieties, including their own, from the children’s earliest productions. They also show their awareness of the two different types of bilingualism in the family, their own, which is native, and their parents’, non-native. Throughout, the children’s confidence in their native command of their languages is apparent. The next chapters, in Part 2 of this book, give details on the children’s acquisition of one of their languages, Portuguese.
Chapter 6
Shaping Sound Learning, like any other cumulative endeavour, must proceed from a sound foundation. This is also true of language, whose medium is sound, pass the pun. The linguistics literature generally takes a reductionist view of sound, by associating this term with purely segmental elements of language like vowels and consonants, i.e. those elements that result from configurational features of the vocal tract. This is due to historical reasons in the study of language, namely, that segmental phonology happened to draw interest from linguists first and that analytical tools for its study naturally developed first. But the historical interest of linguists and the related level of development of analytical instruments have little to do with language itself. They are, and remain, ways of tackling selected chunks of the object of linguistics and they therefore do not make language, nor do they necessarily provide the most enlightening insight into it. Seminal work like Halliday’s (1975) on the role of prosody in acquisition has gone largely unexplored up to quite recently, despite insight into infant perception and production of intonation as early as in Lewis (1951). There is of course no speech, and therefore no language to speak of, without suprasegmental, or prosodic, features, those that modulate vocal production into the cadence and fluency that makes it comprehensible. We must not forget, as Dauer (1987: 449) reminded us almost two decades ago, ‘that the division into segmental and prosodic phenomena is an abstraction created by linguistic science for the purposes of analysis’. It is in my view impossible to gather understanding of language acquisition and of language in general without a close look at the prosody of speech, which lays the foundation for sound, for the twin reasons that children, including infants, are extremely sensitive to the prosodic characteristics of the language(s) to which they are exposed, long before words are acquired, and that prosody is acquired first. Consensus about early sensitivity to prosody comes from a number of classical studies that generally spawned extensive experimental replication. For example, Mehler et al . (1988) reported that infants distinguish utterances in their native languages from those of another language. Using filtered speech, their results point to reliance on prosodic cues. Similar results with similar methods were obtained by DehaeneLambertz and Houston (1998). Nazzi et al . (1998) also used filtered speech to show that newborns are able to discriminate among languages that make use of different rhythmical patterns, and concluded that 96
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differential linguistic rhythm appears to guide infants’ perception of speech. Particularly for European Portuguese, Freitas (1998) found that prosody provides crucial information for the functioning of the other modules of the grammar: children first manipulate prosodic patterns, then proceed to manipulate any other linguistic information (see also research in Lamprecht’s (1999) collection). As noted in the section ‘Use carriers of language-specific prosody’ in Chapter 5, there is also general consensus that prosodic features are among the first, if not the first, linguistic properties to be acquired, whether in intonation or in tone languages (Crystal, 1979; Halliday, 1975; Kaplan, 1970; Li & Thompson, 1978). Jusczyk (1997) provides an overview of research on this issue, arguing that children are able to parse prosodic structures before their emergence in production. As far as bilinguals are concerned, Goodz (1994) proposes that infants hear each language as a different melody and that different languages may be as distinct for infants as different songs. Bosch and Sebastia´nGalle´s (2001) found evidence of discrimination between languages belonging to the same rhythmic category among infants simultaneously exposed to these languages. In bilingual production, Poulin-Dubois and Goodz (2001) report differentiated babble according to language. Other systematic research into the phonetic, phonological