Linguistic recycling in language acquisition

Abstract

The paper examines how children quote their parents’ utterances. In other words, it investigates linguistic recycling as an aspect of language learning and how the child-directed speech (CDS) of adults influences child speech (CS). This topic is examined especially in the light of research made in the crosslinguistic project on pre- and protomorphology in language acquisition. Premorphology is characterized by rote-learned forms, which the child has memorized and stored as chunks from CDS (e.g., Finn vettä, Est vett ‘water,’ partitive form). During protomorphology, the child imitates CDS and produces analogical forms (e.g. Finn CDS: söi vs. CS: syöi ‘ate’, Est CDS: ütles vs. CS: ükki ‘said’), which then gradually evolve into adult-like grammar. Usage-based approaches to language acquisition rely on the assumption that language structures are learned from language use. Typical material in present-day child language research is based on tape recordings and transcripts made from these recordings. This kind of data makes it possible to take into account the influence of CDS to CS in a more accurate way than the earlier data collecting methods, such as diary material, which usually contains mostly utterances produced by the child do. The article examines how CDS gives models to CS and how the acquisition proceeds from early rote-learned forms to adult-like grammar from the perspective of frequency distributions of inflectional patterns and elaboration on linguistic forms in CDS – CS interaction. On the basis of analyzed speech samples and previous results, it is obvious that the quoting in children’s and adults’ speech is present on different levels of language and is often bidirectional in nature.

Repeat After Me? Both Children With and Without Autism Commonly Align Their Language With That of Their Caregivers

“…Linguistic alignment occurs in both adult−adult (Dideriksen et al, 2022(Dideriksen et al, , 2023Duran et al, 2019;Fusaroli, Gangopadhyay, & Tylén, 2014; and child−adult conversations (Chouinard & Clark, 2003;Foushee et al, 2022;Garrod & Clark, 1993;Laalo & Argus, 2020;Leung, Hawkins, & Yurovsky, 2020;Misiek, Favre, & Fourtassi, 2020;Nguyen, Versyp, Cox, & Fusaroli, 2022;Salerni & Suttora, 2022).…”

“…Conversational linguistic alignment—also called entrainment or recycling—is the reuse by one speaker of the linguistic materials uttered by the other (Duran et al., 2019; Fusaroli & Tylén, 2012, 2015; Laalo & Argus, 2020; Perkins, 2014; Pickering & Garrod, 2004). This could involve a simple repetition of words (lexical alignment) but can extend to the reuse of parts of speech (syntactic alignment), and even to topic maintenance (semantic alignment).…”

Children steer the inflectional diversity of their parents: The role of word births and growing vocabulary

“…Their frequent use in IDS can probably best be attributed to the fact that, in addition to the semantic meaning of smallness, they carry a pragmatic meaning indicating endearment or affection (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi, 1994;Jurafsky, 1996). A concomitant feature of diminutives is that they tend to neutralize certain intricate grammatical forms and/or distinctions, such as in Finnish (Laalo & Argus, 2020) or in Dutch (De Schutter, 1994). For instance, Dutch has a complicated, arbitrary two-way grammatical gender distinction encoded in the definite article: de lepel ('the spoon') versus het mes ('the knife').…”