Three is a Crowd?: Acquiring Portuguese in a Trilingual Environment

Three is a Crowd? Child Language and Child Development: Multilingual–Multicultural Perspectives Series Editor: Profess...

Author: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

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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 lıńgua 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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Three is a Crowd?

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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Three is a Crowd?

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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Three is a Crowd?

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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Part 1: Becoming Multilingual

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


21

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

22


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,


23

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


25

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

26


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


27

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


29

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

The Children

31

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


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,

46


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’


47

(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,


58

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


Level tones

Complex tone

59

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

Speaking Languages, and Talking about Them

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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 caõzinho 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˜, paõzinho. mummy, bread. m~ # p~gðı˜f Karin whines and slaps the bread cupboard with both hands. quer paõzinho? 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. naõ! no! gn~ffu naõ quer paõzinho? 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 tubaraõ /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]laõ yyy [dor]mir? is Mikael asleep? Sofia uses the form Miguelaõ ‘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


74

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 fluór. %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˚, coćo´! %eng: bye-bye, poo.


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%act: *MIK: %eng: %com:

Mikael looks up at Mother. coćo´ 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.


*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?? entaõ naõ 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: naõ! 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 lıńgua’. %eng: Karin speaks two language[s]/tongue[s]. %act: Karin sticks the full length of her tongue out and points at it. %com: Ptg lıńgua 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 lıńgua e´ essa?? what language is that?? e´ aquela lıńgua 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, naõ 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? naõ. ‘‘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. naõ 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? entaõ 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*. naõ 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 SebastiańGalle´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 & Sebastiań-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 pitch can be usefully divided into two major groups: falling tones and rising tones. This grouping is based not only on form, in that all falling tones involve a decrease in fundamental frequency and all rising tones an increase, but also on meaning. Cross-linguistic evidence also supports the association of generic meanings to each set of falling versus rising tones, as claimed in Cruttenden (1997) and Bolinger (1978). Falling tones tend to be associated with ‘closed’ meanings of finality and certainty, whereas rising tones more readily convey ‘open’ meanings of interrogation, suspension and doubt (see Hirst & Di Cristo (1998a) for a comprehensive survey of cross-linguistic uses of intonation).

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The different uses to which falls versus rises can be put found an idiosyncratic application among the children in this study. At the outset of the one-word stage, the children briefly made use of rising (or higher) versus falling (or lower) uses of pitch to apparently distinguish between their languages, in words whose segmental form is similar in both. For example, they used a (prolonged) falling tone for the Swedish word da¨r /dæfr/ ‘there’, rendered as [dæ], and had individual tonal preferences for the Portuguese word da´ /da/ ‘(you) give (me)’, whose segmental rendition was target-like. Karin used a rising tone, Sofia used either a rising or a high level tone, and Mikael preferred a reduplicated version of the word, with either a high level tone or a string of high pitched syllables followed by a fall from high on the last syllable (for discussion of the children’s uses of these words with both parents, see the section ‘The language(s) of bilinguals’ in Chapter 2). These uses suggest that at this stage the children treated words from each language as if the languages were tone languages. This is consistent with, for example, Jaeger’s (1997) report that the first use of pitch in her child’s speech was to differentiate between two segmental homophones, one English, the other the child’s own borrowing of a Spanish word (the Spanish vocabulary of the child is not otherwise mentioned in the study). At around the two-word stage, the children appeared keen on making clear to themselves the different meanings that can be conveyed by falls and rises. They would spend large amounts of time practising differential use of intonation in lone-play dialogues. Practice took several different forms, using either known words or babbled strings. For example, Karin would ask questions of her soft toys, or give them instructions to perform some action and then praise them or tell them off according to their ‘response’. Mikael would line up his toys as audience, point at some object while producing an utterance on a rising tone, then shake his head heftily, point at something else and produce utterances on falling tones. Sofia preferred to sit on her own talking away in two different voices, one asking questions on rising tones, the other answering in falling tones. Body language like lifting of eyebrows and open-hand gestures versus frowns and stretching index fingers close to their faces completed the ‘open’ versus ‘close’ feeling conveyed by their uses of prosody. Other instances of the children’s progressive command of uses of falls versus rises come, for example, from their use of the negator naõ ‘no’ as a reply to parental or sibling demands, which consistently had a falling tone, and from their fascination with counting objects. The latter soon became a favourite source of pleasure, probably induced by the rhythmical nature of this activity. Regardless of whether the children had names for the numerals, or for the objects that they matched with these, the non-final tone groups in their counting utterances consistently had rises. A few illustrative examples follow.

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(6.9) K 0;11 %sit: Karin points at an object whose name she apparently does not know, or has forgotten. *KAR: yyy? %pho: db·a %int: HR.

(6.10) K 0;11 %sit:

Karin points at an object whose name she knows, e.g. a glass of water. *KAR: a´gua? %eng: water? %pho: gbab(w) %mod: gagw %int: HR.

(6.11) K 0;11 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %int:

stretching her arms towards Mother’s beer glass. a´gua! da´? water! give? 1tg, HF; 2tg, HR.

Regardless of the segmental form with which it occurs, the rising tone appears to be used for querying, either asking for something, including (presumably) a name, or for confirmation of a name. The form in (6.9) can be interpreted as a wh-question, querying the name of the object, although this type of question occurs with a falling tune in Portuguese (see below). Complementary discussion of Karin’s form in (6.9) is given in Chapter 7, as example (7.9). (6.12) S 1;1 %sit:

Sofia is violently leafing through a magazine that contains a favourite picture of a crying baby. *SOF: aqui? aqui? aqui? %eng: here? here? here? %pho: for each tone group: [ti] %mod: gki


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%int: %act: *SOF: %int:

(6.13) M 1;5 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

the same HR on all three tone groups, very high-pitched. Mother finds the picture for Sofia. aqui! long HF.

hearing the clock strike the hours. dois, dois, dois, dois! two, two, two, two! for each tone group: [do] dojS LR on non-final tone groups; HF on final tone group.

(6.14) M 1;6 %sit: following the printed letters on a cereal box with his finger. *MIK: o a´, o a´, o a´. %eng: the a, the a, the a. %pho: for each tone group: [uga] %int: LR on non-final tone groups; HF on final tone group. Mikael used the utterance in (6.13), varying the number of words in it, in other situations where enumerating was involved, for example, for counting his own fingers while having his fingernails trimmed. Types of fall and types of rise

As illustrated in the previous section, the first differential uses of falls versus rises concern simple tones, those that are either falling or rising only. The children seem to start out preferring overall high varieties. This is particularly so, among rises, for meanings involving querying. Portuguese makes use of low varieties of these tones too, and also of one complex tone, a rise-falling tone where pitch movement is bidirectional. In standard analyses of nuclear tones, rise-falls are usually classified among falling tones, in that the final pitch movement in the tone is assumed as the deciding factor. However, the typical meanings associated with this tone in Portuguese in fact draw from ‘closed’ as well as ‘open’ sets of meanings, as discussed below. The following examples,

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(6.15) /(6.28), all taken from Karin’s data, illustrate some of the children’s well established uses of Portuguese nuclear tones. Low-fall. The low-fall starts at (mid-)low register and falls to the lowest pitch range. This is the unmarked tone for statements of facts, and wh-questions. (6.15) K 1;7 %sit: Mother has just wiped Karin’s ears after her bath. Karin grabs her penguin soft toy and repeats the operation, using the penguin’s beak. *KAR: orelha, suja. %eng: ear, dirty. %int: 1tg, MH/LF; 2tg, LF.

(6.16) K 1;7 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

watching a pigeon perch on the roof of the house. um pombo. a pigeon. mgpo˜bu u˜gpo˜bu MH/LF.

(6.17) K 1;8 %sit: identifying the owner of each piece of clothing in the laundry basket, Karin finds one of her own. *KAR: e´ be´be´. %eng: it’s baby. %int: MH/LF. At the same ages where ‘factual’ uses of the low-fall were stabilising, there are no examples of (low-)falling tones with the children’s whquestions, (o) que e´? ‘what is it?’ and, more rarely, quem e´? ‘who is it?’, the latter restricted to answering, or responding to, door-bells and sometimes, the telephone (the standard form for answering phone calls in the family is esta´? , a form of the verb estar ‘to be’, with a low-rise). The children used (low-)rising tones for these questions. These are sanctioned Portuguese uses associated with politeness, and the children’s forms in


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all likelihood reflect the mother’s extensive use of rises in wh-questions in exchanges with them. High-fall. The high-fall starts high, and falls to mid or to low. Where prenuclear material is involved, the high-fall is characterised by an upstep from the pitch level that precedes it. It can occur in the same sentence types where the low-fall occurs, but in contrast to the factual use of the low-fall, the high-fall indicates some involvement of the speaker in the contents of the utterance, ranging from enthusiasm through assertiveness to terseness. The children also use it, idiomatically, in commands that involve urgency. (6.18) K 2;7 %sit: Karin rushes to Mother from the garden, holding one finger up, where a splinter has lodged. *KAR: mama˜ tira este! %eng: mummy takes away this one! %int: HH/HF.

(6.19) K 2;7 %sit: standing in a long queue with Mother, in an extremely stuffy room, Karin suddenly removes her own skirt. Mother gapes at her. *KAR: esta´ muito calor, mama˜. %eng: it’s too hot, mummy. %int: 1tg, RH/HF; 2tg, LL. Extra low-fall. The extra low-fall starts low and falls below the speaker’s normal register. It is the commonest tone associated with exclamations and commands. In other uses, it indicates the speaker’s conviction about the legitimacy of what the utterance expresses. This latter use is illustrated in: (6.20) K 2;1 %sit:

at dinner, Mother pushes Karin’s elbow from the table. *MUM: muito feio. %eng: very ugly. %act: Karin immediately points at her grandmother, who happens to have both elbows on the table.

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*KAR: vo´vo´ faz. %eng: granny does it. %int: MPH/HH/eLF.

(6.21) K 2;6 %sit:

*DAD: %eng: %act: *KAR: %eng: %int:

Father has just got home from work, and addresses Mother as he walks towards the staircase. jag ga˚r upp och byter byxor. I’ll go upstairs and change trousers. Karin turns to Mother and nods knowingly. papa´ tem calcinha molhada. daddy wet his pants. LPH/RH/eLF.

Rise-fall. The rise-fall starts at mid-range, rises to high and falls to low. This tone can be used in different sentence types, such as statements, questions and exclamations. It commonly signals surprise on the part of the speaker, in all shades of this feeling ranging from astonishment to indignation, depending on tempo and register width. Examples of this use are: (6.22) K 2;5 %sit:

watching a TV character who has the letter K printed on his shirt. *MUM: veˆs? e´ um menino. %eng: see? it’s a boy. *KAR: naõ! %eng: no! %int: RF. %act: Karin points at the letter K on her own pullover. *KAR: e´ menina! %eng: it’s girl! %int: RH/HF.

(6.23)

K 2;8 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %int:

seeing Mother busying herself in the kitchen. o que e´ que vai fazer? what are you going to do? HH/LR.


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*MUM: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %int: %com:

um bolo! (bake) a cake! um bolo?! a cake?! HH/RF. Mother seldom bakes.

Low-rise. The low-rise starts low, rising to mid or high. It is used in yes/no questions, whose word order is identical to that of statements. That is, the use of a (low) falling as opposed to a (low) rising tone is the only way to distinguish between a statement and a question, respectively, in Portuguese. The low-rise also occurs in non-final tone groups of an utterance, to signal continuity, being the commonest tone in, for example, counting or item-listing, as in Mikael’s examples (6.13) and (6.14). In other uses, for example in wh-questions, it indicates tentativeness, often politeness. One use of a low-rise to convey tentativeness is illustrated in (6.26): (6.24) K 1;1 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %int: %act:

*KAR: %int: %com:

reading a story about farm animals. Karin points at a chick. piu-piu. tweet-tweet. gpiwgpiw MH/LF. Karin falls suddenly silent. She then pulls her pyjamas top up to show Mother her navel, and sticks her fingertip in it. piu-piu? HH/LR. Karin associates her word for ‘chick’ with the word umbigo /u˜gbigu/ ‘navel’. Children often pronounce this word ‘‘bigo ’’ [gbigu], apparently reanalysing the first syllable of the target as the indefinite article um /u˜/.

(6.25) K 1;5 %sit: in the bathroom, Karin inspects a new brand of bath gel that the Mother just bought her. *KAR: sabaõ menina? %eng: girl soap? (lit. ‘soap girl’)

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%int: [. . .] %act: *KAR: %eng: %int:

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HH/LR. Karin touches her other belongings in the room. escova menina. toalha menina. girl brush. girl towel. same MPH/RH/LF on both tone groups.

(6.26) K 2;6 %sit:

for some reason, Karin got terrified by Santa Claus, played by her uncle at Christmas several months before. The family lives in Estoril, Portugal, at the time. Karin is still persuaded that Santa is somewhere around the house, waiting to frighten her again. Mother decides to have a long talk with her, explaining very clearly that Santa lives very far away and there is therefore no reason to fear him. Mother concludes her explanation. *MUM: entaõ diz la´, filhinha, onde e´ que esta´ o Pai Natal? %eng: so tell me then, darling, where is Santa Claus? %act: Karin fidgets and glances about herself. *KAR: esta´ no Estoril? %eng: is he in Estoril? %int: LH/LR.

High-rise. The high-rise starts at mid-range and rises to high. Like the high-fall, it involves an upstep from the pitch level of any preceding syllables. The tone carries typically interrogative meanings, being particularly common in echo-questions (questions that repeat the utterance of a previous speaker) or in questions that require repetition of a previous utterance. The interrogative meaning readily associated with this tone stands out most clearly in utterances where the tone itself constitutes the interrogation, in that no particular segmental carrier is required. Common carriers to elicit repetition are como? ‘pardon?’ (lit. ‘how?’), o queˆ? ‘what?’ or single sounds like ‘‘a˜’’? /~/ or ‘‘m ’’? /m/ (roughly equivalent to ‘eh?’). Child forms like Karin’s in (6.9) appear to be ad hoc fillers to support the interrogative tone. Naturally, the mother made extensive use of the high-rise for the purpose of eliciting repetitions, particularly at the time of the children’s first attempts at using new words or describing new experiences. At around age 1;6 the children show clear understanding of this use of the high-rise addressed to them, by repeating their own utterances verbatim, words as well as


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intonation pattern. They nevertheless seldom use the tone to request repetition at this stage, using it more often in echo-questions as an apparent monitoring device of their own rendition of novel words, or of their understanding of the adult’s utterance that they repeat. Examples of this use are: (6.27) K 1;7 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %int: *MUM: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %int:

(6.28) K 1;7 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %int: *MUM: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %int:

seeing a kiwi fruit. e´ ovinho? is it egg? HH/LR. [. . .] e´ um kiwi. [. . .] it’s a kiwi. e´ kiwi? is it kiwi? HH/HR.

looking at pictures of her uncle as a baby. e´ be´be´? is it baby? HH/LR. [. . .] e´ o tio Ze´, quando era be´be´. [. . .] it’s uncle Ze´, when he was a baby. e´ tio Ze´? be´be´? is it uncle Ze´? baby? the same HH/HR pattern on both tone groups.

Given the very specific meanings associated with the high-rise and the high-fall, the children’s early preferential use of these tones as default rising and falling tones, as in (6.9) to (6.12), deserves some mention. In adult uses, the high-rise is clearly interrogative, and the high-fall carries overtones of personal assertion, two sets of meanings that find plenty of reasons for vocal expression in everyday interaction with young children. The children’s early uses show awareness of the generic ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ dichotomy involved in the meanings of each tone, but no awareness of the scope of their application in adult speech. In that the tones are used precisely as generic carriers of meaning, the children’s choices can be said to constitute examples of intonational overextension,

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paralleling other instances of overextension that occur when the children start tackling features of language that are novel to them (see Chapters 7 and 8 for other examples of overextension in the data). The basics of intonational choices and beyond From the outset of the two-word stage and throughout their second year, the children acquire idiomatic command of the basic meanings associated with different tones. Their progressive mastery shows first through their adequate responses, verbal or otherwise, to adult uses, and later through their own productive use. In addition to the examples above that illustrate stable associations between tone and meaning, other examples show understanding of differential choices in intonation, including the use of intonation to challenge perceived assumptions from their interlocutors, as in (6.32) below. A sample from all three children follows. (6.29) K1;8 %sit:

*MUM: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %int: %act: *MUM: %eng: %act: *KAR: %eng: %int:

(6.30) K1;8 %sit:

Karin is at the stage where ‘no’ is her favourite word. Mother wants to clear the table where they just snacked, and points at Karin’s glass on it. a Karin quer a´gua? does Karin want water? naõ. no. eLF. Mother grips Karin’s glass. pronto, entaõ a mama˜ leva o copo. OK, mummy takes the glass then. Karin stretches towards the glass. naõ!! da´, a´gua! no!! give (me) water! 1tg, HF, yelled; 2tg and 3tg, HF.

Karin is playing with her teddy-bear, gripping each of its body parts in turn and greeting them. *KAR: o pe´. ola´, pe´. %eng: the foot. hi, foot. %int: 1tg, LF;


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2tg, HF; 3tg, LR. *KAR: a maõ. ola´, maõ. %eng: the hand. hi, hand. %int: 1tg, LF; 2tg, HF; 3tg, LR. (6.31) S 1;3 %sit:

Mother and Sofia are going through the children’s toys. Mother finds an old rattle and Sofia stretches her arms to it. *SOF: da´? %eng: give? %int: LR. *MUM: e´ da Sofia, e´? %eng: it’s Sofia’s, is it? %act: Sofia nods energetically. *SOF: da´ ca´. %eng: give me (lit. ‘give here’). %int: MH/eLF.

(6.32) M 2;1 %sit:

*MUM: %eng: %act: *MIK: %eng: %int: [. . .] %act: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %int:

doing differently coloured jigsaw puzzles with Mother, whose turn it is to select the puzzles. este branquinho, com o ovo? this white one, with the egg? Mikael nods and points at the egg. ovo aqui. egg here. MH/LF. Mother chooses a reddish puzzle. agora vamos fazer este encarnado, esta´ bem? let’s do this red one now, OK? naõ. este e´ laranja. no. this one is orange. 1tg, HF to mid; 2tg, MH/lower HF to mid.

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(6.33) M 2;1 %sit: Mikael and Mother are playing hide-and-seek with Mikael’s toys. Mikael walks around the room, voicing out loud his guesses about where Mother hid the toys. *MIK: esta´ mesa? %eng: is it table? %int: HH/LR. *MIK: esta´ chaõ? %eng: is it floor? %int: HH/LR. [. . .] %act: Mikael finds one toy behind a curtain. *MIK: esta´ cortina! %eng: it’s curtain! %int: HH/HF. Progressive control over the meanings conveyed by intonation also shows in displaced uses that the children make of these meanings. Just like children eventually realise that they can talk about say, cats, and therefore invoke the meaning of the word cat with no cat in sight, they realise that the meaning of a tone can be invoked by its simple use, whether the associated feeling is there or not. Intonation starts being used also as a means of expressing a feeling that the speaker wants conveyed, not a feeling that the speaker feels. We may wish to label this new insight as the role played by intonation in learning how to lie, in saving face, in swaying the listener’s attention or behaviour, in acquiring small-talk skills, or in becoming perfunctory users of language. Several other labels would equally serve to describe the gist of one central finding that the children appear to be making about language, the one that Pike (1945: 22) so aptly summarised as ‘if a man’s tone of voice belies his words, we immediately assume that the intonation more faithfully reflects his true linguistic intentions’. Two examples illustrate this point, the first an early instance of face-saving, the second a later, and quite adult-like, perfunctory display (part of Sofia’s line in (6.35) is addressed below as example (6.72), in a different connection): (6.34) M 1;5 %sit:

Mikael cannot say the Swedish word Sebastian /segbastjan/, the name of a character in a cartoon book. While reading the book, Mother tries to elicit the word from him several times.


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*MUM: Sebastian. sabe dizer Sebastian? %eng: Sebastian. can you say Sebastian? %act: Mikael quickly turns to a page where he and Mother just spent several minutes discussing another character, ‘daddy’, whose name Mikael has no problem pronouncing. Mikael gasps, feigning surprise at finding ‘daddy’. *MIK: papa´! %eng: daddy! %int: MH/RF.