and prosodic features of child bilingualism dates from only a few years back (Bijeljac-Babic, 2000; Bijeljac-Babic et al ., 2001; Bosch & Sebastia´n-Galle´s, 1997; Khattab, 2000; LaBelle, 2000; Paradis, 2001; Schnitzer & Krasinski, 1994; 1996; Whitworth, 2000. See also contributions to the collection by Cenoz & Genesee, 2001). The phonetic make-up of child utterances thus becomes crucial to understand how they make sense of speech sounds around them. As Roach (2001) points out, it is through the analysis of the phonetic characteristics of spoken language that linguistic data are collected at all. Dealing with segmental phonology, Bybee (1998) argues that phonological regularities emerge from the interface between phonetics and semantics, which are the two substantive ends of language. The same is of course true of suprasegmental phonology. In what follows, I will attempt to redress the imbalance in the bulk of the literature on the acquisition of sound by presenting a number of issues in the children’s prosodic development. Accordingly, the chapter is quite heavy on transcribed material, which can be off-putting for noninitiated readers. I will therefore provide as detailed a description as possible, in words, of what is relevant in the examples so transcribed (which in turn may put off initiated readers). Before discussion of the children’s data, however, one point needs reiterating. Studies on child phonology typically present sets of words produced by the child, giving the child form alongside a target form, and concluding with observations on the former according to features of the latter. Very often, however, the
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choice of target is not specified, leaving it unclear whether it is taken from standard descriptions of the language or from the language forms that the child actually is exposed to, particularly those that are typical of motherese. Motherese involves a characteristic way of using language that has aroused keen interest among researchers in child language (see Chapter 11). This interest is well justified, not least because motherese constitutes input to children, whose linguistic production in turn can, and often is, used as evidence for analyses that propose to account for the adult system itself. One issue that has not aroused as much attention concerns the absence of relevant data on motherese forms in most of the literature addressing child production in this way, which besides concerns languages, like English, with attested uses of motherese. My point is that studies dealing with elicited vocabulary, for example, must include information about the adult forms of the same vocabulary with which the child is familiar, whether in isolation or in connected speech, or that were directed to the child for elicitation, and that the child may in turn use as prompts in production. A close scrutiny of these forms would establish beyond doubt that claims about child forms are indeed about child forms, and not about forms directed to the child. This issue arose during preliminary analysis of the database for this study, and one illustrative example is: (6.1) M 1;0 %sit: *MUM: %eng: %pho: %int:
Mother is trying to get Mikael to say Sofia’s name. chama la´ a Sofia, chama. diga la´, Sofia. diga la´, Sofia. [. . .] call Sofia, won’t you. say, Sofia. say, Sofia. [. . .] for diga la´, Sofia: [gdiggla # sugfiff] for diga la´, Sofia: 1tg, FH/eLF; 2tg, LPH/calling contour, descending minor-third dragged on the last syllable. %com: the mother repeats her utterances several times. *MIK: [So]fia. %pho: figaff %int: calling contour.
In this example, the mother is (unwittingly) using a calling form in order to elicit a name, which is her (intended) purpose. The child naturally replicates what is salient in the target that is being made available to him, namely, the calling form itself, with the associated prosodic effects on segmental material, namely, the prominence of a prolonged syllable. The stress shift that is apparent in Mikael’s rendition of this and other forms elicited in similar ways cannot therefore be
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legitimately claimed to show, say, child preference for iambic over trochaic patterns at this acquisitional stage. The role that child-directed forms, including uses of prosody, may play in linguistic development is addressed in the second section of Chapter 11. In what follows, discussion and transcription of forms that are addressed to the children are included where relevant.
Laying the Foundation for Sounding Infants’ very early interest in speech is well known to any parent, and well documented in the literature too. It is probably part of infants’ equally well known interest in sound in general, be it noises, particularly rhythmical, or music (see Trehub (2003), and other research in the same special issue of Nature Neuroscience ). In line with typically developing children, the children in this study turned their heads to the source of sounds, including their parents’ voice (and their siblings’, in the case of Sofia and Mikael) by one week of age. Their recognition of familiar surroundings is documented at around 10 days of age, when they would frown and show unrest at unfamiliar faces or voices. By age 0;1 they paid undivided attention to facial expressions and speech directed to them, and had learned that particular ways of sounding, on their part, attracted immediate reaction from their parents, whether or not there was reason, on their part, to sound the way they did. We can thus say that vocal sound acquired meaning then, not as a spontaneous effect of bodily discomfort, but as a cause of something pleasurable, namely company and attention. The children’s incipient attempts at reproducing vocal sound directed to them date from the same age, as does the discovery of their own tongues. The tongue became one of their favourite sources of entertainment, by sticking it in and out of their mouths, sucking on it between their gums or stuck under their upper lip, clicking it against their gums, lips or palate, and delighting in the various sounds that these activities provided. Music never left the children in this study indifferent. Their interest in it endures still today, whether through singing or playing musical instruments. Practically from birth, music was found to have a soothing effect on them, particularly Western classical music (including opera). Later, from around the end of their first year, music of all kinds would engage them in effusive body and vocal activity, shaking, bouncing, clapping hands and humming syllables in cadence with rhythmical beats. The same is true of nursery rhymes, whose endurance in unchanged form across generations may be attributed precisely to their role in crystallising the salient prosodic features of a language. These form the linguistic scaffold around which words and their combinations can be appropriately shaped. The primacy of prosodic events in forming
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linguistic habits is accounted for by Brainard and Doupe (2000), who studied the similarities between learning to speak and learning to sing, two activities that appear to complement each other and whose developmental features provide insight into human maintenance of vocal behaviour. The central role played by prosodic scaffolding of this kind as a prerequisite for fluent linguistic delivery has been argued of adult language learning too, notably by Adams (1979) and Kjellin (2002). The children in this study did pay preferential attention to the prosodic patterns of nursery rhymes, not their words. Simple experiments performed by the mother appear to support this claim, where the behaviour associated with particular nursery rhymes was elicited by the reproduction of their sole prosodic patterns (no gestures involved) with the words of other rhymes. The children would also ask to have particular rhymes recounted to them by reproducing their typical prosodic patterns, not any words in the rhymes. Nevertheless, as Crystal (1979: 43) noted, the simple reproduction of ‘invariant prosodic pattern[s]’ typical of nursery rhymes constitute ‘prosodic idiom[s]’ that, as such, provide no evidence of the acquisition of communicative uses of intonation. Crystal adds that only ‘when the same lexical item is used with different prosodic characteristics, can we talk with confidence about the patterns being systematic and productive’ (emphasis added, MCF). Early productive management of differential prosody, however, need not be found among single lexical items only, nor among lexical items at all. The next sections address the ways in which the children in this study worked their way along intonational competence.
Practising the components All three children were early babblers, starting at around age 0;2, taking babbling as the modulation of an egressive airstream for the pleasure of sounding. ‘Sounding’ seems indeed to be the key word here, since it was by means of sound modulations that the children first made it clear what language they were attempting to communicate in (see Chapter 5). Their babbling included several sounds that are not part of the grammatical inventories of their languages, like bilabial and pharyngeal fricatives or glottal stops, as well as utterances consisting of vowels only or consonants only. All of these persisted through the reduplicated babble stage, in varied combinations. All three children went into different preference stages, where particular sounds or sound sequences were favoured. For example, Mikael’s babble was mostly palatal, or [/front], at 0;7, turning to mostly labial at 0;8. Examples of favourite utterances, reduplicated or not, in each phase are:
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(6.2)
M 0;7 [jijij] [wiffj] [iffff] [dijdi]
(6.3)
M 0;8 [bff] [bwafbwafbwaff] [uff]
These and other preferences, or trends, in babbling are well known from the literature, as are the general forms and functions of segmental babbling, including its recognition as diagnostic for early capturing of possible speech impairment (Oller, 2000), and I will therefore not dwell on them. Less known is the babbling of prosodic features of speech, to which I now turn (for a transcribed set of babbling samples during the first year of each of the three children, see Cruz-Ferreira, 2000a). The children isolated several dimensions of sound that play roles in linguistic systems, for example their babbling of voiced /voiceless contrasts in utterances like [iffff] in (6.2). The following example concerns place of articulation (tone groups are numbered, for ease of reference): (6.4)
S 0;5 SOF: %pho: %int:
yyy. 1. /ha # 2. /ha # 3. /ha # 4. /ha # 5. agRfafgRo # 6. gaagRa # 7. RagRaf 1tg, ML; 2tg, LL; 3tg, ML; 4tg, LF; 5tg, HL/ML/HF to low; 6tg, HF/MF; 7tg, ML/MF.