(6.35) S 3;3 %sit:

Karin has completed a puzzle that she found quite challenging, and she shows it around to everyone several times, including to Sofia. The puzzle represents a house. *SOF: oh! casinha! tu fizeste? %eng: oh! house! did you do it? %int: 1tg, eLF; 2tg, eLF; 3tg, HPH/HH/LR. %com: Sofia repeats her utterance verbatim, including its intonation pattern, every time Karin shows her the same puzzle. Sofia uses this utterance as a fixed template, replacing the noun in accordance with her interlocutors’ exhibit, to praise their accomplishments.

This (necessarily very limited) sample of data shows that the children have a repertoire of intonational items from which they can choose, and that they exercise their command over intonational uses at their own discretion, depending on the purposes of their utterances. Their choices are appropriately idiomatic, and the children sound colloquial in their conversational interaction. The sample also shows that the children have command over only a few of the idiomatic uses of intonation in Portuguese, at the stages addressed here. The matter of deciding whether a particular tone has been ‘acquired’ is as problematic as deciding whether a particular word, or sound segment, has been acquired. The word itself may be there in children’s productions, a particular segment may be frequent in a child’s speech, but only with certain meanings or in certain contexts. Likewise, the data in this section show emerging uses of pitch contrasts. As with child uses of language in general, the issue may

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be maturational. The rise-fall, for example, is used in Portuguese to express reservation, adding a qualifying trait to the statements where it occurs. It is also used to express sarcasm, often contemptuous. These are judgmental choices that involve a level of cognitive development unavailable to young children. Just like (uses of) words may be lacking to express, say, meanings of ‘reservation’ that are not yet available to the child, the data in this section show no reserved uses of fall-rises because there are no reserved judgements to be made. There is evidence that passive as well as active uses of intonation are not yet learned by late childhood (Dankovicova´ et al ., 2004), and that the learning of intonation may in fact go on well into adulthood (Cruttenden, 1982; 1985). For later uses that the children in this study made of, specifically, the rise-fall and the high-fall, see Cruz-Ferreira (1999b).

Speaking in Sentences Child multiword utterances in data like (6.13) or (6.25) provide interesting insight into first attempts at tackling and managing sentence intonational patterns. Awareness of which tones to use when implies emerging awareness that speech melodies must be fitted into tone groups. Halliday (1967) discusses (adult) choices in the assignment of linguistic material to tone groups as issues of tonality. Tone groups correspond to comfortable breathing cycles, generally separated by unfilled pauses (although the criteria to assign tone groups to utterances can be quite complex, see Cruttenden, 1997: 29ff.). Beginner users of language are known to have difficulty with the sophisticated task of coordinating speech with breathing. This is why tone group structure may be, and often is, disrupted in child speech, in the sense that there is mismatch between pauses and the complete train of thought that can be expressed by a sequence of words that would otherwise form a ‘sentence’. The children’s early use of tonality is interesting in what it shows about their first attempts at putting a whole idea together, or a sequence of events. It also raises a number of intriguing issues about whether and how to define a child sentence on the basis of tonality alone. Sentence fluency Tonality is generally taken as giving a good indication of whether children are attempting a single-word or a multiword utterance, in that the presence of a pause is taken as signalling the end of the utterance (see e.g. Cruttenden, 1979: 33/34). By this token, utterances like (6.36) are one-word, whereas utterances like (6.37) are two-word. Each tone group corresponds to a sentence, with utterance-final pause marked by an orthographic final stop. In both examples, Sofia is referring to her own belongings:


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(6.36)

S 1;2 *SOF: %eng: %int:

bola. Sofia. ball. Sofia. 1tg, LF; 2tg, MH/LF.

(6.37) S 1;9 *SOF: sapato Sofia. %eng: Sofia shoe. (lit. ‘shoe Sofia’) %int: RH/LF. Tone choices also play a role in deciding where an utterance ends. As noted above, one of the uses of rising tones is to signal continuity, that is, precisely to indicate that the utterance is unfinished, regardless of whether there is a discernible pause following the tone. Examples from the data are (6.14) and (6.28), where orthographic commas and the question mark represent rhythmical pauses. Signalling continuity in this way is of course a common feature of adult speech, where the same sentence may contain several tone groups. Current analyses of intonation take this differential use of pauses into account, by means of labels like ‘intermediate phrase’, corresponding to uses of tonality within a sentence, one or more of which may be contained in an ‘intonation phrase’, which corresponds to a major break, roughly equivalent to a sentence (Beckman & Elam, 1993). Sofia’s example (6.36) would then be taken as containing two distinct utterances. However, data like the following appear to raise problems for this analysis (cp. also example (6.15) above): (6.38) K 1;7 %sit:

Karin comes to Mother, carrying her blue hair-tie and her comb in her hands. *KAR: da´, puxo, azul. %eng: give, ponytail, blue. %int: LF on all three tone groups. %com: Ptg puxo can refer both to ‘hair-tie’ and ‘ponytail’.

(6.39) K 1;9 %sit: in the car with Mother, having just been in the automatic car-wash, an experience that terrifies her. *KAR: carro, sujo, banho.

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%eng: car, dirty, bath. %int: LF on all three tone groups. Karin repeated her utterance in (6.39) several times on the way home. As soon as her father came home, she reported to him in the same way, including several repetitions: (6.40) K 1;9 *KAR: bil, smutsig, bada. %eng: car, dirty, bathe. %int: LF on all three tone groups. (6.41) S 2;0 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %int:

Sofia has just used the potty by herself. mama˜, anda ca´, olha, coćo´. mummy, come here, look, poo. LF on all four tone groups.

(6.42) S 2;10 %sit: Sofia has just finished a representation of the side façade of the neighbouring house, viewed from her bedroom window, using plastic pins on a frame. She shows it to Mother, pointing at the neighbour’s house. The frame shows three sides each of two differently coloured squares, partially overlapping, one for the main wall, one for the outhouse. *SOF: a casa, quadrado, igual. %eng: the house, square, the same. %int: LF on all three tone groups. There seems to be good reason to take utterances like (6.15) and (6.38) /(6.42) as multiword sentences, in that the sequencing of the words appears to show an attempt at expressing a complete thought, in the right language-bound logic order. That is, the child may be chunking up the utterance into tone groups with falling tones, not because each tone group is meant as a complete message, but because both pauses and falling tones may reflect a time lag that assists the meaningful juxtaposing of the different words that constitute a complete thought, or a grammatically complete description of an event. For adult uses of language, Croft (1995) addresses similar asymmetries in the reciprocal mapping of grammatical units and tone groups.


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At the same stages, child attempts at the opposite strategy, fitting all relevant words into one same tone group, result in a different effect altogether. The words can no longer be spread out neatly in the way that they do in single-word tone groups; they need to be compressed beside one another into single-breath cycles instead. The result is that fluent tonality, with associated fluent intonation pattern, is often achieved at the expense of fluent word articulation. Examples are: (6.43) M 1;5 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

reading a picture book about antonyms, Mikael points at a large dog. e´ um grande caõ. it’s a big dog. gou˜ggk~w ˜ gou˜gR~dgk~w ˜ MH/LF.

(6.44) M 2;1 %sit: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

reading a book, Mother points at a ship. o que e´? e´ um barco? what is it? is it a boat? e´ grande, muito grande. it’s big, very big. og‹gl~d # mdg‹gl~d oggR~d # mu˜˜jtu gR~d LPH/LF on both tone groups.

The auditory effect of renditions like grande in (6.43) and muito in (6.44) is that of a mumbled sequence of sounds. Achieving target sentence intonation appears to involve learning how to rush through a number of syllables, particularly those that immediately precede the intonational nucleus. The next section addresses this strategy. Filling in the fluent whole Just like children realise that word meanings are elastic (see the first section in Chapter 8), they find out that word forms are elastic too. Words need to fill in and fit into, in sequence, the intonation patterns that are already in place and working. For some children, the realisation that certain positional slots in their utterances need to be so filled appears to come ahead of their means of filling them. The resulting utterances typically show these slots overtly marked by means of their own fillers.

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Fillers are accounted for by Boysson-Bardies (1999: 199) as ‘particles / neutral elements [. . .] whose referents are not clear’, added to children’s first words. They are defined by Peters (2001: 229) as ‘unglossable syllables’ that some children incorporate into their utterances. The ‘not clear’, or ‘unglossable’, nature attributed to child fillers stems of course from an assumption of the adult model of grammar as the target of child productions. Fillers are unglossable because they do not correspond to assumed target forms, not because they lack a function in child forms. Fillers are said to lie at the interface between different layers of grammar, straddling phonology, morphology and syntax, and therefore to resist a ‘rigidly compartmentalized view of language’ (Lleo´, 2001: 262). Difficulties in a generalised approach to children’s use of fillers are highlighted by Veneziano (2001), who points out the noncomparable nature of the different methodologies and theoretical approaches used in filler data elicitation and analysis. Boysson-Bardies (1999: 167), in turn, cautions against not only cross-linguistic differences in children’s use of language, for example that expressive styles involving widespread use of intonational devices are more common among French than AngloAmerican children, but also against cross-cultural researchers’ sensitivity to different child styles. She notes that ‘Anglo-American authors take a dim view of such [expressive] strategies’, because they are seen to involve less lexical variety and less rapid vocabulary development. Consensus seems nevertheless to be that fillers lie outside of standard approaches to grammar. Bilingualism does too, in that neither fits into received models of language. To my knowledge, no discussion on the use of fillers by bilingual children is available in the literature. Bearing in mind the tentative nature of findings about child fillers, I now propose a few preliminary thoughts on the use of fillers among the children in this study. Consensus from available literature is also that fillers play a role in shaping child grammar for the child, where the word ‘grammar’ generally refers to morphosyntax, as is the norm in linguistics literature. The literature does provide a number of intriguing comments on the prosodic features of child fillers. For example, Peters (2001: 232) states that ‘one function of these early fillers seems to be to preserve the number of syllables in and/or the prosodic rhythm of a target utterance ’ (emphasis added, MCF). Nevertheless, the possible role of fillers in suprasegmental child grammars is not followed up, as Peters (2001) also notes. Fillers are even viewed as a hindrance to a clear-cut segmental analysis of child utterances, as in Boysson-Bardies’s (1999: 161) observation that filling the intonation contours with filler syllables ‘masks’ whatever words the children may be using (emphasis added, MCF). What is clear from comments such as these is that fillers represent child attempts at replicating the suprasegmental structure of the language in question. Common analyses take them instead as provisional placeholders for


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syntactic slots, namely, articles or demonstratives (Boysson-Bardies, 1999: 199), emergent 1st and 2nd-person pronouns (Scliar-Cabral, 2002) or, more generally, as an incipient modelling of adult functors (Menn & Feldman, 2001). These analyses appear to stem from the syntactic position in which fillers are said to occur. As Peters (2001: 233) notes, it is difficult to talk about the role of position, because of its ‘dual nature: on the one hand it plays a role in rhythm, on the other it plays a role in morphosyntax’. Most of the literature reports on fillers that precede assumed phrase heads, in line with observations about babbling where isolated syllables predominantly occur preceding, rather than following, sequences of syllables (Boysson-Bardies, 1999: 50). However, fillers also occur in positions that cannot easily be parsed as preceding phrasal heads. Following are a few examples from the present data, corresponding to similar examples available in other literature. Two distinct types of fillers, stressed and unstressed, occur in these children’s data, a distinction that may help us understand the role played by fillers in their speech. Stressed fillers

Stressed fillers appear to compensate for lexical targets that for some reason fail the children. The children’s productions show that the gap must be filled with a word that can bear lexical stress: (6.45) K 1;7 %sit: Karin has hurt herself, and calls for her teddybear for comfort. *KAR: yyy ursinho! %eng: yyy teddy! %pho: gvi ugił %int: MH/HF. %sit:

spotting a picture of her uncle in a family photo album. *KAR: yyy tio Ze´. %eng: yyy uncle Ze´. %pho: gvi tig˘o %int: MH/LF.

(6.46) K 2;1 %sit: Karin wants to hold Sofia, who is lying in her cot. *KAR: mama˜ ‘‘fuxatila´t’’ ‘‘Fossia’’?

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%eng: %pho: %int: %com:

mummy takes Sofia out? mgm~ gfuStiglat fugi MPH/HH/LR. up to age 2;4, Karin had a spoonerism on Sofia’s name, pronouncing it [fugsi], for /sugfi/.

%sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %com: %int:

Karin has a splinter in her finger. mama˜ ‘‘fuxatila´t’’ ‘‘pito’’! mummy pulls out splinter! mgm~ gfuStiglat gpitu the target form for ‘splinter’ is pico /gpiku/ MPH/HH/HF.

The filler in (6.45) has no apparent lexical target, whereas the one in (6.46) is likely to be based on the two Ptg verbs puxar ‘pull’ and tirar ‘remove’, compounded as puxa tirar /gpuS tigRaR/. Karin used the latter for anything related to pulling, removing or fixing, including when she used the potty. (6.47) S 1;11 %sit: Sofia has just completed a jigsaw puzzle, and takes a few steps back to admire her work. *SOF: yyy ‘‘didu´’’! %eng: yyy pretty! %pho: guff digdu %int: MH/HF.

Sofia’s utterance probably attempts a replication of the mother’s usual appreciative comments que/taõ lindo! /gk‹ glı˜du, t~w glı˜du/ ‘so/how pretty!’, on the same falling tone. (6.48) S 2;1 %sit:

*SOF: %eng: %pho: %int:

at a poolside, in Portugal, a boy invites Sofia to play with him. She later reports to Mother. m[en]ino yyy S[of]ia! boy yyy Sofia! gminu gg·&g·& gsi RH/RF.


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(6.49) S 2;8 %sit:

Sofia is asking Mother how to say certain words in Swedish. *SOF: papa´ yyy olhos? %eng: daddy yyy eyes? %pho: pgpa kg·f g&ju %int: MPH/HH/LR.

(6.50) S 3;5 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %pho: %int: %com:

(6.51) M 1;4 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %com: %int:

telling a story, or recounting some episode. yyy vez [. . .] yyy time [. . .] g·gveS FH/LR. this filler is probably modelled on the standard Era uma vez. . . /goR()umgveS/ ‘Once upon a time’, and extended from it.

watching Father eating grapes. papa´ yyy uva. daddy yyy grape. pgpa gb/gb/gb/ ugw ˚ ˚ ˚ the transcription of the second word represents Mikael’s smacking his lips together. LPH/RH/LF.

These fillers often occur with supporting gestures, and they may or may not be glossable, by association with (recognisable chunks of) likely phonological and referential equivalents in the target language. The filler in (6.46) is glossable in this way, the one in (6.48) is not (see example (7.11) for further discussion of the form in (6.48)). Any overextended or child-invented form that is a possible word of the target language could therefore be taken as a filler, in this sense. Whether they can indeed be viewed as (single) words of the language, and computed in quantifications of child vocabulary remains moot, an issue to which I return in Chapter 8. What seems to be clear is that these fillers play a role in lengthening the children’s utterances, thereby adding prosodic fluency to them. For other examples of stressed fillers in these children’s data, and discussion of their function, see the first section of Chapter 5.

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See also the section on ‘Replacive words’ in Chapter 8, for an account of placeholders, i.e. sanctioned adult-like fillers in the children’s speech. Unstressed fillers

Unstressed fillers sometimes occur as strategies to resolve syllabic complexity, particularly where syllable margins are concerned. Illustrative examples from Karin and Mikael follow. Sofia’s data show practically no use of these strategies, in that she preferred omission or substitution of problematic segments in words. (6.52) K 2;0 [g˘ul‹] azul /gzul/ ‘blue’ (6.53) M 1;10 [tgweS] treˆs /tReS/ ‘three’ [kglom] creme /kRom/ ‘balm/ointment’ Portuguese has drastic vowel reduction, and often omission, in unstressed syllables. Vowels reduce to the default vowel of the language, which can subsequently be omitted. Neutral, or default, vowels have been postulated for some languages, to account for the occurrence of a vowel sound in a number of different circumstances, viz. in unstressed syllables only, in epenthesis to break consonant clusters and in filled pauses (see Hyman, 1975: 146). This can also be the vowel with which other vowels alternate in stress shifts due e.g. to affixation. The quality of the vowel that fulfils all of these roles is different across languages, and may also be different within the same language (for a sample of the controversy surrounding neutral vowels and their labels, see Linguist List (1998; 2003b)). In the Lisbon dialect of Portuguese used in the family, the default vowel has an unrounded high mid-back quality in epenthesis and stress-induced alternation, and is usually transcribed /‹/ in the literature on Portuguese. Other varieties of the language, in both Portugal and Brazil, have a quality in the area of /i/ as default vowel (see Cruz-Ferreira (1999a), Mateus & Andrade (2000), and Barbosa & Albano (2004), for discussion of neutral vowels in European and Brazilian Portuguese, respectively). The vowel /‹/ is phonemic in European Portuguese and occurs only in unstressed syllables where, as stated, it is often omitted. The same vowel, or an unrounded mid central one, //, also phonemic in the language, occurs in filled pauses. As an epenthetic vowel, [‹] is found in song lyrics for the purpose of melismatic effects: folk songs or the traditional fado provide profuse examples, where a monosyllabic word like flor /floR/ ‘flower’ may be rendered as trisyllabic [f‹gloR‹]. The same epenthesis is also found in nursery rhymes for purposes of rhythmicality, and in some child speech,


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including to avoid consonant clusters or closed word-final syllables as in (6.52) and (6.53). Syllable-bound child fillers of this kind occur either before of after the lexically stressed syllable in a word, and they consist of one single vowel sound that has the quality of the language’s default vowel(s). Because they result in the addition of a syllable to what is treated as a sanctioned target word, not necessarily a target ‘utterance’, analyses of child language usually treat these strategies as instances of phonotactic processes that are accounted for in a straightforward way. Other child fillers, also unstressed and also resulting in the addition of syllables, appear to owe nothing to phonotactic strategies. They consistently precede stressed syllables of words whose initial segments the children have no trouble pronouncing, including vowels, and are therefore probably best treated as additions to an utterance, not to single words. They can also occur reduplicated as in (6.61). Examples are: (6.54) K 1;6 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

(6.55)

whenever Karin tires of being carried around, or of sitting on Mother’s lap. chaõ. down (lit. ‘floor’) igj~w ˜ S~w ˜ MPH/eLF.

K 1;6 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

(6.56) S 0;8 %sit:

saying the names of letters of the alphabet. um o´. an oh. mgw& u˜g& MPH/LF.

playing ball with Mother, by rolling it on the floor between themselves. *SOF: yyy da´! yyy da´! %eng: yyy give! yyy give! %pho: gda # gda %mod: da

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%com: Sofia bounces her body in rhythm with her utterance, which she repeats whenever the mother has caught the ball and prepares to roll it back to her. %int: MPH/HL in both tone groups. The form in (6.56) appeared after Sofia used da´, in similar play sessions. She later used either form to request toys or attention. (6.57)

(6.58)

S 0;9 %sit: *SOF: %pho: %mod: %int:

calling her sister. yyy Karin! igaj gkaRin MPH/descending minor third from high.

S 2;1 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

wanting a drink of water. yyy a´gua? yyy water. lig·a gagw HPH/LR to high.

(6.59) S 2;4 [gl~w ˜ ] Miguelaõ [jgj] sua feia!

/migg(‹)l~w ˜/ /su gfj/

‘big Mikael’ ‘you naughty one!’

Sofia used the second utterance in (6.59) to report to her mother any mischief or accident that involved herself, such as drawing on a wall or soiling her pants. Her utterance is based on the mother’s usual response to such incidents. (6.60) S 3;5 %sit:

coming indoors after playing in the garden. Sofia lifts her mother’s hand to touch her own cheek. *SOF: a Sofia tem a bochecha fria. %eng: Sofia has a cold cheek. %pho: gsiagSSagsi %mod: sugfi t~˜j bugSS gfRi


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%com: the given target utterance is tentative, in that it is unclear whether Sofia is referring to one cheek or both. %int: MPH/RH/LF. Example (6.60) shows the typical sandhi involved in sequences of the oral unrounded mid central vowel of Portuguese, where consecutive // merge into [a]. The two [a] in the transcription show that Sofia’s utterance does involve consecutive // vowels: the first is the final sound of the words Sofia and bochecha , the second is a filler. (6.61) M 0;10 %sit: Mikael reaches for his brand new shoes, that are among his toys on the table at which he is playing. *MIK: yyy sapato! %eng: shoe! %pho: bbgbatu %mod: sgpatu %int: MPH/HF.

(6.62) M 1;10 %sit: *MUM: %eng: %com: %act: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

(6.63) M 2;0 %sit:

during potty-training. tem coćo´? you have poo? Mother is asking whether Mikael has soiled his nappy. Mikael shakes his head heftily. yyy tem. yyy have (lit. ‘no(t) have’). gt~˜j n~w ˜ t~˜j MPH/eLF.

Mikael has been looking for his toy dog, and finds it under a cushion. *MIK: yyy [de]baixo yyy [almo]fada! %eng: yyy under yyy cushion. %pho: gbajSagfad

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%mod: gdbajSu dalmugfad %int: MPH/FH/HF. The prosodic role of fillers Disregarding word-bound fillers, whose phonotactic nature appears uncontroversial, there are several arguments that plead for a chief role of fillers as prosodic devices, in these children’s data. The examples below concern mostly Sofia’s data, given the more encompassing use of these linguistic devices in her speech. She was earliest in her use of fillers, and used them the longest. First, the same segmental filler may occur in stressed or unstressed positions, and correspond to lexical or grammatical material in different utterances. Compare example (6.64) (discussed as (5.17) in chapter 5), which contains a filler for grammatical material, with (6.49), above: (6.64)

S 2;8 %sit: *SOF: %gls: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

seeing Mikael asleep in the living-room. Miguelaõ yyy dormir? o Miguelaõ esta´ a dormir? is Mikael asleep? gl~w ˜ k· gmiR u miggl~w ˜ (S)ta duRgmiR MH/LR.

Another example from Sofia shows these uses in the same utterance: (6.65)

S 2;6 *SOF: %gls: %eng: %pho: %mod:

mama˜, ‘‘klhi klhko´’’? mama˜, a Karin esta´ na escola? mummy, is Karin at school? gm~ff # kg·ifk·gk&f mgm~ # gkaRin tanSgk&l

It is therefore difficult to find a general lexicogrammatical function, or a general meaning, that can be attributed to particular fillers. Other examples are: (6.66)

M 2;1 %sit:

Mikael and Mother are playing hide-and-seek with Mikael’s toys. As Mikael watches, Mother hides his toy dog under a table, and then deliberately lies to Mikael.


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*MUM: %eng: *MIK: %pho: %com: %int:

pronto, o caõ esta´ no sofa´. there, the doggy is on the sofa. yyy sofa´?! tgttgtugfa the target of Ptg sofa´ is /sugfa/. MPH/FH/RF.

In (6.66), Mikael uses the appropriate rise-falling tune that conveys disbelief. It is likely that the nuclear tone is the crucial factor for the meaning that he intended, and that he therefore filled in the less relevant remaining vocabulary material with nonsense syllables. (6.67)

S 2;3 *SOF: %eng: %pho:

yyy bola. yyy ball. gkika gb&w

Sofia used the filler in (6.67) preceding nouns or adjectives like grande ‘big’ or encarnado ‘red’, in dialogues or in lone play, at times adding her own name in a separate tone group at the end of her utterances, and with rising or falling intonation. She used it to describe, request or ask about the word following the filler in utterances where the filler could be interpreted as a rendition of material as disparate as a determiner, a noun or isto e´ (da Sofia) , onde esta´, esta´ aqui , quero , da´ (a` Sofia) , etc. (‘this is (Sofia’s), where is, here is, I want, give (Sofia)’, respectively). The likely functions of these fillers are too different and too unrelated to make sense of them in lexicogrammatical terms, suggesting that the children are not attempting a replication of a segmental target. They appear instead to be using the fillers as prenuclear stand-ins, i.e. as carriers of prosodic features that precede nuclear tones. In fact, certain truncations in oxytone words appear to occur for the sake of prosody too, to accommodate the stressed syllable against a preceding unstressed context, as in (6.68) and (6.69), or in Mikael’s rendition of his own name in (6.73), below. This is apparent in renditions where only the vowel of CV prestressed syllables is kept, although the children have no problem in pronouncing the consonant otherwise. In that the children are similarly preserving, at word level, what matters for the right wordprosody, these truncations explain why the children do not choose to simply omit the prestressed syllable altogether. Examples are: (6.68) K 1;6 [igSi]

chichi

/SigSi/

‘pee (N)’

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[igpow] chapeú /Sgpow/

‘hat’

[igpow] papel

‘paper’

/pgpol/

(6.69) M 1;3 [g‚o] cafe´ /kgfo/ ‘coffee’ [ig·o˜˜j] balo˜es /bglo˜˜jS/ ‘balloons’ Added support for this interpretation of these children’s use of fillers comes from the children’s data on singing. The linguistic filler pattern discussed here is replicated in their attempts at singing with lyrics, where a prestressed filler regularly precedes a strongly stressed final word. Examples from Mikael: (6.70) M 1;1 %sit:

singing the refrain from the Spanish-language popular song ‘La Bamba’. *MIK: bamba bamba. . . %pho: bafgwawa %mod: gbambagbamba

(6.71) M 1;3 %sit: *MIK: %pho: %mod:

singing Happy Birthday to You. [parabeńs a vo]ceˆ. . . figueff pRgb~˜jz v&gse

Second, fillers occur not only in place of syntactic material, but also where no syntactic slot can be detected in the target (unless, of course, empty syntactic slots are postulated in the target in order to account for these child forms). The fillers appear instead to occur in order to accommodate the rhythmical structure of the language or, more generally, a fluent stress pattern with alternation of strong and weak syllables, as in (6.47) or (6.60). Other examples are: (6.72) S 3;3 %sit: *SOF: %gls: %eng: %pho: %int:

praising her siblings’ skills, who show her their drawings or constructions. yyy tu yyy ‘‘fez’’? tu (e´ que) fizeste? yyy you yyy did? gtu gfeS HPH/HH/LR.


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(6.73) M 2;1 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

fitting a piece into a jigsaw puzzle that he and Mother are doing. Miguel yyy ‘‘fiz’’! Mikael did it! iggowlugfiS (u)miggolgfeS MPH/RH/RF.

Fashioning a rhythmically fluent utterance is true of these children’s Swedish too, as in the following two examples from Karin: (6.74) K 0;11 %sit: Karin is sitting on Father’s knee. She suddenly becomes restless. *DAD: vad vill du, gumman? %eng: what is it you want, darling? *KAR: yyy titta da¨r! %eng: yyy look there! %pho: 3 ''gik3 gt3t3gdæ *DAD: ska jag titta na˚nstans? %eng: shall I look at something? *KAR: da¨r yyy titta! da¨r yyy titta! %eng: there look! there look! %pho: gdæ 3''d ita # gdæ 3''d ita %mod: dæfr ''titfa

(6.75) K 1;9 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %mod:

Karin claps the seat of a swing, addressing a group of gathered Swedish relatives. yyy sitta och gunga! yyy sit and swing! ogito ''gPEa for sitta och gunga: /''sItfa &(k) ''gPEfa/

Third, the fillers are, or contain, sonorants, the class of segments that can carry prosody. They are often constituted by a single vowel sound, as in several of the examples discussed here. Incidentally, the occurrence of single vowels as strategic devices in child speech deserves investigation, particularly in what concerns the assumed child preference for the

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construction of CV syllables. Kent and Miolo (1995: 309ff.) and Oller (2000: 100ff.) provide different perspectives on the issue of default child syllables. Fourth, unstressed filler segments may or may not show articulatory similarity with the segments in the target forms that presumably occur in the same syntactic position, but they often involve either vowel harmony, by replicating articulatory features of the segments in the intonational nucleus of the children’s utterance, or the quality of a default vowel. This suggests that the target for the fillers’ phonetic shape is not to be sought in the segmental shape of syntactic material for which the fillers stand in, but either in the segmental shape of the intonational nucleus of each utterance, or in the quality of a vowel whose function in the target language is that of a ‘filler’ too. Interference from material occurring in the nuclear position of these children’s utterances is observed elsewhere. The two following examples from Mikael illustrate this point, both concerning the same word bem /b~˜j/ ‘well, right’, that he had no problems pronouncing (other examples that vouch for the central role played by nuclear material in these children’s productions are discussed in the ‘Replacive words’ section in Chapter 8): (6.76) M 2;5 %sit:

*MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod: (6.77) M 2;6 %sit:

*MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod:

Mikael is struggling to free himself from his grandmother’s grip, who insists on feeding him against his will. The grandmother accidentally knocks a glass over, spilling its contents. ‘‘fem’’ feito! serves you right! f~˜j gfjtu b~˜j gfjtu

Mikael is playing with Mother, leaves the room to fetch additional toys and immediately comes back in again. Miguel ja´ vem, esta´ ‘‘vem’’? Mikael will be back soon, OK? miggol a gv~˜j # ta gv~˜j miggol a gv~˜j # ta gb~˜j

Through the use of fillers, the children appear to be keeping their utterances manageable by controlling their segmental variable. Child


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multiword utterances are thus filled in with segments that help keep their segmental quality largely constant, in order to support the prosodic rendition that gives them fluency. From the outset of the two-word stage, this one-dimensional exploration of features of speech mirrors their learning strategies at the babbling stage, as exemplified in examples (6.4)/(6.7). As noted in the literature, fillers start appearing more consistently from the transition to the two-word stage, when children begin grappling with the connected sequencing of single words. Child attempts at long utterances appear to show a regression in the pronunciation of words that are otherwise unproblematic. Certain words, that are otherwise easily incorporated into their speech, may even start being omitted, resulting in variability in the shape of phrases, like that of single words, at the same developmental stage: (6.78) M 2;1 %sit:

reading a book with Mother. Mikael’s favourite character in the book is a snail. *MIK: o caracol! %eng: the snail! %pho: u k()Rgk&w, u kktgk&w %mod: u kRgk&l %com: Mikael repeats his phrase several times along the reading of the book, with different intonations, pronouncing the noun in the alternative ways given in the %pho line. [. . .] %act: Mother turns to a page with a large picture of the snail, and feigns surprise. *MUM: que e´ isto? olha! %eng: what’s this? look! %act: Mikael gasps, extremely excited. *MIK: aqui caracol!! %eng: here snail!! %pho: gki kRgk&w %com: the determiner is dropped when another word is added before the noun. %int: LPH/FH/eLF.

Putting words together is not just a matter of slotting. It is a matter of fluency in the sense that words in context have different features from words in isolation that are chained together, as it were, along

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time. Fluency depends on intonation, and on the very difficult task of coordinating speech with breathing, in which rhythm plays a crucial role. The children seem aware of the fact that context affects the prosodic shape of words said in isolation, but they cannot yet manage the shape of target reductions and other processes that characterise the target’s connected speech. Fillers cannot therefore be seen as more or less botched, or random, attempts at fitting in morphosyntactic material into utterances. Along with omission, the other most common strategy to tackle pronunciation difficulties is substitution. Child multiword utterances may have no apparent lexicogrammatical counterparts in the target, as in (6.72), or the words that the fillers presumably replace may show regression in their renditions, as in (6.62) or (6.66), both from Mikael, in utterances whose target words he had long mastered. But there is a trade-off: in contrast to omission, the use of fillers makes child utterances ‘sound more like full phrases’, in Peters’s (2001: 232) words. That is, such phrases are full in the prosodic sense, in that the fillers reproduce well formed prosodic targets. The two following examples illustrate the fossilisation of the use of fillers as stand-ins for whole prenuclear patterns, in Sofia’s speech. Example (6.80) in addition shows the lexicogrammatical (and segmental) instability of child forms that make up target-like prosodic utterances: (6.79) S 3;0 %sit: Sofia has just finished her dinner. *SOF: yyy [obrigada pela refei]çaõ, yyy [posso sair da] mesa? %eng: may I be excused? (lit. ‘thanks for the meal, may I leave the table?’) %pho: igs~w ˜ igmez %com: the nuclear words in each of the target’s tone groups are refeiçaõ /‰fjgs~w ˜ / and mesa /gmez/, respectively. %int: HPH/HH/LR. (6.80) S 3;3 %sit:

Mother has just washed her hair, and walks into Sofia’s room. *SOF: yyy [c]abelo yyy [mo]lhado? %eng: yyy hair yyy wet? %pho: gbelu g·adu %mod: kgbelu mug·adu %int: HPH/HH/LR


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*SOF: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

yyy [lav]aste o cabelo? did you wash your hair? lfgjaSt u kgbewu lgvaSt u kgbelu HPH/HH/LR

Child speech abounds with other examples of hesitation, or apparent regression. Instances of morphological overextension, for example (discussed for these children in the next chapter), are usually taken as proof of acquisitional grip on the rules of the language. Here, too, we must conclude that the children are showing proof of incipient use of a productive process in the target language, namely, prosodic fluency. Where means of coping with connected speech are concerned, these children’s filler strategies appear no different from those of monolinguals discussed in the literature. Fillers can be viewed to occur in syntactic slots, taking these as the sequential ordering of segmental speech material, because speech is necessarily linear along the dimension of time. But it is also true that speech is necessarily modulated through prosodic features. It is the absence of these features that makes stereotyped Hollywood-like robots sound so alien, and it is the disruption of these features that makes foreigners sound foreign (CruzFerreira, 2002/2003; Ioup, 1984). In other words, syntactic position cannot be tackled independently of prosodic position, as Peters’s (2001: 233) remark quoted above aptly points out, nor vice versa . The appeal of the analysis proposed in this section lies in that fillers become fully glossable as prosodic carriers, and that it is therefore no coincidence that they appear at the stage when connected speech is first attempted. As is apparent elsewhere from these children’s data, their strategy is to start out getting the prosody right. Getting it right in the right language is besides a precondition for the remainder of the language to fall naturally into place. Words come next.

Chapter 7

Probing for Constituency As discussed in the previous chapter, the realisation that sequencing of linguistic units is not indifferent to linguistic meaning appears to be in place at the transition to the two-word stage. Well formed tone groups appear first, through signalling of the nucleus in the last position. As the children’s control over the prosodic shape of their utterances increases and becomes habitual through practice, they are ready to shift their attention to probing for constituency, which involves patterned fitting of words into the intonational scaffold of speech. Words are first given their own tone group each, at the so-called one-word stage, and single-word tone groups are sequenced by means of appropriate uses of linguistic rhythm and pitch, so as to represent a consequent line of thought. Words are then arranged (or replaced) within tone groups, so as to respect the structuring of information within each tone group. This chapter deals with the children’s emerging command over words and the requirements to fit words together.

Words in Inventories Word is one name given to each of the units where lexical meanings are traditionally said to be encapsulated. The term lexical is taken here to mean ‘contained in the lexicon’, taking for granted the distinction between lexical and other types of word meanings, as well as the semantic relevance of child forms at the pre-word stage (see Chapter 5). The word ‘word’ There is conspicuous lack of agreement about what a word is, as a cursory look through the literature will show. Recent research adds to the controversy, whether arguing for forms like uh and um , otherwise treated as filled pauses, as additional candidates to conventional word-status (Clark & Fox Tree, 2002), or pointing out the contextual relativity of meanings in linguistic communication, which amounts to the realisation that word meanings and their assumed mental representations play little or no role in it (Gauker, 2003). The construct word nevertheless enjoys undeniable centrality in linguistic descriptions, as is clear from the recent collection by Dalton-Puffer and Ritt (2000), or from Allott (2001), who takes words as the fabric itself of language. Equally central is the role ascribed to words in accounts of child language acquisition, on the premise that in order to acquire word meanings, children need first to 139

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acquire the notion that words are relevant entities in some way. The assumption of words as crucial building blocks of language in turn entails the assumption that words are what children listen for, screening them out, as it were, from the utterances that are made available to them. A large body of research, particularly by Cutler and colleagues, has focused on what may prompt listeners to isolate words from connected speech, and lexical stress has been proposed as a cue (Cutler & Carter, 1987; Cutler & Norris, 1988). Other research, contemplating adult or child listeners, highlights the intimate interplay between constituency and prosody. Jusczyk et al . (1992) found a listening preference among infants for coincident versions of pause and major phrasal units, and Koenig (1996) investigated the claim that speech prosody may play a relevant role in the acquisition of word meaning, concluding for young children’s apparent mapping of semantic entities onto prosodic units characterised by clear boundaries. van Petten and Bloom (1999) review findings showing an immediate brain response to intonational cues that indicate phrase boundaries. This response explains the rapid decoding of grammatical relationships involved in natural speech comprehension that may control initial decisions about sentence structure. Equally significantly, the natural association of prosody with constituency was found to motivate different modes of speech production too. Hartmann (1997) reports more evident prosodic adjustments in speech directed to foreigners than to fellow native speakers, with the purpose of aiding comprehension. That is, speakers manipulate prosodic cues in their speech, depending on estimation of the level of linguistic proficiency of their interlocutors. I return to matters of speech adjustment for the sake of child listeners in Chapter 11. The finding that prosodic events like pauses or pitch obtrusion aid listeners in the recognition of major linguistic constituents underscores the crucial role played by prosody in navigating surrounding speech, but lends only indirect support to the claim that words are what children listen for. Indeed, despite their earlier findings, Cutler’s team reported more recently that ‘stress information does not facilitate human word recognition’ (McQueen & Cutler, 1997: 580), mooting the issue of what exactly is it that makes children apparently start by uttering words and not, say, sentences. The issue may in fact lie on what is meant by a (child) word. The assumption of words as central to linguistic make-up easily leads to the belief that words are what children utter first because words are taken as the target of their first renditions. The uttering, by children, of what sounds like a word of the language in question may not in fact be a word of the language at all, with its associated meaning(s) in adult lexical inventories. If we view the use of the label word in descriptions of children’s first recognisable productions as a matter of terminological convenience, then the issue of whether and why children are attempting

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to communicate through words becomes circular. ‘First words’ are indeed often taken as holophrases, ‘single word utterances spoken by young children which seem to express more than just the meaning of the lexical item itself’ (Purnell, 1998: 365). A holophrase, by definition, is not a word, though its shape may be that of a word found in the target language. What children are able to articulate happens to match one linguistic unit that analysts choose to call word . Additional complications to the nature of children’s first utterances are that one thing is uttering a word, another is the meaning that we may reasonably guess to be associated with the child’s use of one particular sequence of sounds. In order to assign some method to the apparent chaos of child words and their meanings, and for purposes of discussion in this chapter, I will make two assumptions. First, a working definition of word as a name (for any entity, physical or relational), a definition that is generally applicable to words in all three languages of the children in this study. Second, that the first word-associated activity seems to be naming, taken here in its broad sense of using a word to label a referent, not in the narrower sense of labelling an object. Keeping in mind that the children in this study are at this stage faced with the task of working out naming strategies that are acceptable in two languages, the next sections deal with their handling of Portuguese words. Child inventories One methodological useful consequence of assuming child words as more or less exact replicas of adult word inventories, complete with associated meanings, is the well rooted establishment of vocabulary counts as a reliable measure of linguistic development. Measurement tools like the Communicative Development Inventories (CDI, Fenson et al ., 1993), or Mean Length of Utterance (MLU, Brown, 1973) have for decades assisted discussions of child vocabularies and assessment of progressive linguistic development, particularly early linguistic development. Assessment generally depends on establishing the type and amount of words that a child is said to master, both in comprehension and in production (but see Tomasello & Mervis (1994) for discussion of the usefulness of the CDI to assess speech comprehension, and Ingram (2002) for a suggestion of phonological-based criteria for the measurement of child-word productions). Each tool provides different types of findings, CDI assessing evidence of available paradigmatic choices, MLU assessing evidence of actual syntagmatic concatenation. Similar wordbound criteria hold in popular views about language and their users, where access to more or fewer words is believed to define rich versus poor languages and proficient versus deficient users of language, respectively. Whereas MLU-based assessments are comparatively recent,


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Hamilton et al . (2000) quote Lukens (1894) as giving inventory-based measurement of child language development. Comparative use of CDI can also provide statistical data on which to identify children at risk for language or other communicative disorders. For recent discussion on the validity of this assessment instrument see Feldman et al . (2000) and Fenson et al .’s (2000) reply to their comments. Despite the common grounding of both tools on the assumption that words are items that can be counted, quantifying conventions needed immediate establishing, as spelt out in Brown (1973) for MLU-based studies. Examples of these first conventions are that compound words and ritualised reduplications are counted as single words where there is no evidence of independent morphemic structure of their constituents in the data, and that diminutive words like doggie and inflections like those in regular plurals and past tenses count as one morpheme, on the basis of similar observations about the children’s overall use of these forms. CDIbased studies have used several revised versions of parental report instruments, as discussed in Bates et al . (1995). The universal applicability of these tools is subjected to regular scrutiny, given that both became institutionalised in analyses of child speakers of one particular variety of English, pending likely different quantifying conventions that may hold for different languages. The core assumption behind their usefulness is to take child words as replicas of adult words. (In truth, we can be as sure that children are indeed categorising according to standards found in the target language as we are about whether adult users of the same language categorise in a way that is common to all.) Problems in establishing the identity of child utterances may fade when child productions conform to words whose forms and meanings are recognisable from adult inventories, but data can certainly be problematic, and often baffling, among first words. One problem arises from cases where what corresponds to several, sequential target words is best described as one child word, for reasons similar to those mentioned above for decisions on MLU-counts concerning no evidence of independent morphemic structure in target compound words. The child word retains some phonetic similarity to the target expression. Examples from Sofia’s repertoire are: (7.1) S 1;0 [kogk&] S 1;11 [gudigdu]

quer(o) colo /gkoR(u)gk&lu/ ‘I want to sit on your knee’ (lit. ‘want(s) lap’) taõ/que lindo! /t~w ˜ lı˜du, k‹ lı˜du/ ‘how pretty!’