In (6.4), the babbled consonants keep to the uvular to glottal range. At this stage, Sofia had apparently realised that a coughing sound is made at the back of the throat, and she starts her babbling block with a sequence of faked coughs, in tone groups 1/4. I define ‘babbling block’ as a series of babbled utterances separated by at least 5 seconds of silence before
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and after, with the children vocalising on their own. I offer the length of the pause as tentative, on preliminary observations that babbled material separated by shorter pauses often appears to coincide with manipulation of specific linguistic features. Likewise, the children isolated dimensions of prosody, and babbled them. Unlike reduplicated segmental babbling, which is generally seen as involving a specific set of sounds and sound sequences, usually of the syllabic form CV where C is often plosive, suprasegmental babbling ranges through all other dimensions that make speech possible, viz. pitch, amplitude, tempo and length, all of which are the substance itself of rhythm, accent, stress or, more generally, of prominence in speech (Denesˇ & Pinson, 1993; Fry, 1979). In fact, the limited variety of segmental choices and combinations that takes over babbling particularly at the transition to reduplicated babble can be seen as an effective strategy in probing for prosodic effects. The children appear to hold the segmental material of their utterances, especially vocalic material, within easily manageable articulatory dimensions, so as to assist the babbling of prosody. Segmental variation is left out of the way, as it were, so that prosodic practice may get full attention. The following three examples, (6.5) to (6.7), also from Sofia’s data, show the babbling of trochaic and iambic rhythmical alternations, of pitch registers ranging from top high to creak, and of amplitude ranging from whisper to full loudness, respectively. Each of the examples corresponds to a complete babbling block: (6.5) S 0;3 SOF: %pho: %int:
yyy. 1. 3gwef # 2. wo # 3. ‹ffgwo # 4. 3ff # 5. gwI/a # 6. 3g3j # 7. g3w3h # 8. /‹3g/‹3 1tg, ML/ forceful HF; 2tg, milder HF on the same register; 3tg, HL/MF; 4tg, RF; 5tg, MF/ingressive HR; 6tg, ML/HF; 7tg, ML; 8tg, MF/MF on a higher register.
(6.6) S 0;5 *SOF: yyy. %pho: 1. afff # 2. agafff # 3. gwagwa # 5. jojajojagjof %int: 1tg, MR to top high;
4. jogjo #
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2tg, 3tg, 4tg, 5tg,
HL/HL/HF to mid, at top register; LL/ML, low register, creaky; LL/ML, low register, creaky; ML/higherML/LR/MR, low register, creaky.
The next example, illustrating practice of amplitude contrasts, has some of its tone groups divided into assumed ‘words’, based on the prosodic shape of the child’s utterances. Reduplicated babble, whether segmental or prosodic, does involve word-like units to begin with. These ‘words’ are rhythmical and melodic wholes, integrated into the overall melody of their tone group, with no perceptible pause between them. They are separated by spaces in the transcription. Given that this babbling block is rather long and complex, with different types of fall, rise and level tones in different syllables of longer strings, transcription of tone is omitted, for the sake of clarity: (6.7) S 0;8 *SOF: yyy. %pho: 1. agoago aofgaf æ/ # 2. hagofffoffagbu # 3. 3g·a affg3 # 4. Ifgja3 # 5. uf3gafjo # 6. agQfaf # 7. ag«/ # ~ ~ 8. gaagh‹fw‹g33 # 9. ag33wIghI # 10. 3f3gw3 # 11. w‹g3f %int: 1tg, loud; 2tg, three first syllables very loud, two last syllables very short and very soft; the whole tone group lasts 8 seconds, all in one breath; 3tg, soft; 4tg, very soft; 5tg, very soft; 6tg, loud; 7tg, loud; 8tg, soft; 9tg, soft; 10tg, loud; 11tg, loud. It is likely that the warming-up, muscle-toning nature of articulatory exercises involved in early babbling targets control over different possibilities offered by the vocal tract. Tremblay et al. (2003), addressing segmental components of language, showed that the generation of speech relies not only on auditory information, but also on the brain’s ability to track the position of different articulators. Just like with babbling of specific segmental sound material, once each component of