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Sofia used [kogk&] while reversing, as it were, towards her mother to be taken up on her knee. She used [gudigdu] to comment on her own or someone else’s achievements when completing a jigsaw puzzle or a drawing by e.g. adding noses to faces. These types of utterances were pronounced in one single tone group. Another problem concerns what status to assign to the association of form and meaning that is perceived from child uses. Examples (7.2) /(7.4), from Mikael’s speech, illustrate the issue, that is recurrent in the children’s data. (7.2)

M 0;11 [gbab]

a´gua /gagw/ ‘water’

Mikael used this word as a typical overextension, applied to any drinkable substance. He consistently pronounced it as given above. An overextension is so labelled because the use of the word applies to more referents than the assumed adult target does (see Chapter 8). That is, the label reflects an arbitrary constraint that happens to hold true in the adult system, although the child word represents a perfectly acceptable word meaning, as in a noun like bebida ‘drink’. Nevertheless, analyses of this child word would rather take it as overextended from the form corresponding to a ‘water’ meaning than as a likely target-like rendition of the nominal meaning ‘drink’. In either case, the child form is taken as ‘incorrect’: in one case it is an instance of semantic shift, in the other the child uses the wrong word for the right meaning. (7.3)

M 1;4 [kxfkxf]

The form in (7.3) was used to refer to skiing, by means of a likely onomatopoeic rendition. Mikael said this word whenever skiing was discussed among the family in Portuguese or Swedish, or when looking at pictures or films of family skiing holidays or of ski resorts. He complemented his use of the word by adopting the forwards-tilting, knee-bent body posture of a skier, and jerking both arms rhythmically backwards with clenched fists, as if holding ski poles. If sitting on his high-chair, he would bounce his body and use the same arm movements. Mikael’s word is a nontarget form, used with an apparently consistent meaning. Like other nontarget child forms, it can be taken as a filler, whose ‘word’ status is problematic when dealing with quantifications of child vocabulary (discussion of these children’s fillers is given in the second section of Chapter 6). The issue here, besides deciding which language the child’s word belongs to or whether the word represents one cross-linguistic meaning of some kind, is what element of the skiing


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whole is the child referring to, whether the equipment, the physical activity, the sport or the noise itself of skis scraping against snow. (7.4) M 1;5 sereia /s(‹)gRj/ [igjij] [u‹gij] [d igij] [igjij] [gjij] [gdj] [g·ij] [gwi]

‘mermaid’ [jgjij] [jugjij] [gjij] [‹gjij] [gj] [glij] [ugij]

Mikael produced these 15 forms for the target sereia, when describing a Little Mermaid cartoon book for his mother in one recording session. The child forms are given above in the order in which they first appear in the recording. Mikael repeated several of them along the exchange in an apparently random fashion, usually pointing at the same time to pictures of the mermaid, or repeating the mother’s utterance of the word. Given these contextual clues, it is reasonable to argue that all of these child productions can be interpreted as tentative approaches to the same target, i.e. they all represent one single word. Forms containing wordinitial occurrences of [] are more likely to be attempts at renditions of the target’s prestressed syllable than of instances of the definite article a // (see ‘The prosodic role of fillers’ in Chapter 6), the reason being that systematic use of grammatical words had not appeared in Mikael’s speech at this age. Besides the legitimacy of ascribing one same meaning to different child forms, which appears straightforward in cases like this, the issue here is also whether a form like, say, [glij], repeated in other contexts like, say, playing with a boat, can be equally reasonably assumed to refer to a mermaid. This was in fact the case for Mikael, leaving it undecided whether he meant ‘mermaid’, ‘whale’ (baleia /bglj/), a word equally well known to the child or, indeed, whether the form means any sea-bound creature or object. Homonym forms in child speech are further discussed in the ‘Semantic manipulation’ section in Chapter 8, and the issue of differing conclusions about child grammar depending on assumed targets is addressed in ‘The choice of target forms’ in Chapter 4. A third problem concerns the scope assigned to the word ‘word’. If the definition of word, or ‘primitive meaningful item’ differs in a child’s two languages, then its counting as a unit available to the child cannot be fairly compared across languages. Taking Portuguese and Swedish as examples, one instance of this issue would be child productions of Ptg


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lavei (‘I washed’) and its equivalent Sw jag tva¨ttade. Counting words, a Portuguese child has one word, a Swedish child has two. Counting morphemes according to agreed-upon analyses of these two languages, which language wins at the count may not be so clear. The Swedish child may have three units to boast, corresponding in sequence to 1st-person and singular, the verbal root {tva¨tta}, and past tense, respectively. The Portuguese child has certainly more than three, though the exact number depends on what analysts will want to count as relevant for the analysis at hand, from within the system of grammatical contrasts that is decided upon for Portuguese. In lavei , lav - is a root, corresponding to Sw tva¨tta-, and -ei contains, among others, information about 1st-person, singular, past tense, perfect aspect and 1st verbal declension. It is clear that vocabulary assessment and therefore useful crosslinguistic comparisons by means of quantification and taxonomies need to agree on their primitives. This understanding is clear from research with a view to adapting MLU and CDI tools to different languages or different language varieties. Examples concerning Portuguese are Teixeira (2000), who proposes an adaptation of the CDI to the language, Scliar-Cabral and Secco’s (1995) MLU-based study of morphological acquisition, or the use of an adapted Mean Length of Utterance in Words (MLUW) in Valian and Eisenberg’s (1996) study on syntactic acquisition. These studies concern the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese. Even across varieties of the same language, the extrapolation of analytical tools may be illegitimate. Hamilton et al . (2000), for example, provide CDI for British varieties of English. The manifesto of the recent launch of the American National Corpus (2003) supports caution in the generalisation of findings within a language, by pointing out that ‘analytic work has demonstrated that the BNC (British National Corpus) is inappropriate for the study of American English, due to the numerous differences in use of the language.’

Child Vocabularies The mapping of meanings onto forms of a language that is perceived from children’s use of words provides insight into how children make that language serve their communicative purposes. Bearing in mind the difficulties in counting child forms as legitimate vocabulary items, as well as those arising from general quantification of child data discussed above and in Chapter 4, the following sections attempt a qualitative account of the children’s lexical development. Passive vocabulary The reasoning behind claims about children’s acquisition of passive vocabulary is that if a child shows understanding of a particular word by

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reacting to it in an adult-like way, then the child has acquired that word. Among the first reactions to words from the children in this study are responses to the children’s own names and nickname variants of these in both languages, for Karin from 0;4, Sofia from 0;5 and Mikael from 0;7. The children responded by turning their heads towards the speaker, and by smiling and wiggling their bodies. The literature supports the claims that one’s own name is distinctively perceived even among adverse listening conditions (Wood & Cowan, 1995) and that it is probably among the first words learned (Mandel et al ., 1995). Bortfeld et al . (2002) further suggest that a child’s own name soon assumes a decisive role in fluent speech processing too. Identifying the name in context as one unit of speech may in fact signal that the speech preceding and following conforms to the word-final and word-initial phonotactics of the language, respectively. Jusczyk et al . (1994) claimed that children as young as 0;9 seem in fact to be concerned with the frequency with which certain sound patterns co-occur in speech. Listening for their own names may therefore constitute one of the earliest strategies used by children to work out the phonotactic structure of languages. The fact that the child’s own name is used very often to the child, either in isolation or in different contexts, does not of course endorse a claim that the children react to their own name because they recognise their name as their name, or one particular name as the name that uniquely applies to them. It is more likely that the children are reacting to a sequence of sounds that they somehow recognise as consistently associated with themselves. The same positive, pleased response indicating some recognition of a familiar utterance by an interlocutor was obtained to several, quite different variants of their own names, both across their two languages and within each of the languages, and to other forms that interlocutors consistently used to call the child’s attention. Besides variations on equivalent forms to ‘darling’ or ‘little one’, variations in the form of proper names are, for example for Mikael as addressee: (7.5) Migalhinho /migg·iłu/, Miguelaõ /mig(‹)gl~w ˜ /, from the mother Mickesson /gmik3sofn/, Mickepuck /mik3gpPkf/, from the father ‘‘Ie´l ’’ /igow/, ‘‘Alaõ’’ /gl~w ˜ /, from Sofia, based on Miguel /miggol/ and Miguelaõ, respectively. Response to simple commands in the form of actions appeared around 0;7 for all three children, when the prompt Da´? ‘Give (me)?’ elicited the children’s handing in of a toy in their hand, or simply dropping it. These responses gained consistency from the first half of the second year, with


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appropriate understanding of instructions involving locatives and different types of syntactic objects like Po˜e na mesa ‘Put it on the table’, Limpa a boca ‘Wipe your mouth’, Da´ a` mana ‘Give it to your sister’. They progressed to requests involving invisible objects outside of the children’s immediate surroundings, in what can be termed the ‘errand stage’, where the children were delighted to be able to run errands around the house on prompts like Traz ca´ o teu ursinho ‘Get your teddybear’, Vai buscar o relo´gio da mama˜ ao quarto ‘Fetch mummy’s watch from the bedroom’, Diz ao papa´ que o jantar esta´ pronto ‘Tell daddy that dinner is ready’. By this time the children were entering the two-word stage. The children’s passive vocabulary increased steadily from around age 0;8, when they started identifying objects named by their interlocutor. The children responded consistently to ‘Where is the __?’ prompts, where a noun replaces the blank, by slapping, grabbing or pointing to the objects in question, including the moon in the sky and birds in gardens, and their own or others’ body parts. They reacted in similar ways to representations of objects in books and drawings. Examples are: (7.6) K 0;8 *MUM: onde e´ que esta´ o pe´? %eng: where is the foot? %act: Karin grabs her own feet. S 0;9 *MUM: %eng: %act: *MUM: %eng: %act:

onde e´ que esta´ o nariz da Sofia? where is Sofia’s nose? Sofia puts both hands on her nose. e onde esta´ o nariz da mama˜? and where is mummy’s nose? Sofia grabs Mother’s nose with her right hand. *MUM: e onde e´ que esta´ a lıńgua? %eng: and where is the tongue? %act: Sofia sticks her tongue out. M 0;8 *MUM: onde e´ que esta´ o relo´gio? %eng: where is the clock? %act: Mikael points at the clock on the wall. [. . .]


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%sit: *MUM: %eng: %act: %act: *MUM: %eng: %act:

reading an image book, where different scenes of farm life are depicted on each page. onde e´ que esta´ o cavalinho? where is the horsy? Mikael slaps the page with the image of a horse. Mother points at an image of a dog. e o gato, esta´ aqui? and the cat, is it here? Mikael shakes his head and bounces. He pushes Mother’s hand and then points at the image of a cat on the opposite page.

The children’s choice of the right object or toy included those that were deliberately concealed by their interlocutors under or behind others. Peek-a-boo games, particularly with their father, were favourites from as early as 0;3. The father used a very low-pitched voice when covering the baby’s face with a piece of cloth while repeating Var a¨r __? ‘Where is __?’ followed by the name of the child, and suddenly removed the cloth and changed to a very high-pitched voice, exclaiming Da¨r a¨r __! ‘There is __!’, eliciting nervous gurgles and delighted shrieks, respectively. From age 0;8, the children started a more deliberate enjoyment of peek-a-boo games, including demands to initiate them by grabbing the cloth used in the game and throwing it either on top of toys lying on the floor or at the interlocutor, often uttering Sw tittut! or Ptg tu-tu! ‘peek-aboo!’. The association of ‘there being’ or ‘there not being’ objects with visual perception continued with other games, for example, all three children’s covering of their own eyes with their fists at age 0;11 in response to the mother’s prompt Naõ ha´ menina/menino! ‘There is no girl/ boy!’. The association here seems to be that if they themselves cannot see, then they cannot be seen either. More abstract vocabulary, like the recognition of the names for colours, appeared by 1;5 for Karin, and 1;7 for Sofia and Mikael. The children would either point at an object with the requested colour, or hand to the interlocutor a right-coloured crayon or building block, on prompts like Onde e´ que esta´ o (N) amarelo/a (N) amarela? ‘Where is the yellow N/one?’ or Da´ o (N) amarelo/a (N) amarela a` mama˜? ‘Give mummy the yellow N/one?’. Some vocabulary was elicited through imitation. For example, after a period of consistently replying papa´ ‘daddy’ to the mother’s prompts Diz mama˜, Sofia! ‘Say mummy, Sofia!’, Sofia (0;11) started responding with the word mama˜ to the same prompts. Imitation leaves undecided the matter of whether vocabulary items elicited in this way should count as passive or active vocabulary.


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Active vocabulary Assuming our working definition of ‘word’, deciding on what constitutes a child’s active vocabulary involves deciding what constitutes a child-word and, therefore, what constitutes a first word. I take a (first) child-word to be a spontaneous, regular correspondence between a consistent sequence of sounds and any approximation to a target-like referent in the language in question. First words are words used with a purpose, which can be interpreted as having a meaning in the context in which they are used. By the criterion of spontaneous production, Mikael’s (0;10) utterance papa´ [pgpa] when seeing a photograph of his father is a (first) word, Sofia’s (0;10) response papa´ [pgpa] to the mother’s prompts Diz mama˜! ‘Say mummy!’ or Diz papa´! ‘Say daddy!’ is not. The unprompted utterance of words points to some realisation that sequences of sounds can be usefully associated with certain objects, activities, qualities or sensations. Whether they are in fact associated with each (or all) of these, and therefore reflect the acquisition of word classes like nouns or verbs, remains moot. The particular lexical class of first words has been extensively discussed in the literature, among others by Gentner (1982), who predicts the acquisition of nouns before verbs, and by Merriman and Tomasello (1995), who redress the almost exclusive interest for nouns in child lexical acquisition. Depending on the vocabulary characteristics of the language(s) surrounding the child, and on assumed definitions of each word-class in different languages, findings and conclusions will vary. I will therefore disregard the issue of whether these children’s first words can or should be classified according to particular word-classes, because word classes are adult labels for adult uses. I cannot tell whether the children are rendering the adult-like nouns a´gua ‘water’ or bola ‘ball’ as the name of an object, a shape or an activity. Being single child-words, there is besides no linguistic context to enable the decisions about syntactic patterning that classification into wordclasses usually involves. I will instead describe when and how the children used what sounded like target words in Portuguese, giving those target words but leaving open the matter of the interpretation of their syntactic meaning. These children’s very first words, recognisable from adult targets in both of their languages, were: (7.7)

K 0;9 K 0;9

Ptg [pgpa] Sw [gpapfa]

papa´ pappa

/pgpa/ /gpapfa/

‘daddy’ ‘daddy’

S 0;8 S 0;11

Ptg [da] Sw [tIgtfa]

da´ titta

/da/ /gtitfa/

‘give (me)’ ‘look!’


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M 0;8 M 0;8

Ptg [ufPf] Sw [gpapfa]

luz pappa

/luS/ /gpapfa/

‘light (N)’ ‘daddy’

Karin used Ptg papa´ for a wedding photograph of her parents, and it is therefore unclear whether her word meant both parents or whether she singled out her father in the picture. At age 0;9, she predated Sofia’s preference for the use of Ptg papa´ by consistently responding with this word to her mother’s attempts at making her repeat Ptg mama˜. Both Karin and Mikael used Sw pappa whenever they saw their father in person. Sofia used Ptg da´ to request a favourite toy during play with her mother, pointing at the toy or stretching both arms towards it, and repeating the word until her request was satisfied. She used Sw titta consistently with a pointing gesture too, apparently as an attention-caller, for example, to a noisy bumblebee in the garden, but also as an interjection for unexpected happenings like the phone ringing or an object crashing to the floor, gesturing towards what caused her curiosity. She often used Sw titta in lone play too. Mikael used Ptg luz for the ceiling lamp in his bedroom, looking up or pointing at it, whether the lamp was turned on or off. These data show that a decision on the semantic meaning of first words is not a straightforward matter. I return to matters of meaning categorisation in the next chapter. Predictably, the children’s first words belong to semantic fields denoting their immediate interests and concerns, including requests for actions that they are unable to carry out themselves, and vocabulary for interesting people, toys or food (Dromi, 1987; Huttenlocher & Smiley, 1987). This is no different from the commonest vocabulary found among adults too. Equally predictably, people talk about what concerns them, in their daily life. A recent survey (Hall, 2002) showed, for example, that words for food are among the most common in adult speech. Individuality and personality also play role. From the joint data of the children in this study, it would be difficult to draft a consensus about ‘most common first words’, or ‘most common words’ in their early Portuguese vocabularies, in that the children show preferences in semantic fields. Their first words are context-bound, but the children’s favoured contexts are different. Several of the children’s earliest words are greetings, or interjections, or reproduce some nonlinguistic feature associated with the target. For example, Mikael had a bilabial fricative ‘blowing word’ [bff] for vela /gvol/ ‘candle’. Sofia, in particular, had a preference for nonreferential words altogether, including first words. At 0;9, she would imitate words, e.g. Karin’s name as [igaj] /gkaRin/, or the word bola ‘ball’ as [ba] /gb&l/, though only when the adults’ prompts were in the form of a calling contour, whose descending minor-third Sofia reproduced in her words. Other tunes on the same words elicited no verbal response. She would


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also rather stick to nonreferential than referential words for objects. For example, her Swedish cousin Johan taught her at 0;10 to reproduce the ticking of a clock as /gtIkfgtakf/, which she pronounced [gtigta], reduplicated. This later became her word for clock in both languages, and remained so long after learning to say Sw klocka /gkl&kfa/, which she imitated as [k&gkfa], or Ptg relo´gio /g‰l&ju/, rendered [ig·&‰]. It was as if the naming, for Sofia, were less interesting than the effect that the words could achieve by being used. Other first words are onomatopoeic, reproducing the motherese sounds used for animal, object or action referents, by means of sounds that belong in one of the children’s languages. Portuguese examples are, for all three children: (7.8) KSM 9/1;0 [~w ˜ g~w ˜ ], [bowgbow] [mogmo] [pi(w)gpiw]

‘‘aõ-aõ’’, ‘‘beú-beú ’’ ‘‘me´me´’’ ‘‘piu-piu ’’

for ‘dog’ for ‘sheep’ for ‘bird’

The children later used these words interchangeably with the words that name the animals. Other sets of synonyms are, for example, dormir and fazer o´-o´ ‘to sleep’, comer and papar ‘to eat’, where the second word in each pair is typical of motherese, and sets of words with their diminutive forms, like peixe and peixinho ‘fish (N)’ or sossegado/sossegada and sossegadinho/sossegadinha ‘quiet/still’. Those are target-like words. Children also create their own words, sometimes in ways that are recognisable from adult uses, sometimes in ways that appear difficult to explain because they are unpredictable, raising additional problems for quantification of word inventories with associated meanings. Examples (7.9) /(7.11) illustrate this issue. (7.9)

K 0;11 K 1;2

[db·a] [m]

Karin used both forms in (7.9) on a high-rising tone. Associated body language, like raising of eyebrows and pointing at different objects with outstretched fingers or upward-turned hands make these forms likely candidates for renditions of ‘What’s this?’. But a number of points are noteworthy. The form [db·a] corresponds to no segmental target, whereas the later form [m] on a high-rise does occur in Portuguese, although in questions asking repetition of a previous utterance. This form does not occur in information-seeking questions of the type ascribed to the child question. In addition, Karin’s reaction to responses to her presumed questions, which she asked non-stop in batches during


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this period, is equally indecisive as to their intended purpose. She appeared satisfied with any answer. For example, if pointing at a flower, responses like (E´ uma) flor, (E´ uma) tu´lipa ‘(It’s a) flower/tulip’ and like Bom dia ‘Good morning’, Sua malandra! ‘You naughty one!’ or O que e´ que queres? ‘What do you want?’ would equally prompt either repetition of the response, or a pleased-looking expression and the next question, or both. The mother tried similar nonsensical responses in reply to all three children’s high-rising utterances while pointing at objects at the same stages, and got similarly pleased reactions from them, including when their questions contained clearly recognisable renditions of a target utterance like O que e´ (isto)? ‘What’s this?’ The querying tone and body language used by the child and the ‘knowledge’, of adults, that ‘children will ask for the names of objects’ narrow the interpretation of the question down to a request for the name of objects. Adults duly provide labels for objects, and conclude that the child has attained naming insight. What is not clear, however, is what the child is actually asking for: a name label, information on how to use the object, on why the object is lying there, on the colour of the object, or on some other feature of the object that somehow struck the child as interesting. Vygotsky (1962) provides arguments for a broader interpretation of child queries along these lines, where the query may concern a property of the object instead of an item in a separate formal system called ‘language’. Whichever the case may be, the fact remains that adults respond to children in adultbound ways that trigger adult interpretations of child utterances. We do not know either whether the child is asking at all: perhaps the child simply wishes to monopolise the adult’s attention, and has learned an infallible strategy to do so by means of intonation and body language. (7.10)

S 1;2 [g~g~]

Sofia had the form in (7.10) in several situations involving cuddling and sleep. She used it to cuddle toys, to request cuddling, to describe someone sleeping or lying down, and to announce her intention to go to sleep herself. Her word is probably derived from the mother’s use of o´-o´ /g&g&/ on a monotonous descending minor-third, a common way of inducing sleep in very young children. Sofia replicated the mother’s intonation and body language when rocking toys to sleep, but used the same word [g~g~] with different tunes for different purposes, including HL/HF to request cuddling and a dragged LF/LF when being tucked in for the night. That is, the word meaning remains, involving some association of cuddling with sleep, independently of the tune. (7.11) S 2;0 [g·&] M 1;0 [gp·ugp·u]


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Sofia used her form in (7.11) either singly or reduplicated. The form was very common in her speech around this age, when she already had several target-like Portuguese words. She used the word on a low-rising and very soft tone to comfort her crying sister, supplementing it by gentle patting, to express her surprise at unexpected happenings e.g. when watching a circus show on TV, to describe how pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit together while doing the puzzle, and in several other apparently unrelated ways. One instance of its use is given in example (6.48). Mikael used his form in (7.11) in dialogues, including in lone play, preferentially with falling tones preceded by a high head, and consistently reduplicated as in the example. There are several target candidates for Mikael’s word, among them the nouns espelho /gSp·u/ ‘mirror’, pelo /gpelu/ ‘(body) hair’ and coelho /kug·u/ ‘rabbit’, one of his favourite animals, on the basis of similarity in segmental form, and the discoursal operator pois /pojS/, loosely glossed as ‘(that’s) right’ or ‘of course’, on the basis of similarity in prosodic form and in function, as an emergent conversational device whose use with falling tones is widespread in Portuguese. There is some evidence that adults start adopting a conversational style that involves adult-like use of operators of this kind for back-channelling in exchanges with children at around the two-word stage, and that children’s first use of these devices coincides with this shift (see Kajikawa et al., 2004). Nevertheless, I have no way to tell whether these words are likely candidates for Mikael’s form, nor whether Mikael was indeed modelling his word on a target. His word may happen to simply remind of a word that does exist in Portuguese. One reason to take these forms as Portuguese words is that they do conform to the phonotactics of the language, as do earlier, similar-sounding productions by the children. These words are discussed here as examples of child forms that were clearly useful to the children, but for which I was unable to find a plausible target or lexical meaning. The children’s recognition, not just use, of their own words as legitimate linguistic symbols shows through instances of spontaneous production in the absence of the original object that first prompted their own word for it, as in the following example concerning Mikael: (7.12) M 1;1 % sit:

Sofia (3;4) is playing with the contents of a sewing basket, sitting at the dining-room table with Mother and Mikael, who is playing on his own with building blocks. Sofia holds a cotton reel up to Mother. *SOF: e´ linha, ma´mi? %eng: is this thread, mummy? *MUM: e´ um carro de linhas.


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%eng: *MIK: %pho: %int: %act:

it’s a cotton reel (lit. ‘it’s a car of threads’). ‘‘brrum-brrum! ’’ gb‰fu˜mfgb‰fu˜mf 2 successive HF. Mikael does not look at either Mother or Sofia throughout this exchange, and goes on playing on his own.

The word brrum-brrum was Mikael’s onomatopoeic rendition of an engine noise, and his word for any motorised mechanical device, including lawnmowers. He apparently singled the word carro (lit. ‘car’) out from the mother’s utterance, recognising it in a different context altogether, and in the absence of any engine noise.

Words in Context Probing for constituency involves finding out which word sequences carry meaning, and in which way. Certain words may precede others, but not follow them; other words appear to be freely swapped around, with different effects on meaning. Yet other words can be grouped together (into what are usually termed phrases in the literature) to function like single words. Like words, phrases can be moved around on their own and, in turn, form larger units. Inherent to this investigation is the realisation that word juxtaposition is not random, and that words in context behave differently from their behaviour in isolation. They are pronounced differently, and they mean in a different way. This novel, parsing task concerns the sequential organisation not only of lexical material, but of prosodically less salient linguistic markers, like inflections, that occur at the end of words. Probing for constituency also means the realisation that words in context must be marked in ways that show phrasal cohesiveness. In the literature, this is usually termed agreement which, borrowing Hockett’s (1958: 231) formulation, can be characterised as triggering a particular ‘behavior of associated words’. This section begins with a few general comments on the children’s multiword utterances, and moves then on to matters of agreement. The last subsection deals with compounding, which shows constituency in a word itself, and therefore constituent cohesiveness in a different way. Putting words together results not in a phrase but in a new word, which therefore has word and not phrasal properties. Multiword meanings The management of multiword utterances involves using words with meanings that are different from their meanings when used in isolation.


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Words no longer mean through their own meanings alone, but also by modifying other words or being modified by them. That is, multiword utterances involve words qualifying words: (7.13)

K 1;9 %sit: *KAR: %eng:

Mother is eating an apple. maça˜ mama˜. mummy(‘s) apple (lit. ‘apple mummy’)

(7.14) K 1;10 %sit: Sofia, asleep in her cot, suddenly cries out loud. *KAR: mana barulho. %eng: sister noise. In examples (7.13) and (7.14), the meanings of each of the four words in question is narrowed down, or expanded, in order to convey the holistic meaning intended by each two-word utterance. The apple is not any apple, it is the one that in some way belongs to mummy, whereas mummy, besides remaining the child’s parent, is also identified as a more general owner of, among other things, an apple. Similarly, the noise is the particular one associated with the baby, whose noise-making ability is selected, among other baby-bound properties, for reporting by means of a single utterance. The children’s multiword utterances also show differential treatment of word order, according to syntactic function, from the outset of the twoword stage. Examples are (compare (7.13) with (7.15)): (7.15)

K 1;10 %act: *KAR: %eng:

(7.16) M 1;5 %sit: *MIK: %eng: (7.17) M 1;5 %sit: *MIK:

Mother draws a fish. mama˜ peixe. mummy fish.

sorting through laundry, spotting one of Father’s shirts. roupa papa´. daddy(‘s) clothes.

seeing Father carrying some laundry. papa´ roupa.


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%eng: %com:

daddy clothes/laundry. Ptg roupa means both ‘clothes’ and ‘laundry’.

Besides nouns, as in the examples above, the first multiword utterances contain adjectives too. The first adjectives occur after the nouns that they modify, which is the standard word order in Portuguese noun phrases (although this order may be reversed for emphatic purposes with some adjectives, cp. (6.43)). One interesting trend in the data concerns the differential prosodic treatment of noun /noun and noun /adjective utterances, in that adjectives are often given a tone group of their own. The children appear to treat phrases that indicate possession, like (7.13) or (7.16), and word sequences that can be glossed as verbless sentences with a subject followed by nominal complementation, like (7.14) or (7.17), differently from nominal head-modifier constructions involving noun and adjective. Examples are, where (7.18) shows the continuation of (7.15) above: (7.18) K 1;10 %act: *KAR: %eng: [. . .] %act: *KAR: %eng: %com:

Mother draws a fish. mama˜ peixe. mummy fish.

Karin draws a smaller fish. ‘‘Da`di’’ peixe. Karin fish. ‘‘Da`di ’’ [dagdi] is Karin’s rendition of her own name, /gkaRin/. %act: Karin points at her own drawing. *KAR: peixe. ‘‘pinino’’. %eng: small. fish. %com: ‘‘pinino’’ [pigninu] is Karin’s rendition of pequenino /p(‹)k(‹)gninu/ ‘small’.

(7.19) S 2;8 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %act: *SOF: %eng: S 2;9 %sit:

looking through her old baby clothes. roupa be´be´, roupa Sofia. baby clothes, Sofia(‘s) clothes. Sofia picks up a blue bonnet. touca. azul. blue. bonnet. finding a perfectly round pebble in the garden.


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*SOF: pedra. redonda. %eng: round. stone. (7.20) M 1;10 %sit: discussing hair colours while looking at family photos, Mikael points successively at a photo of his mother, his father, and himself. *MIK: cabelo. preto. %eng: black. hair. *MIK: cabelo. amarelo. %eng: yellow. hair. *MIK: cabelo amarelo. %eng: yellow hair. Mikael’s examples in (7.19) show that the differential treatment of noun /adjective constructions is a trend, rather than an all-or-none feature in the children’s data. One reason for this trend may lie in that noun /adjective noun phrases require agreement between head and modifier, and that emerging awareness of this requirement causes the children’s apparent hesitation that surfaces as a pause between head and modifier. Agreement marking does show up in these early utterances, in that the adjectives are correctly marked for gender, masculine or feminine, according to the noun that they modify (see below for details on Portuguese gender). The pause also affects adjectives like azul ‘blue’ in the first example in (7.19), whose feminine and masculine forms are homonymous, suggesting that what causes it is not the overt pronunciation of a correctly gendered form, but some more abstract realisation that gender agreement is something that must be decided upon in phrases of this type. There are no gender-bound changes in the shape of words functioning as possessor, possessed, subject or object, as in examples (7.13) /(7.17), and there seems to be no hesitation either about pronouncing them in the same tone group. Besides readjustments in meaning, the children appear to be coming to the realisation that multiword utterances also involve differences in the shape of some of the words that make them up, to which I turn next. Agreement Agreement is an important speech organiser, in that it signals which words go together with which within a phrase. In Portuguese, agreement markers occur at the end of words, by means of affixation. All words in a phrase that can take a marker, for example of gender or number, must take that marker. The children’s progressive mastery of agreement,


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whether verbal or nominal, followed a pattern that is familiar from the literature, consisting of correct productions, followed by overextension resulting in incorrect productions, followed by stable correct production. They also made use of eliciting strategies, whether attempting to elicit judgements about their own tentative productions, or to elicit words forms that they were unsure of. A few are described below. Person and tense

Portuguese has a rich verbal system, with different verbal paradigms inflecting differently for tense, aspect and mood according to person and number. Verbal suffixes are synthetic, signalling several verbal features together, as noted in ‘Child inventories’ in this chapter. The following account deals with a fraction of present and past perfect tense forms (in the indicative mood) of regular verbs. Discussion involves mostly the one productive verbal paradigm in Portuguese, concerning verbs whose infinitive form ends in -ar. The first verbal forms used by the children are 3rd-person singular forms in the present tense, in predicates describing their own or someone else’s activities or states. Besides being homonymous with 2nd-person singular imperative forms, which are extensively used in the household, the mother commonly addresses the children and herself in the 3rdperson too, replicating the children’s own way of referring to themselves at this stage. Otherwise, 3rd-person verbal forms are polite forms of address. Later, the mother switches between 3rd- and 1st-person forms to address herself, and between 3rd- and 2nd-person forms to address the children, the latter being the standard way of addressing children and intimate peers. The mother’s uses parallel the children’s own transition from 3rd-person to 1st-person forms to address themselves. Two examples of the children’s early uses are: (7.21) S 2;7 %sit: watching Mother breastfeed Mikael. *SOF: Miguel come mama˜. %eng: Mikael eats mummy. (7.22) S 2;8 %sit: describing her skills with fork and knife. *SOF: Sofia come sozinha. %eng: Sofia eats all by herself. Perfect past tense forms (henceforth ‘past tense’) appear next, first in 3rd-person uses only:


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(7.23) K 2;3 %sit:

at Sofia’s nap time, Sofia suddenly starts babbling away. *KAR: ‘‘Fossia’’ acordou. %eng: Sofia woke up.

(7.24) M 2;6 %sit: Sofia and Mikael are racing about outdoors, Sofia stumbles and falls. Mikael reports to Mother. *MIK: Sofia caiu muito ra´pida. %eng: Sofia fell down very fast. Contrasting present versus past tense forms show in the children’s extensive play with these forms, in lone play or otherwise. The children put present and past forms together in one temporally logic utterance, appearing intent on making it clear for themselves the appropriate use of each form. Examples are, where (7.26) shows contrast of a past tense form with the present progressive (given by the periphrastic infinitive a cortar, lit. ‘at cut’): (7.25) K 2;3 %sit:

repairing a building-block house that tumbled down. *KAR: Karin arranja. viu? Karin arranjou. %eng: Karin fixes. see? Karin fixed.

(7.26)

(7.27)

K 2;8 %sit: *KAR: %eng:

practising her skills with scissors and paper. quer ver a Karin a cortar? ja´ cortou. want to see Karin cut? (Karin) cut.

S 2;8 %act: *SOF: %eng: %act: *SOF: %eng:

Sofia closes her eyes. Sofia dorme. Sofia sleeps. Sofia opens her eyes. Sofia dormiu. Sofia slept.

Past tense forms are also consistently generalised, among regular verbs. Example (7.28) concerns a novel verb to the child, espreitar ‘to peep’, and example (7.29) shows a target verbal form on the wrong verb:


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(7.28) K 2;6 %act:

*MUM: %eng: %act: *KAR: %eng:

Karin and Mother are inside the house, and suddenly hear loud bird noises from the garden. Mother lifts Karin up and peeps out. vamos espreitar? shall we peep? Karin peeps out the window. Karin espreitou. Karin peeped.

(7.29) M 2;4 %sit: Mikael and Sofia are gathering all their soft toys in the living-room. Mikael walks to his room. *MIK: Miguel vai buscar o caõ. %eng: Mikael goes get the dog. %act: Mikael comes back to Sofia with the toy. *MIK: Miguel ja´ buscou. %eng: Mikael got it. %com: The form buscar in Mikael’s first line is an infinitive. The target of Mikael’s second utterance would be Miguel ja´ foi ‘Mikael went’, where foi is the past form of vai . Later, contrasts of person show when the children start marking different subjects in the verbal inflection. Incidentally, this is the obligatory way of marking subjects, in Portuguese. Discussions on whether (child) Portuguese allows subject ‘dropping’ or ‘insertion’ depend on a definition of subject as a positional slot, assumed to precede a predicate slot, an assumption in turn based on the assumption that sentences must consist of subjects and predicates (see Faria, 1993; Valian & Eisenberg, 1996). Subject marks cannot be dropped from, nor inserted in, verbal forms, because they are an inherent part of these forms. A positional subject may be overt in cases of ambiguity in the verbal form, as in (7.31), or to achieve contrastive emphasis (see below, example (7.36)). In what follows, person inflection in verbal forms is indicated by means of hyphenation, beside the English glosses. Examples of contrasts of person are (here with the baby-verb papar ‘to eat’): (7.30)

S 3;1 %sit: *SOF: %eng:

Sofia finishes her meal. ja´ papei. I finished eating (lit. ‘already I-ate’)


(7.31)

S 3;1 *SOF: %eng:

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Miguel papou tudo! Mikael ate up! (lit. ‘Mikael he-ate up’)

Command over person inflection shows in the children’s idiomatic repetition of the verb in replies, which is a standard feature of Portuguese. Va´zquez-Cuesta and Mendes da Luz (1971: 229) describe this repetition as a feature of ‘echo-language’ (‘lenguaje-eco’, in the Spanish original). Affirmative replies to yes/no questions consist of the verb itself, often on its own, inflected for the appropriate grammatical person. Examples (7.32) /(7.35) show the children’s compliance with the verbal person used by the mother: (7.32) K 2;8 *MUM: %eng: %act: *KAR: %eng: %com: (7.33) S 3;0 %sit: *MUM: %eng: *SOF: %eng: %com:

(7.34) S 3;1 %sit: *MUM: %eng: *SOF: %eng: %act: *MUM: %eng: *SOF:

mastiga bem! chew your food properly! Karin quickly swallows her food whole. ja´ ‘‘maquiguei’’! I’ve chewed! (lit. ‘already I-chewed’) the target for ‘‘maquiguei ’’ is mastiguei .

Sofia complains to Mother that Karin was hitting her, Mother is doubtful. a Karin naõ estava nada a bater-te! Karin was not hitting you at all! ‘‘ta´va ta´va ’’! yes, she was! (lit. ‘she-was she-was’). Sofia’s response shows an idiomatic colloquial reduplication indicating emphasis.

Sofia is eating, Mother has her back turned. ja´ acabaste, Fia? are you finished, Fia? acabei. finished. (lit. ‘I-finished’) Mother comes to Sofia. acabou tudo? finished it all? (lit. ‘(did Sofia) finish it all?’) acabou.


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%eng: finished. (lit. ‘she-finished’) %com: the mother uses first a 2nd-person form, and then a 3rd-person form. Sofia’s replies are in the 1st- and 3rdperson, respectively. (7.35) M 2;9 %sit: Mikael is chasing away a stubborn bee. *MUM: deixa a abelha, filho! ela naõ quer nada contigo. %eng: leave the bee alone, darling! it doesn’t want anything from you. *MIK: quer sim! quer picar o Miguel! %eng: yes it does! (lit. ‘it-wants yes’) it wants to sting Mikael! The stable use of person inflection can be seen in the children’s productive generalisation of it to mixes involving Swedish verbal stems (Swedish has no verbal person inflection). Generalisation consistently involves verbal forms from the Portuguese verbal -ar paradigm. In the following example, the 1st-person present tense inflection -o is used: (7.36) K 3;3 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %com:

wanting to press the start button of the washing machine. deixa, mama˜, eu *trycko*! let be, mummy, I press! for *trycko*, [gtRYku]. Ptg and Sw equivalents of ‘(I) press’ are carrego /kg‰ogu/ and trycker /gtrYkf3r/, respectively.

A similar example to (7.36), also involving a Swedish /Portuguese blend, is (10.46). One later example of the children’s productive use of the verbal -ar paradigm is (10.14), involving English. Tense inflections remained stable, in the sense that present and past forms were consistently used in target ways. In contrast, all three children went through a stage where 1st- and 3rd-person inflections were treated interchangeably, which is clear from utterances with overt positional subject. In examples (7.37) /(7.42), the %eng line gives the literal inflectional form of the verb used by the children, and the %mod line gives the alternative verbal form:


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(7.37) K 2;9 *KAR: a Karin ja´ consegui. %eng: Karin I-managed. %mod: conseguiu . (7.38) M 2;11 *MIK: o Miguel papei tudo. %eng: Mikael I-ate up. %mod: papou . (7.39) S 3;4 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %mod:

Mother hurts herself and cries out in pain. mama˜ magoei-me? mummy I-hurt-myself? magoou-se .