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prosody has been explored through babbling, the child is ready to start combining them. In (6.7), Sofia appears to be testing her control over her breath too, resulting in segments of sharply contrasting length. These warming-up exercises also lay the foundation for fluent prosody, namely, through babbling of sentence-like intonation, which started appearing at around age 0;9 for the children in this study. One example is Sofia’s first tone group in (6.7), reproduced in (6.8) with tone transcription: (6.8) S 0;8 *SOF: yyy. %pho: agoago aofgaf æ/ %int: 1st word, LL/MR, then LL/MR on a lower register; 2nd word, LL/ML/MR to high; 3rd word, short HF to mid. In (6.8), reduplicated rising tones precede a final falling tone, in an incipient manipulation of the rising pitch followed by falling pitch that has been argued to characterise basic cross-linguistic uses of intonation (see discussion of this pattern for simple declarative utterances in Hirst and Di Cristo, 1998b: 18ff.). Early sensitivity to prosody, and associated control over it, is what enabled these children to engage in dialogue by reproducing prosodic features of their languages, using nonsense segments as carriers. Given that these features have been found to play a decisive role in language identification (Hirst & Di Cristo, 1998b; Ramus & Mehler, 1999), the resulting target-like, fluent effect of these utterances was invariably acknowledged by relatives and friends, who instinctively reacted to them with full attention, in turn reinforcing their continued use by the children. Discussion of these utterances is given in Chapter 5. Later, at the outset of the two-word stage, similar strategies account for the children’s use of fillers, addressed in the ‘Speaking in Sentences’ section in this chapter. Another non-negligible factor in the acquisition of a language is the mastery of its articulatory settings. These settings concern (largely) supralaryngeal activity and configurations that result, in Laver’s (1980: 2) formulation, in a ‘tendency for the vocal apparatus to be subjected to a particular long-term muscular adjustment’. Just like different athletic specialities develop different muscles in the body, different languages develop different muscular postures in the vocal tract, which then become a habit. Grace (1983) notes that ‘there are pronunciation skills which apply to a sound system as a whole’ and that this is why, for example, ‘it is hard to pronounce a French word in an English sentence without either pausing to get one’s speech organs set for the task or pronouncing it with an English accent’. Disregard for languagespecific articulatory settings in most second-language teaching shares
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responsibility for the endurance of the ‘foreign accent’ that learners are so often accused of keeping (more on why this ‘accusation’ is unfair in Chapter 9). Adequate articulatory setting is required for the native-like pronunciation of a language, as was observed by Honikman as early as in the 1960s (Honikman, 1964) or, more recently, as Boysson-Bardies’s (1999: 65) ‘oral posture’. Being native speakers of their languages, the children in this study acquired, with them, their respective articulatory settings, and a native accent in each. The existence of a ‘specific articulatory posture’ for each language of a Portuguese /English bilingual child is also noted by Major (1977: 114). For research on laryngeal settings across languages, see Esling (2000), who shows that these differ between languages and accents, and discusses social uses of voice quality. Among adult bilinguals, Bruyninckx et al . (1994) found variability in the voice quality of their informants according to language. Mastering intonational fluency We saw above examples of the children’s attempts at capturing prosody by means of its components. Capturing the prosody of a particular language means finding out which of these components are relevant for meaning, and in which way. That is, which are the choices that make communicative sense in that language. Among these, choices in the use of pitch play a significant role in Portuguese. This section discusses how choices in pitch became progressively available to the children, and includes a brief description of which uses of which phonological tones are commonest in Portuguese, or unmarked, according to the survey used in Cruz-Ferreira (1998). The phonetic shape of each tone is also given, so that the reader may form an impression of how the children sounded. For discussion of the analytical framework adopted here, which is based on the nuclear approach to intonation, see Chapter 4. For one previous study on the acquisition of Portuguese prosody, see Frota and Viga´rio (1995). Falls versus rises
On the basis of cross-linguistic evidence, uses of p