(7.40) S 3;6 *MUM: %eng: *SOF: %eng: %mod:

consegues falar alemaõ? can you speak German? Sofia naõ consigo. Sofia I-can’t. consegue .

(7.41) S 3;6 *SOF: eu acabou. %eng: I she-finished. %mod: acabei . Interestingly, despite their spontaneous use of these forms over a period of a few months, the children appear aware that they are nontarget. For example, Karin at times attempted to make Sofia repeat utterances like (7.41) immediately after Sofia had used them, by means of prompts like: (7.42) K 5;4 *KAR: Sofia, diz la´: eu acabou. %eng: Sofia, say: I she-finished. Sofia regularly responded to these challenges with furious tantrums, yelling the correct form, e.g. eu acabei ‘I I-finished’ back at her sister several times, and showing her own awareness of the target form that she somehow had just failed to use.


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The children also devised verbal inflections of their own: (7.43) S 3;3 *SOF: Sofia ‘‘papoi’’. %eng: Sofia ate up. %pho: for ‘‘papoi ’’, [pgpoj] S 3;3 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %pho:

at the end of a TV show that she was watching. agora ‘‘acaboi’’. it’s finished now. for ‘‘acaboi ’’, [kgboj]

(7.44) M 2;10 *MIK: %eng: %pho:

a Sofia e a Karin ‘‘vaiem’’ para o jardim. Sofia and Karin (are) go(ing) to the garden. for ‘‘vaiem ’’, [gvaj~˜j]

Sofia’s forms in (7.43) blend the 1st- and 3rd-person past tense inflections -ei [j] and -ou [o], respectively, of the regular -ar verbs that she uses in her utterances into one novel form -oi [oj]. Mikael’s target in (7.44) is vaõ /v~w ˜ /, from the irregular verb ir ‘to go’. The form ‘vaiem ’ could be modelled on the 3rd-person singular form of this verb, vai /vaj/, blended with the -em /~˜j/ inflection that marks the 3rd-person plural of regular verbs except -ar verbs, e.g. comem /gk&m~˜j/, from comer ‘to eat’. It could also be calqued on the 3rd-person plural form saem /gsaj~˜j/, from sair ‘to go out’. Number and gender

In Portuguese, number inflection holds for verbal forms, together with person, and stands also for agreement within the noun phrase. Gender accounts for the division of nouns into different classes. Portuguese has two numbers, singular and plural, and two genders, masculine and feminine. In gendered languages, all nouns must fall into one gender category (although a few nouns may belong to several, as for example Ptg doente ‘patient’, which has both). This includes native novel words, as well as borrowings and loanwords. The following discussion focuses on uses of gender and number within the noun phrase, and concerns the regular plural suffix -s /S/, as well as the commonest gender markers, the Ptg suffixes -o /u/ and -a // for masculine and feminine, respectively. The definite article has homonymous forms o and a.


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The following examples, (7.45) /(7.48), concern Mikael’s productions, which illustrate typical developmental tokens. In his case, they were concentrated within less than two months. Possessives are among the earliest words that were marked for gender. Possessive constructions were first indicated by means of tagging the word for the possessor after the word for the possessed object, as in (7.13) or (7.16). This is an idiomatic construction in Portuguese, although the children omitted do , dos , da , das , the contracted forms of the preposition de ‘of’ and the definite article, in between the two words. In the examples below, gender is indicated for each word in sequence, as mc. (masculine) and fm. (feminine). (7.45) M 1;5 bone´ Miguel bone´ papa´ meia Miguel meia manas

‘Mikael’s cap’ ‘daddy’s cap’ ‘Mikael’s sock’ ‘sisters’ sock’

‘cap, mc./Mikael, mc.’ ‘cap, mc./daddy, mc.’ ‘sock, fm./Mikael, mc.’ ‘sock, fm./sisters, fm.’

1st-person possessives then appear, meu mc. and minha fm. ‘my’. They first replace the possessor’s name, in its syntactic position: (7.46) M 1;7 aguinha minha? caõzinho meu

‘?my water/ water is mine’ ‘?my doggy/doggy is mine’

‘water, fm./my/ mine, fm.’ ‘doggy, mc./my/ mine, mc.’

From a positional perspective, comparing this pattern with the one in (7.45), it is difficult to decide whether the children are attempting to build up possessed /possessor constituents within a noun phrase, or a possessive subject /complement clause with the copula e´ ‘is’ omitted. Sequences like bone´ Miguel in (7.45) could be syntactically well formed renditions either of isto e´ o bone´ do Miguel ‘this is Mikael’s cap’, where bone´ and Miguel form a phrase, or of este bone´ e´ do Miguel ‘this cap is Mikael’s’, where bone´ and Miguel belong to different constituents. The simple substitution of one word for a different word in the possessor slot in (7.46) is equally ambiguous. Words like meu/minha have homonymous determiner and pronoun forms, e.g. o meu bone´ ‘my cap’ versus o bone´ e´ meu ‘the cap is mine’. For both determiners and pronouns, agreement is with the gender of the possessed. In examples like (7.46), they appear to simply fill in the possessor’s positional slot. The construction in (7.46) later alternates with the constructions where meu/minha are pre-posed, i.e. occur in determiner position, with or


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without overt copula. There are also a few instances of use of the two possessive markers so far available to the child, as in the second example in (7.47). At this stage, determiner-words occur with the target gender (and number) agreement between determiner and possessed (caõzinho and sapato are masculine singular, aguinha and escova are feminine singular): (7.47) M1;7 (e´) minha escova ‘(it’s) my brush’ ‘my, fm./brush, fm.’ (e´) meu sapato Miguel ‘(it’s) my Mikael’s ‘my, mc./shoe, mc.’ shoe’ The form meu appeared as a generic possessive too, in a target-like pronominal use. One example is the second utterance in (7.48). The two productions in (7.48) are typical of the children’s utterances while fighting over toys, for example, and the generally furious tone in which they were uttered is a good indication that this word was becoming intuitively associated with possession meanings. The statement of possession concerned either own possessions that were being snatched by sibling(s) or sibling possessions that the speaker decided should be shared. (7.48) M 1;7 e´ meu balaõ! e´ meu!

‘it’s my balloon!’ ‘it’s mine!’

‘my, mc./balloon, mc.’ ‘mine, mc.’

The pronominal form e´ meu applied to differently gendered nouns. Fights over a toy wristwatch (relo´gio , mc.) or a pair of slippers (pantufas , fm.) prompted the same response. As adult observers, we cannot often tell precisely when and how, or even whether, child productions reflect child insight into the workings of the language. In some cases, however, the children do appear to give clear signs of testing hypotheses that they may be forming, and of requesting confirmation about them, by means of incipient metalinguistic skills that they find at their disposal. One example concerns Karin’s use of adjectives. Portuguese adjectives are also marked for gender, whether in attributive or predicative uses. After having produced several target instances of noun/adjective agreement, Karin suddenly appeared to realise that agreement involves some pattern, which therefore needed to be checked. During the next month, she produced deliberately wrong noun /adjective agreement forms, restricting herself to two-word utterances only, where she combined her active vocabulary in productions like the following (transcription is given for the adjectives only):


(7.49)

K 2;1 patinho amarela sabaõ branca Karin sentadinho

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[mgluglf] /mgRolu/ [gb~gkf] /gbR~ku/ [sitgdigłuf] /se˜tgdił/

‘duck, mc./ yellow, fm.’ ‘soap, mc./ white, fm.’ ‘Karin, fm./ sitting, mc.’

Karin consistently used an assertive low-falling intonation pattern in these utterances and, whenever the mother was around, she stared at her in anticipation of the mother’s invariable utterance of the correct agreement forms. She made use of other prosodic markings in these utterances too. In the examples above, all three target adjectives have penultimate lexical stress. Karin added an extra emphatic stress to the syllable containing the adjectival suffix that she was checking, and lengthened it so that the vowel was clearly heard. She seems also to have realised that the form of the adjective, not of the noun, is the one that needs checking. Karin’s last example in (7.49) draws upon the largely consistent correlation, in Portuguese, between clearly sexed referents and the gender of the nouns that designate them. Words like homem ‘man’, boi ‘ox’ and galo ‘rooster’ are masculine, words like mulher ‘woman’, vaca ‘cow’ and galinha ‘hen’ are feminine. In contrast, the words for a child, whales, seagulls and spiders of either sex are feminine, whereas those for ghosts, sharks, sparrows and mosquitoes are masculine. The often puzzling effects of sex/gender associations in children’s understanding of their surroundings is aptly given in the title of Taeschner’s (1983) book, ‘The sun is feminine’, particularly where sex-bound representations of referents are concerned. Female representations of the sun or male representations of the moon make little sense in Portuguese, where the genders of the equivalent words are masculine, sol , and feminine, lua , respectively. The children in this study also found it necessary, for example, to repeatedly ask for confirmation of whether the evil witch in commercial video versions of The Little Mermaid story indeed was an octopus: the character is clearly female, and designated by the feminine nouns bruxa ‘witch’ or fada ma´ ‘evil fairy’, whereas the Portuguese word for octopus, polvo, is masculine. A related issue arose in Mikael’s speech between around age 2;5 and age 3;0, when he had productions like the following: (7.50) M 2;6 %sit: attempting to excuse himself from putting his toys away.


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*MIK: Miguel muito cansada. %eng: Mikael very tired. %com: Mikael’s form cansada is fm. The target is the mc. form cansado . (7.51) M 2;10 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %com:

describing his newfound biking skills. Miguel anda ‘‘cicle´ta’’ sozinha. Mikael bikes all by herself. Mikael’s form sozinha is fm. The target is the mc. form sozinho .

The reasons for Mikael’s use of feminine adjectival forms for selfreference could be sought in a generalisation from an apparent interpretation of feminine gender as default in his data, exemplified in (7.52) below. Or, as is perhaps more likely, his uses are due to an issue of models. All speakers of Portuguese in his immediate surroundings were female, and therefore used feminine forms for self-reference. Contact with male speakers of Portuguese was sporadic, and this stage coincided with the period when his father was posted to the USA, so Mikael seldom heard Portuguese masculine forms applied to males other than himself. The issue of the children’s choice of default gender marking is nevertheless worth mentioning, particularly where gender clashes may arise. Because gender marking is compulsory, there must be a choice between the two genders when referring collectively to objects or living beings, in cases where the words designating each individual belong to different genders. Masculine is taken as the unmarked gender in Portuguese, on the strength of default masculine marking for both collective reference to masculine and feminine nouns, and for reference to sexed beings whose sex is undetermined or irrelevant. Examples are utterances like Saõ me´dicos ‘They are doctors’ to refer collectively to a male and a female doctor (a female doctor is referred to as a me´dica ), or Olha um gato! ‘Look, a (tom)cat!’ at the sighting of any cat (a female cat is gata ). The children had plenty of evidence for the choice of masculine forms as default, in Portuguese speakers’ use of, for example, eles ‘they’ and os meninos ‘the children (lit. the boys)’ to refer to all three children, or os papa´s and os vo´vo´s to refer to their own or others’ parents and grandparents. By the analysis of masculine as default gender, the reasoning would follow that when one word is being retrieved for use while the word itself is being learned, masculine would be the default gender assigned to it. By the same reasoning, mixes of noun phrase


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constituents from languages where this gender distinction is nonexistent would occur (mostly) with masculine gender. Discussion of these two issues follows. Specifically for Mikael, and after target use of the masculine form meu for a while as in (7.48), the form ‘minho ’ later appeared. This is a nonstandard possessive form in Portuguese, in all likelihood built from an overextension of the feminine minha as default form. Mikael’s form follows other regular instances of feminine -a and masculine -o suffixation, whose pattern was apparently beginning to fall into place for the child. His likely association of each suffix with different genders explains his exclusive use of minho with masculine nouns: (7.52) M 1;7 livro e´ ‘‘minho’’ (e´) ‘‘minho’’ paõ sumo ‘‘minho’’

‘book is mine’ ‘(it’s) my bread’ ‘my juice’

The form meu accordingly disappeared for a while from Mikael’s data. Later, e´ meu did reappear, though in a different use. At 1;10, Mikael started using it for representations of himself, whether in photographs or videos. In these later uses, the form meu can possibly be interpreted as a positional replacement for the word Miguel , with either loss of the possessive meaning or confusion between the earlier possessive meaning of e´ (do) Miguel ‘it’s Mikael’s’ and the complement meaning e´ (o) Miguel ‘it’s Mikael’. Interestingly, at the same age, 1;10, Mikael briefly reverted to the form (e´) Miguel to describe his possessions. In Sofia’s data, there are also several examples of overextension of feminine forms, for example her use of esta ‘this (one), fm.’ for generic reference to any object, instead of the standard forms este and isto ‘this (one), mc.’ that she used before. The words relo´gio and paõ in (7.53) are masculine: (7.53) S 3;0 %sit: Sofia is sorting out toys. *SOF: esta e´ relo´gio Sofia. %eng: this is Sofia’s watch. S 3;1 %act: *MUM: %eng: %act:

Mother shows Sofia two different kinds of bread. queres paõ branco ou este escurinho? do you want white bread or this dark one? Sofia points at the dark bread.

*SOF: esta. %eng: this one.


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S 3;1 %act:

Sofia points at a lemon squeezer with a design unknown to her. *SOF: que e´ esta? %eng: what’s this? Another example concerns numerals, which have masculine and feminine forms for ‘one’ and ‘two’. The children were well acquainted with these forms from counting, e.g. body parts (nariz ‘nose’ and olho ‘eye’ are masculine, boca ‘mouth’ and maõ ‘hand’ are feminine). From age 1;4, Sofia counted up to her limit of 4 using the masculine forms: (7.54) S 1;4 um dois treˆs quatro

[u do te ka] ‘one two three four’

These numerals appeared first when repeating the nursery rhyme Um dois treˆs quatro, quantos pelos tem o gato? ‘One two three four, how many hair(strand)s does the cat have?’ after her mother, and later in spontaneous counting. From 2;0, she started using the feminine form of numerals to count, up to her limit of 5, and to count any objects, for example her fingers (the word dedo ‘finger’ is masculine): (7.55) S 2;0 uma duas treˆs quatro cinco

[gm du te ka ti]

In contrast, Karin and Mikael consistently used the masculine forms for general counting. At age 1;10, Mikael started using the masculine form dois /dojS/, rendered [do(j)], to indicate not only the meaning ‘two’, but the meaning ‘plural’ as well, i.e. more than one. He used the word to quantify plural nouns, regardless of their gender. The first example in (7.56) was produced when entering a reasonably full car park: (7.56) M 1;11 dois carros ‘two, mc./cars, mc.’ dois manas ‘two, mc./sisters, fm.’ Mikael used the same word to try to elicit plural forms. One dialogue that illustrates his strategy is given in (7.57), for the word casa ‘house’, which is feminine: (7.57) M 1;10 %sit: Mikael wants Mother to draw for him, and requests several objects in turn. *MIK: casa! %eng: house!


%act: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %act: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %com: %act:

*MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %act: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng:

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Mother draws a house. uma casa. viu? a house. see? dois! two! Mother draws the number 2, and speaks as she draws. um do B/— / a tw B/— / naõ!! casa, dois! no!! house, two! Mikael interrupts Mother. Mother draws another house by the first one, and speaks as she draws. Mikael giggles and bounces excitedly. ah, duas casas! e´ isso? I see, two houses! is that it? casas! casas! dois. mais casa? houses! houses! two. more house? Mother draws several houses. ih, tantas casas! muitas casas, gosta? ooh, so many houses! many houses, do you like it? casas! casas! houses! houses!

On the other hand, after a steady period of correct gender use of the possessives meu versus minha , the feminine forms minha(s) also emerged for Sofia from age 3;0 as apparent default, as minha did for Mikael. In contrast to Mikael’s interpretation of the scope of the word minha as default but feminine, Sofia appears to have taken it as gender-neutral default, as she did for esta in (7.53). In the following example, pantufas is feminine and plural, Lego and brinquedo are masculine and singular: (7.58)

S 3;0 isto e´ minha [pan]tufas [brin]quedo e´ minha e´ minhas Lego

‘this is my slippers’ ‘(the) toy is mine’ ‘(this) is my Lego’

For the next two months, minha(s) forms were applied to all novel words and Sofia no longer used the form meu :


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(7.59) S 3;1 %sit:

*SOF: %eng: *SOF: %eng: %com: *SOF: %eng: %com:

Sofia is being shown around her new kindergarten. She marvels at all the facilities and activities available there, by enumerating and describing them at length for her mother. olha ma´mi! look mummy! cadei[r]as ‘‘caninas’’. small chairs. Sofia’s rendition of pequeninas /p(‹)k(‹)gninS/ ‘small’ is [kgninS]. m[en]inos tem [pan]tufas. (the) children have slippers. Sofia uses the singular verbal form tem for the plural teˆm .

[. . .] %act: Sofia falls silent, then opens her arms in a wide gesture. *SOF: isto e´ minha? %eng: is (all) this mine? %com: Sofia wants to know whether she is allowed to play with all the toys around her. The singling out of the feminine form minha as default for generic reference is apparent from data like Sofia’s last line in (7.59). In this episode, she otherwise shows command of gender agreement in the feminine phrase cadeiras pequeninas ‘small chairs’, and of the use of masculine forms for mixed-sexes groups, in the word meninos ‘children’, referring to the boys and girls around her. Other data concerning minha are: (7.60) S 3;2 (e´) minhas liv[r]os ‘(it’s) my books’ minhas carro ‘my car’ minha puxo ‘my ponytail’ The examples in (7.60) show masculine nouns, although the pattern is replicated with feminine nouns like cola ‘glue’, roupa ‘clothes’ or caneta ‘pen’. Sofia used these utterances with or without e´ ‘is’, for one or several referents. For example, she used minha puxo , with both words marked for singular, while twirling both ponytails on her head. Sometimes, like Mikael, she had double possessive marking in the same phrase. Like him,


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her utterances had no prosodic marking that might signal different constituents: (7.61) S 3;0 e´ minha(s) Sofia

‘it’s my/mine Sofia’s

Sofia’s data also show that she used both singular minha and plural minhas indiscriminately for all 1st-person possessives. Because both gender and number are compulsory for possessive NP-internal agreement, she appeared to be attempting to work her way through both markers, although experimenting with minha took precedence for default gender marking, not for number. These data do not of course prove that one or the other of the two genders is the default marker for these children, they simply show that decisions on this matter can be quite difficult. Data from all three children’s use of adjectives as single words are equally vague about which gender to take as unmarked in their productions. Single adjectives were produced, for example, when answering questions like De que cor e´ o gatinho?/Qual e´ a cor do gatinho? ‘Which colour is the kitten?’, where cor is feminine and gatinho is masculine, or when spontaneously commenting on the size or appearance of an object designated by a noun of either gender. Both adjective forms could be produced, like preto/preta ‘black’, pequenino/pequenina ‘small’ or sujo/suja ‘dirty’. Data from the children’s early mixes of Swedish into Portuguese provide no clue either. Where the words refer to sexed beings, their choice is for the matching gender: (7.62)

KSM 9/3;0 a farmor o farfar

‘the (paternal) grandmother’ ‘the (paternal) grandfather’

Other uses follow the gender of the corresponding Portuguese word. The examples below give only the mixed noun and one modifier, which are extracted from the children’s more elaborated utterances, and the equivalent Portuguese noun with its gender: (7.63) K 3;3 uma la¨tto¨l K 4;8 os kra¨ftor S 3;3 as myror S 3;3 os [ele]fanten

‘an alcohol-free beer’ ‘the crayfish’ ‘the ants’ ‘the elephants’

cerveja, fm. lagostins , mc. formigas , fm. elefantes , mc.


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S 3;4 uma pepparkakshus S 4;0 no gunga

‘a gingerbread house’ ‘on the swing’

casa , fm. baloiço, mc.

Incidentally, the children’s uses in (7.63) appear problematic for Spradlin et al .’s (2003) recent claim that child mixes involving a determiner and a noun will favour the determiner of the language that marks it with the greater number of features. Their study dealt with Spanish and English, and found that the majority of mixes involved a Spanish determiner and an English noun. This preference was attributed to the compulsory double encoding of Spanish determiners for gender and number as opposed to the English single encoding for number. In both Portuguese and Swedish, determiners are marked for the two features of gender and number. Swedish marks number similarly to Portuguese, singular (one) versus plural (more than one), whereas the Swedish gender system shares only incidental similarities with the Portuguese one. It is only later, well into their English-language schooling, that the children do seem to take masculine as unmarked in most of their English mixes into Portuguese. Examples are their use of masculine modifiers with nouns like ‘wheel’ (roda), ‘assembly’ (assembleia/reuniaõ ), ‘sword’ (espada), ‘tongue’ (lıńgua ), ‘pool’ (piscina ), ‘ink’ (tinta ) and several others, whose Portuguese equivalents are all feminine. The same is true, at the same stage, for Swedish mixes like julgran ‘Christmas tree’ (a´rvore de Natal ), fo¨delsedagskalas ‘birthday party’ (festa de anos ), kjol ‘skirt’ (saia ), and several others. By then, the children can be safely said to be following the Portuguese default norm that they had heard used around them. If choices concerning default markings in child speech are found to have theoretical relevance, the default remains undecided from treatments of gender apparent from these children’s early data. More interestingly, the data provide a glimpse into the strategies that the children found helpful to sort out agreement. Compounding Compounding is the process through which new words are created by attaching stems together. Compound words raise interesting issues about Frege’s Principle of Compositionality (Frege, 1952), which has the meaning of a whole as a function of the meaning of its parts. Like phrases, compounds involve a head and a modifier. Unlike phrases, the resulting compounded meaning need not preserve the meaning integrity of its parts. One example from Portuguese that illustrates this distinction is carro elećtrico , lit. ‘car electrical’. The phrasal meaning is ‘electrical car’, related to battery-operated vehicles or toys, whereas the compound


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meaning is ‘tram’. Compounding takes several different forms in Portuguese, common among which are simple juxtaposition of the two stems, or their linking by means of the word de, ‘of/for’ (see Villalva, 1992, for a thorough discussion of compounding in Portuguese). Early uses of compounding in the data follow the structure of nominal phrasal constituency, and are left-headed. Examples of the children’s renditions of target compounds are: (7.64) K 1;11 pasta de dentes K 2;3 Pai Natal

[patgde˜t] /gpaStgdfe˜tS/ [pałgtal] /gpajngtal/

‘toothpaste’ ‘Father Christmas’ ´stica S 3;8 pastilha ela [piliglaSku] /pSgti· iglaStik/ ‘chewing gum’ M 3;0 chapeú de chuva [powgSuv] /Sgpowgd(‹)Suv/ ‘umbrella’

Lexical-like stress assignment to the compounds in (7.64), and the morphological treatment of other compounds may argue for their use as single-morpheme words, as opposed to phrases or compounds proper. For example, the plural marker is added at the end of the compound word, not at the end of its first stem: (7.65) K 3;7 *KAR: be´be´s naõ tem ‘‘fato-banhos’’? %eng: don’t babies have swimsuits? %com: the plural of the compound fato de banho (‘swimsuit’) is fatos de banho . Karin uses the singular verbal form tem for the plural form teˆm . (7.66) S 3;2 %sit:

seeing a new bottle of bubble bath gel beside an old one. *SOF: ‘‘puqueˆ’’ tem dois ‘‘banho-pumas’’? %eng: why are there two bubble baths? %com: the plural of the compound banho de espuma (‘bubble bath’) is banhos de espuma .

Regardless of whether the children realise that the compounds in their productions are indeed constituted by different words juxtaposed to form a new one, they appear to follow the strategy that, if a word is a word, then its internal constituents cannot be modified nor interrupted.

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Other evidence for this claim comes from early play with compound words: (7.67) K 1;11 %act: Karin is rummaging inside a kitchen drawer, and grabs a large wooden spoon. [. . .] *KAR: colher pau Karin. Karin colher pau, sim, sim, Karin colher pau. %eng: wood spoon Karin. Karin wood spoon, yes, yes, Karin wood spoon. %com: the target word is colher de pau ‘wooden spoon’. Karin adds her own name either after or before the compounded stems, but not in between these, e.g. *colher Karin pau . In contrast, compounded proper names appear to be preferentially treated as phrases. In the two examples below, plural markers are attached to each stem: (7.68) K 3;2 %sit: Mother explained to the children that, like them, she also has an uncle called Ze´. *KAR: entaõ e´ dois tios Ze´s. %eng: then it’s two uncles Ze´s.

(7.69) M 2;6 %sit: puzzled at two different representations of Peter Pan’s Captain Hook. *MIK: e´ dois ‘‘Paquintaõs Hookos’’? %eng: is it two Captains Hooks? %com: both the English name of this character and its Portuguese translation Gancho (‘hook’) are used in the family. The first examples of compounds used as a word modified by another word to acquire a third meaning come from the children’s own novel words. Their productions support Clark’s (1993) arguments for the early productivity of compounding in child speech, and her observation that compounds stand for a large proportion of novel words in child speech. Couto (1999) reports similar findings, and provides some discussion of


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spontaneous lexical reduplication in child Portuguese. The earliest recorded example of compounding in the data comes from Mikael: (7.70) M 1;5 %sit: at dinner, Sofia (3;8) asks to sample some of Mother’s beer, and is disgusted by its taste. *SOF: ‘‘blh!!!’’ %eng: yuk!!! %pho: b·ff %act: Mikael immediately turns to Mother, stretching his arms towards her glass. *MIK: quer(o) a´gua ‘‘blh’’? %eng: (I) want yuk water? %pho: kogwawgb· %mod: for quer(o) a´gua , /gkoR(u) gagw/ %int: HPH/HH/HR At this age, Mikael did not know the word cerveja /s(‹)Rgv/ ‘beer’. In order to be able to name the drink so as to request it, he chose to modify the well known word for ‘water’ (which he had used for a while to refer to any drink) by means of Sofia’s verbal comment on it. Other examples of novel compounds show similar understanding of the core features of compounding in Portuguese: (7.71) S 2;8 %sit: commenting on the different contents of the potty that she has just used, pointing at each in turn. *SOF: e´ coćo´. %eng: it’s poo. *SOF: e´ coćo´ a´gua. %eng: it’s water poo. (7.72) M 1;5 %sit: watching mother take gherkins out of a jar. *MIK: pa´pa banho! %eng: bath food! In (7.71), Sofia chose to create a compound, instead of using the standard noun known to her, chichi ‘pee’, in all likelihood to call attention to shared features of both referents. Mikael’s creation in (7.72) became his word for gherkins and any foodstuffs preserved or displayed in liquids, including olives.


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(7.73) M 3;0 %sit: *SOF: %eng: %com: *MIK: %eng: (7.74) M 3;0 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %com: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: %com: *MIK: %eng: %com:

Mikael and Sofia (5;3) are discussing future careers. quero ser mulher-polıćia. I want to be a policewoman. Sofia uses the standard Ptg word for ‘policewoman’. eu ‘‘tame´m’’! quero ser menino-polıćia. me too! I want to be a policeboy.

Mikael is baffled at the sight of a man wearing a ponytail. e´ um senhor? is it a man? Ptg senhor, lit. ‘gentleman’, is the polite word for ‘man’ used in the family. e´. that’s right. tem puxo?! he has a ponytail?! tem, tem um puxo. that’s right, he has a ponytail. Mikael falls silent for a while. e´ um senhor menina. it’s a girl man. ponytails are Karin’s and Sofia’s regular hairstyles.

Example (7.73) shows the choice of the right syntactic position in which to substitute the stem required to form the appropriate meaning of the intended word. The use of the masculine determiner um in (7.74) shows an additional feature of compounding, that the head-stem decides the gender of the compound (senhor ‘man’ is mc., menina ‘girl’ is fm.). The children’s spontaneous examples of compounding appear to belong to the same type, both formally and semantically. They can be analysed as formed by two nouns, X and Y, to result in the meaning ‘an X that has some property of a Y’. This type of compound is quite productive in Portuguese (see also example (6.46) for a possible example of a verb /verb compound, with a different meaning relationship between its stems). Another type of noun /noun construction in the children’s early speech consists of reduplication. One example is:


(7.75)

M 1;10 %sit: *MIK: %eng:

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choosing his favourite soft toy to play with. ola´ caõ-caõ. hi dog-dog.

Whether reduplication should be taken as an instance of compounding is, I believe, open to discussion. Reduplication of this kind involves overtones of endearment and attenuation. Affective reduplication is common in motherese, and attested examples in the data are pe´-pe´ ‘footfoot’, pico-pico for ‘itchiness’ (lit. ‘sting-sting’) or linda-linda ‘gorgeousgorgeous, fm.’ (motherese is further discussed in Chapter 11). Similar expression of attenuation or diminution has been otherwise argued for reduplication, particularly of adjectives, in certain creoles (Parkvall, 2003). These overtones are absent from the meaning of other compounds. The typical modification of the first stem by the second can only marginally be argued to hold for reduplicated compounds, in that reduplication does not involve the specification of the reduplicated word as a legitimate representative of itself: in (7.75), the dog-dog is not ‘a dog that is unquestionably a dog’. On the other hand, the reduplication does convey a different meaning from that of the stem word in isolation, constraining it: the dog-dog is not any dog, but ‘a dog that is the object of specific affection’. That is, the reduplicated word acquires a meaning of its own, which is a typical effect of compounding. One (rare) example of reduplication where the second stem does modify the first was elicited in connection with the utterance of another compound: (7.76) S 3;10 %sit: *SOF: %eng: [. . .] %act: *MUM: %eng: %com: *SOF: %eng:

checking out how a mechanical lead-pencil works. isto e´ um la´pis-caneta. e´? this is a pen-pencil. is it? Mother picks up an ordinary pencil. entaõ isto o que e´? what is this, then? Sofia thinks for a while. e´ um la´pis-la´pis. it’s a pencil-pencil.

Common to the uses of compounds discussed in this section is the apparent realisation that compounding is a handy way of making words mean more. In contrast to affixation, compounding involves the simple juxtaposition of words, whereby one modifies the other with no additional requirements about agreement between them.

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Common to the children’s uses of grammatical processes affecting words and their meaning, discussed in this chapter, is that the children’s productions, whether target or nontarget, consistently draw on features of Portuguese, the one language that is the object of their probing: early uses of verbal inflection or of nominal agreement proceed from within the grammatical resources of Portuguese, as does compounding. The next chapter discusses the children’s exploration of language-specific resources from a complementary perspective, that of semantic processes affecting words and word meanings.

Chapter 8

Probing for Meaning The meanings of a language are not exhausted in its words and in the grammatical arrangements of these. If they were, learning to use a foreign language would be a straightforward matter of checking commercially available dictionaries, phrase books and grammars of that language. Language mastery, whether in first language acquisition or in second language learning, depends on interaction with competent users of the same language(s) and emerges from concrete utterances used by individual speakers (see Barlow & Kemmer, 2000; Bybee, 1998; Kessler, 1986; Leather & van Dam, 2002; Tomasello, 2003). Typically, the first interlocutors that are available to children are older users, often the child’s parents or caregivers who, having mastered language in this way are now, in turn, able to provide a model for the neophyte. The task of processing their elders’ speech appears to proceed by sorting out which meanings go with which sequences of sounds, as sound is the medium of language that typically developing children are exposed to. Making sense of speech besides includes finding out the conditions under which linguistic items and their arrangements are used in actual communication. Competent linguistic interaction involves what Spurrett and Cowley (2004: 443) refer to as ‘utterance-activity’, defined as ‘the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans’, which is argued to enhance infants’ cognitive powers. Everyday interaction by means of language proceeds in context and, particularly in interaction with young children, often has relevance for the immediate context surrounding child and interlocutor. This results in the inherent ambiguity of language forms rarely showing under these circumstances, as studies in automatic pattern recognition have demonstrated (Hunston, 2001). Out of context, on the other hand, practically any utterance in any language can be ambiguous. This is particularly true of children’s first words, as we shall see below.

Words and Concepts The ability to use language involves the ability to form concepts, and learning the associations that pair conceptual structures with words and utterances. Forming concepts in turn involves categorisation, that can be thought of as a taxonomy enabling the grouping together (or differentiation) of objects, actions, perceptions, that can usefully be referred to by means of the same (or different) linguistic labels. Put this straightforward way, acquiring language would be learning the names for things, and all 181

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languages would have names for the same pre-existing things. In fact, concepts are a product of language, because different languages serve different conceptual needs. The question is not so much the trivial matter of whether some languages have dozens of names for snow, camel or rice, and some do not, but whether distinguishing among different types of snow, camel and rice serves any communicative purpose. Children, like adults, will have no need for useless devices, linguistic or otherwise. The bulk of this section deals with the children’s conceptualisation of the world around them, apparent from how words and utterances can be made to work for them. But first, the relationship between word, concept and referent needs clarification. Word referents By naming, we recognise a category, i.e. a set of features in the entity that satisfies our criteria in providing one word, and not another, for it. But naming also assists in the process of categorisation itself. Lewis (1923: 172) observes that in ‘scientific classification, the search is [. . .] for things worth naming ’. This is an interesting parallel to the task facing a child learning language too, the ‘little linguist’ revisited in another form. Lewis also adds that ‘the naming, classifying, defining activity is essentially prior to investigation’ (p. 172). Naming is therefore part of the process of understanding, not a mechanical labelling of a product of thought. Naming is in fact one way of making sense, whether of the object of a scientific investigation, or of everyday objects and experiences. In practice, the process is the same. The word products of different languages are what, for example, second-language learners look for, when they consult bilingual dictionaries. But neophyte children face a whole different task altogether. One thing is to realise that referents need to be named, so that they can be communicated. Another is to conform to the uses that particular names are put to in adult uses of language, so that communication can take place at all. Bilingual children, who have been shown to ascribe much weaker necessary links between a referent and its name than monolingual peers (Romaine, 1989: 99ff.), appear to have this as clear as monolinguals. The labels may be different in different languages, but they must be used in the consensual way that is sanctioned for each language. Book-reading, or generally sharing printed material, seems to be a particularly well suited activity to demonstrate explicit associations between referents and their names, and so facilitate the acquisition of words. The acquisition of words appears central to those surrounding the child, not least because of popular assumptions that words are the prime units that contain linguistic meaning. Words are also the usual target of elicitation play with young children, as well as a source of parental worry

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that equates lacking vocabulary with delayed speech. It follows that what the parent is engaging in, through books, is a naming activity. However, the children in this study provide several examples of book-reading activities where their responses to parental prompts asking for word repetition were systematically disregarded. The children were more interested in, for example, properties of the printed objects or characters, rather than in their names. They also wanted to be allowed to provide, or to hear, a description of what they saw on the printed page, rather than isolated words, and were, in turn, attempting to engage the parent in that particular book-reading activity. This in an observation afforded in hindsight, about several book-reading sessions dedicated to name-giving where only renditions of prompt words or object names were reinforced, and where no attention was paid to what the children themselves were attempting to gain from the interaction. These sessions were deemed ‘unsuccessful’ and recorded as such in diary notes afterwards. One example from one of these sessions is (6.44), where the mother attempts to elicit the word barco ‘boat’ (for ‘ship’), a word that was well known to the child at the time, and Mikael responds with a phrase that concerns the ship’s size. Incidentally, I have no way to tell whether Mikael’s response is a statement about the size of the object in question, or a thought about whether the prompt barco applies to (small) boats as well as (large) ships. The children obviously did not know that reading books ‘means’ finding ways of calling things by their names. The parents generally assumed that they did, and also that they were interested in saying words, especially from around age 0;9, when the children had their first attempts at precise imitation of adult speech. The children’s apparent refusal to cooperate in word-eliciting activities may, furthermore, be interpreted as ‘evidence’ that certain words have not been acquired yet, or are in some way ‘difficult’ words for the child or, simply, that the child does not enjoy book-reading or is going through some funny period. Despite mixed feedback of this kind, the children’s interest in books grew steadily from around age 0;8, when they started enjoying being read to and entertaining themselves with books containing images with or without accompanying text. By the end of their second year, they often initiated book-reading sessions themselves. Being read stories from a book had by then established itself as a regular activity, at bedtime or otherwise. Besides providing opportunities for naming and describing, the earliest book-reading activities also involve visual cues that assign physical properties, like a particular location and shape, to the referent named by the word. In addition, book-reading makes it clear that the same word can name a referent both in the real word and in the twodimensional representation of it on a printed page, engaging a very abstract set of associations between referent and verbal as well as visual

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representations of it. What the children are learning through books is not only that names associate with different referents and different representations of the same referent, but crucially that names are therefore elastic. At the same time, the children learn that not all likely candidates to one name can in fact be named by the same word. The same twodimensional circle on a page may prompt adult names as different as moon, ball or plate. Names obey apparently rigid naming rules. Children therefore need to test the limits within which semantic elasticity is allowed by their elders, in order to find out how words can be made to do useful work on their own behalf too. That is, the children are not so much finding their way through to a name, or possible names for things, but trying to find out the name that their elders use for particular things, a name that was already there before and that gained use and acceptance as a standard name. This was expressed in Clark’s (1995) principle of conventionality, accounting for the pragmatics of vocabulary learning. Children try to zero in onto the meanings that are used in the uses that they hear around them. The task is to find out what are the things that the people around the child find worth naming, and therefore worth talking with and talking about. Conformity to convention is necessary, in that competent users of a language are those who use it the way they are told to, i.e. those who use it like everyone else around them does. Word meanings During the later part of their first year, children appear to work out that the usefulness of having words lies in that words relate to something else, in the very practical sense that they get things done for the child. The use of words may elicit pleasure and company from a parent, produce an out-of-reach favourite toy to play with, or assert the child’s unwillingness to comply with instructions or routines. Children can finally ‘intrude’ in their surroundings, in the sense given by Halliday (1975: 17) to this word, and actively modify them. In so doing, children become part of the world of language users . The association of naming with power over the named has long been recognised: the biblical Adam also became master of all things after being able to give names to them. The significant cognitive step of realising how a word gets to be something that associates to something else, and can therefore be used in its stead, finds a practical application. The outset of the first words in all likelihood makes it clear to children the need to express themselves through verbalisations that are acknowledged by their interlocutors. The effect produced by early words proves that they are key in steering the listener’s engagement to take part in whatever aroused the child’s interest. That the right words or their standard forms may be yet missing appears to be no impediment for

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children’s attempts at expressing themselves. Human beings assume that language makes sense. Just like children attempt to assign some plausible interpretation to the adult utterances around them, adults will do likewise with child speech. The strategy seems to be that what matters is not so much to use the right word to talk about things, but to use words to talk about things. There are surrogate utterances that may also comply with the listeners’ requirements, and the way to find out is to try. If words convey meanings and thereby produce practical effects, the sensible thing to do must be to apply this newly found knowledge as broadly as possible. The process is trial and error, where progress takes place by successive approximations, whether we choose to label it as testing of lexical constraints or as replication of adult uses to the best of one’s ability. Words are tried, tested for meaningfulness, and either discarded or approved as appropriate carriers of the particular meaning that was intended at the particular time of their use, via the response that their use prompted in the child’s interlocutor of the moment. It is therefore clear that often, children end up concluding that one word will do as well as another. That is, the chosen word does not always have to be the standard word, so long as the meaning gets through, much like in the translators’ motto that has the meaning as sacred, though not the words. As noted above, naming requires awareness of referents. Research shows that naming also appears to require some realisation that different referents will have different names. Markman and Wachtel (1988) showed that a mutual exclusivity principle, i.e. a biunique correspondence between word and referent, indeed seems to hold for children aged 3 and 4. Similar findings, e.g. in Golinkoff et al . (1994), entail two corollaries. One, that different words name different referents, and vice versa , that different referents will be labelled by means of different words. This corollary predicts no homonymy and leaves moot the matter of lexical overextension, where one child word is taken to refer to different adult referents. Two, that one word names one referent, and vice versa , that the same referent will have only one name-label assigned to it. This corollary predicts no synonymy, and cannot therefore account for child uses like the ones discussed in connection with example (7.8) (but see Clark’s (1995) discussion of a principle of contrast, a weaker version of the mutual exclusivity principle, that does allow for synonyms like dog and animal to designate the same referent). The research paradigm spawned by assumptions on mutual exclusivity of course concerns monolingual children. The one-referent one-name principle predicts that multilingual children would refuse to assign two, or more, different names to the same referent, or would at least have serious difficulty in doing so, and does not therefore account for the fact that multilingual children naturally do exactly this. Monolingual data

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from the children in this study raise additional questions about these findings. The strategies discussed below concern the children’s probing for words and their meanings within what they are able to produce in the single language that the interlocutor requires of them. The children’s bilingual strategies for the same purposes are addressed in Chapter 5.

Strategies to Approach Word Meanings This section discusses, in turn, three strategies that the children found useful to navigate their way along word meanings. The first two are early strategies, where the children attempt to pinpoint word meanings and word uses, by querying and manipulating words. The third strategy concerns ways to dodge words that somehow are unavailable, by replacing them with other words that are deemed suitable to function in their stead. At this stage, the children already have linguistic resources that enable them to choose among words. Despite the different resources that each strategy contemplates, the following discussion of each strategy under different headings is largely a matter of presentation convenience. The querying strategy, for example, is as productive in child speech as in adult speech, and the children go on using it today.

Semantic manipulation Children’s experiments in manipulating the way in which words can be made to mean often surface in what have been termed semantic shifts . Research shows that the first semantic shifts that are detectable in child’s early word meanings come in the form of underextensions (Barrett, 1995), where the child’s word refers to a subset of the referential meanings of the equivalent adult word. One example comes from Mikael aged 0;10, who used the word colher [gugi] /kug·oR/ ‘spoon’ for his own feeding spoon only (at the same age, he had garfo [ga‚] /ggaRfu/ ‘fork’ for any other cutlery, including spoons). Underextension reflects archetypical context-bound uses of words, not unlike those of adults faced with a novel word in their own language or in a foreign one. The assumption will be that the word means what they understand it to mean in that firsttime context. In my first encounter with fish and chips, just landed in England on my first visit there in my early 20s, I too assumed that the word ‘chips’ referred only to the partner in that particular fish and newspaper-wrap combination. The word I had learnt in school for fried potato pieces was ‘French fries’. Underextended words thus have unique reference, one that is besides ‘correct’: Mikael’s spoon is a spoon, so his use of this word for it is correct. Adequate uses of words in this way may remain undetected, and explain why underextension arouses less interest than overextension in child speech.

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Overextension, where the target word refers to a subset of the referential meanings of the child’s word, is interesting for several reasons. First, it shows decontextualisation of name and referent. Second, it involves the sophisticated mental operation of generalisation. Third, precisely because it is analysed as involving decontextualisation and generalisation, the construct ‘overextension’ raises more questions than it solves about the presumed organisation of child vocabularies. The construct itself becomes vulnerable to overextension: where does the boundary go, between overextended and target uses of words? The following examples, (8.1) /(8.6), are a sample of identifiable instances of overextension in the children’s data, together with brief comments explaining why the child words may be taken as overextended forms. (8.1) K 1;0 *KAR: %eng: %pho: %mod: %com:

dedo . finger (N). pronounced variously [gdadu, gdad&, gdid&] gdedu Karin uses this form for finger, for pointing (e.g. people pictured with a stretched arm or a pointing finger) and for the object pointed at.

(8.2) K 1;1 *KAR: yyy. %pho: wawagwa %com: Karin uses this form for any soft toy, for real furry animals and for her mother’s hair. (8.3) S 1;1 *SOF: %eng: %pho: %com:

coćo´. poo. k&gk& Sofia uses this form with a high-falling tone to announce a dirty nappy, pointing at her own backside, and to name the contents of the potty after use, also pointing at it. I.e. she uses the same word for something that she feels and that she sees.

(8.4) S 1;9 *SOF: quatro. %eng: four. %pho: gkaku


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%mod: gkwatRu %com: Sofia uses this form for any number or figure, whether counting objects, pointing at numbers in telephone or clock dials, or taking a lift, when she yells the word on a high-falling tune on every floor. From age 1;1, she knows how to count up to 5. The overextension is probably due to regular lift rides during the family’s stay in a 4th floor flat at the time. (8.5) M 1;2 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %com:

seeing Mother in her furry coat. caõ! dog! k~w ˜ Mikael has used this form for any furry animal including dogs. He now uses it for people wearing furry winter clothes too.

(8.6) M 2;7 %sit:

Mother cuts cherries neatly in pieces around their pits. She places the cherry pieces in Mikael’s dessert plate, and the pits in her own plate. Mikael looks at his plate in disgust and demands more cherries. *MUM: o´ filho, tens o prato cheio. come! %eng: your plate is full, darling. eat up! *MIK: as cascas?! %eng: the peels?! %com: Mother usually peels fruit like apples for the children. Mikael appears to take any fruit part so cut away as the peel.

Examples such as these seem to vouch for the assumption that the children are overextending word meanings, that is, they are using words with meanings that cross the threshold of a sanctioned semantic scope. Prefixes like over- (and under-), applied to child productions, obviously modify what we, adult observers, presume that children are targeting in adult forms that we use ourselves. In addition, the prefixes contemplate modifications of the scope of a word’s referent that is attributed to these adult targets and assumed to be used as such by adult users themselves. There is, in other words, one basic word meaning, that is taken as core, from where overextension radiates in different directions depending on individual children. For example, Sofia (1;2) used the word porco ‘pig’ for

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pink-coloured representations of any four-legged animal, including soft toys and printed illustrations or drawings, possibly on the basis of common representations of pigs as pink in child books. Her associative chain appears based on visual properties of the objects in question, namely, animal, four-legged and pink. Mikael (2;4) used the same word porco for pigs and as an insult to his sisters whenever they snatched his toys or annoyed him in any way. This word is used in Portuguese, and in the family, as a colloquial synonym of ‘dirty’. It is also used as a noun to describe a person who is perceived as lacking in personal hygiene. Mikael’s association appears based on the function of the word, from characterising dirtiness as an undesirable trait to characterising undesirable behaviour of other kinds. In all cases of presumed overextension it seems possible to settle for a common feature, or set of features, to describe all child uses of the same word. The task may be more or less arduous, or more or less ingenious, but it largely depends on the imagination and powers of abstraction of the analyst. In all cases, the analysis in fact self-fulfils the assumption that overextension involves generalisation. The other problem with the usefulness of overextension as a construct is, where to draw the line beyond which it ceases to be legitimate to talk about overextension. The issue is not so much the risk of generalising shared semantic features to apply universally, or otherwise so broadly that they become in fact meaningless, but the more mundane criteria behind what may constitute a useful general feature. Consider the following data: (8.7) K 1;2 [guw] [guw]

uva chuva

/guv/ /gSuv/

(8.8) M 1;1 [igj~w ˜] [igj~w ˜]

aviaõ leaõ

/vig~w ˜/ /lig~w ˜/

‘grape’ ‘rain (N)’

‘aeroplane’ ‘lion’

Child forms like these raise the issue of why, or why not, they should be treated as overextensions. Shared semantic features can certainly be found, arguing for overextension. For example, round drop-like shape for (8.7), or large size plus roaring noises for (8.8). Another example is given in (6.68), concerning the words for ‘hat’ and for ‘paper’, where the association holding between hats and paper could be sought in headgear that the children loved to have made for them out of folded newspaper. Alternatively, we can say that these interpretations make little sense amid what is known about general cognitive development. We can argue


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instead that, clearly, the children have two different words for two different things, because their uses match target ones. In the latter case we, analysts, will have to explain as clearly why is it that we assume that one same child-form is a rendition of different adult words, that is, how do we know that children generalise in certain ways and not in others. Homonymy may come to the rescue, but homonymy is also a construct devised to analyse adult speech uses. As is well known, its own boundary with that of polysemy, which deals with variants of a single word, is blurred. The reverse of the coin can be illustrated in examples like (8.9). Having learned to walk two weeks before the episode below, Mikael put his newfound mobility to linguistic use too. His favourite activity was to walk around the house touching or pointing at anything he could reach and asking (O) que e´? /ugkjo/ ‘What is it/this?’, which he pronounced [t·igo] with a dragged high-rising tone. (8.9) M 1;1 %act: *MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: %act: *MIK: *MUM: %eng: %com: %act: *MIK: *MUM: %eng: %com: %act: *MIK: *MUM: %eng: %com:

Mikael slaps the seat of an armchair. que e´? what is it? e´ uma cadeira. it’s a chair. Mikael slaps the arm of the chair. que e´? e´ o braço da cadeira. it’s the arm of the chair. Mikael looks baffled. Mikael slaps the arm of the chair again. que e´? e´ o braço da cadeira, filhinho. it’s the arm of the chair, darling. Mikael looks extremely baffled. Mikael slaps his own arm. que e´? e´ o braço do Miguel. it’s Mikael’s arm. the word braço for ‘human arm’ is known to Mikael. Mother realises the reason for Mikael’s puzzlement. *MUM: e´ tambe´m um braço, filhaõ, e´! a cadeira tem um braço e o Miguel tambe´m.

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%eng:

that’s also an arm, darling, you’re right! the chair has an arm, and so has Mikael. %act: Mikael slaps the arm of the chair again. *MIK: que e´? *MUM: e´ o braço da cadeira. %act: Mikael slaps his own arm again. *MIK: que e´? *MUM: e´ o braço do Miguel. %act: Mikael slaps the arm of the chair again. *MIK: que e´? [. . .] The last part of this exchange is repeated several times, until Mikael satisfies himself that the novel name for a chair part may be intriguing, but is appropriate. Mikael appears to be monitoring the legitimacy of naming two so apparently different things by exactly the same word. This is clearly as baffling to him as a hypothetical association between, say, grapes and rain, might be to adult observers. If Mikael were a researcher in language uses, he might well conclude that adults overextend the use of a word like braço . There may in fact be a very thin line between what the linguistics literature discusses as (adult) homonyms or metaphors and (child) overextension. Pease et al . (1993: 125) note that children may ‘use words as analogies or as semantic standins’ for unknown words (emphasis added, MCF), and Carabine (1991) argues that there is far more similarity between children’s and adults’ use of word extensions than is generally recognised. In a compelling study on figurative uses of language, Dowker (2003) agrees that adults’ uses of metaphor are no different from children’s uses of apparently inappropriate terms, for lack of more appropriate alternatives, to express what is otherwise inexpressible.

Querying around words Children realise very early that questions get things done for the questioner, a realisation that may well be aided by the extensive use of questions in motherese, as discussed in the second section of Chapter 11. With it comes the additional insight that language can be used to question language itself. Queries aimed at eliciting unknown vocabulary in one of their two languages are among these children’s first examples of questioning strategies, discussed in Chapter 5. The matter of querying unknown words in one same language necessarily involves different uses of similar questioning strategies.


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Well into the two-word stage, the children go on using utterances like (O) que e´ (isto)? ‘What is it/this?’, aimed at eliciting single words that are, for the most part, unknown to the child. This type of question can also be used to confirm the use of a known word, as in Mikael’s repeated queries about the name for his own arm in (8.9) and, as illustrated in the same example, to check appropriate uses of new words. The use of these questions for these different purposes is extremely productive in the children’s data, in all likelihood because of the investment/gain trade-off involved in their use. Questions like these constitute a fine example of how to deal with various kinds of pertinent issues with minimal linguistic gear. At this stage, yes/no questions of the general form E´ __? ‘Is it __?’ develop, where the blank represents a known word. These questions do not simply duplicate the purpose of confirming the label for a referent. The queried words do not concern referents that the children already know they name, but referents that show some similarity to those to which the known name applies. The reasoning seems to be that, since referent B, for which I have no name, in some way reminds of referent A, for which I do have a name, perhaps A’s name may be used to name B too. This is similar to adults’ hypotheses about new or intriguing referents. We may wonder whether, say, some funny insect that reminds of a beetle might be properly called a ‘beetle’ too, or whether light makes more sense to us if we talk about it using wave terminology or particle terminology. The children’s questions seem to be part of a housekeeping strategy, as it were, were semantic elasticity is put through explicit tests. The quest is no longer aimed at finding out what does a word mean, but what can a word mean. Semantic relationships among words appear to be under scrutiny too, in that the children’s questions could be interpreted as attempts at identifying instances of synonymy, as in (8.13), or hyponymy, as in (8.15). A sample of the type of words so queried is given in (8.10) /(8.15): (8.10) K 1;3 *KAR: e´ mama˜? %eng: is it mummy? %com: this is Karin’s standard question when seeing pictures of women in books or magazines. (8.11) K 1;5 %sit:

indicating the bowl in her bedroom where Mother just placed a soiled nappy. *KAR: e´ lixo?

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%eng: is it (a) rubbish (bin)? %com: the word lixo is used both for the container and the contents of a rubbish bin. (8.12) S 2;5 %sit:

Mikael is crying very desperately, and suddenly makes a choking sound. *SOF: e´ ‘‘atchim’’? %eng: is it ‘‘atchoo’’? %com: Sofia is asking whether Mikael sneezed.

(8.13) S 2;7 %sit:

in a restaurant, watching a pie being cut, and one piece placed on her plate. *SOF: e´ triaˆngulo? %eng: is it triangle?

(8.14) M 1;6 %sit: Mother brings a basket with Swedish-type hard-bread for tea. *MIK: e´ bolacha? %eng: is it biscuit? (8.15) M 2;1 %sit: finds a turquoise-coloured cotton reel in a sewing basket. *MIK: e´ verde? %eng: is it green? Yes/no questions are also used to query the pronunciation of words, sometimes with mixed results: (8.16) S 2;10 %sit:

Sofia has trouble distinguishing the pronunciation of the words roda /g‰&d/ ‘wheel’ and (cor de) rosa /(koRd)g‰&z/ ‘pink’, for which she has been corrected several times. She pronounces both words [g‰&d]. Karin’s new pink bicycle provides a chance to practice (Sofia’s own bike is a different colour). %sit: Sofia slaps the frame of Karin’s bicycle. *SOF: e´ ‘‘(coˆ)rosa’’? ‘‘cale´ta’’ Karin? %eng: is it pink? Karin bike?


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%pho: %mod: [. . .] %sit: *SOF: %eng: %pho: (8.17) M 2;6 %sit:

*MIK: %eng: %pho: *MUM: %pho: *MIK: %pho: *MUM: %com: *MIK: %pho: %com: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %pho:

go (ko)g‰&d # kglot gkalin for bicicleta /bisigklot/ ‘bicycle’ Sofia slaps one of the bike’s wheels. e´ roda? ‘‘cale´ta’’? is it wheel? bike? gog‰&d # kglot

Mikael is fascinated by Captain Hook’s character in Peter Pan’s story, and wants to be able to say his name right. At this age, Mikael’s speech had several spoonerisms. e´ ‘‘Paquintaõ?’’ is it ‘‘Patcain’’? o pkı˜gt~w ˜ Capitaõ. kpigt~w e´ ‘‘Cantintaõ’’? ˜ o k~tı˜gt~w Ca-pi-taõ. Mother pronounces each syllable carefully. ‘‘Ca-ti-taõ’’. k # ti # gt~w Mikael pronounces each syllable carefully. quase, filhinho, sim. nearly, darling, yes. ‘‘Paquitaõ’’! e´? ‘‘Pactain’’! is it? pkigt~w ˜ #o

A new strategy that develops in parallel involves the application, to words, of the same commonsense strategy that the children apply to toys and any other interesting object: in order to find out how to use something, use it. The children first elicit the new word, and then not only repeat it several times, aloud or under their breath, but also use relevant objects or body language to confirm their conclusions about the meaning of the word. This strategy also involves the immediate manipulation of possible linguistic contexts for the new words. Typical exchanges are (parts of example (8.18) below were used as (7.67) in the previous chapter, in a different connection):

Probing for Meaning

(8.18) K 1;11 %act: *KAR: %eng: *MUM: %eng: %act: *KAR: %eng: %act: *KAR: %eng:

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Karin is rummaging inside a kitchen drawer, and grabs a large wooden spoon. e´ colher? e´ colher? is it spoon? is it spoon? e´ uma colher de pau. it’s a wooden spoon. Karin stares at the spoon in her hand for several seconds. colher pau. wood spoon. Karin stares again at the spoon in her hand for several seconds. colher pau. colher pau. colher grande, colher pau. colher grande, colher pau. wood spoon. wood spoon. big spoon, wood spoon. big spoon, wood spoon.

[. . .] %com: %act: *KAR: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *KAR:

Karin repeats colher grande, colher pau over 12 times. Karin shakes the spoon rhythmically as she speaks. e´ colher pau? mama˜, e´ colher pau? is it wood spoon? mummy, is it wood spoon? sim, queridinha, e´ uma colher de pau . yes, darling, it’s a wooden spoon. colher pau Karin. Karin colher pau, sim, sim, Karin colher pau. %eng: wood spoon Karin. Karin wood spoon, yes, yes, Karin wood spoon. %com: Karin goes on repeating these utterances, including her questions, over and over again.

(8.19) M 1;10 %sit: Mikael and Mother are reading a picture book describing the adventures of a puppy. The puppy can’t find the bone it buried before. The picture shows the puppy sitting beside the empty hole it just dug out on the ground, with a tear dripping down its face. *MUM: olha, o caõzinho taõ triste! ele quer o osso, veˆs? e naõ encontra!


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%eng: *MIK: %eng: %act: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %act: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %act: %com: *MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %act: *MIK: %eng:

look, the doggie so sad! he wants his bone, see? and he can’t find it! o que e´? what is it? Mikael makes a gesture, that Mother interprets as pointing at the dog. e´ o caõzinho. it’s the doggie. naõ. o que e´ isto? no. what’s this? Mikael slaps the dog’s face repeatedly, showing signs of losing patience. ah, e´ o caõzinho a chorar. oh, it’s the doggie crying. naõ! caõzinho ‘‘uh-uh-uh’’! no! doggie boo-hoo-hoo! Mikael quickly imitates a whining sound, makes a miserable face and pretends to rub both his eyes. Mikael is really impatient now. caõzinho ‘‘uh-uh-uh’’, o que e´!? doggie boo-hoo-hoo, what is it!? o caõzinho esta´ triste, e´ isso, filhinho? the doggie is sad, is that it, darling? triste! caõzinho triste! ‘‘uh-uh-uh’’! sad! doggie sad! boo-hoo-hoo! Mikael repeats his previous actions, triumphant. Miguel triste. olha, Miguel triste. Mikael sad. look, Mikael sad.

In both (8.18) and (8.19), the children not only find out new words, in the sense of new names for interesting referents, but also the ways of using these words in appropriate syntactic contexts. Having, I suspect, no way to formulate queries about constituency, their strategy is to put the words in context, and check for any feedback. In (8.18), for example, Karin checks the adequacy of having a word like grande ‘big’ fill the same slot as the word pau ‘wood(en)’. In (8.19), Mikael checks not only the appropriate use of a qualifying word like triste ‘sad’ after a noun, but also the appropriateness of using it as a qualifier for a puppy and for himself or, possibly, for animals and human beings in general. By now the children also know that their target uses of words, whether in meaning or otherwise, have become invisible to their elders. If new uses arouse no

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reaction, they can be safely assumed to match the common pool of acceptable features of the language. Replacive words Acquiring a rich vocabulary offers a whole array of new communicative possibilities. Children are now able to choose among available words, so as to fine-tune the expression of their communicative needs. It is the same insight about newly available choices that opens the door to the use of words as stand-ins for other words. The children had plenty of evidence, both passive and active, that different words can mean the same, or at least that their meanings are so similar that their alternative use serves equivalent communicative purposes. Among the first ones that the children were exposed to and made use of are the synonyms discussed for examples (7.5) or (7.8). Alternative use of words must therefore be a sanctioned strategy to remedy lexical glitches that suddenly threaten to disrupt communication, in mid-communication itself. Lexical glitches can be caused either by ignorance of a particular word or by temporary failure to access a word that is otherwise known. Replacive words relate to their targets in two ways, one that operates through meaning, and one that carries associations of sound, each dealt with in turn below. Semantic equivalence: Synonyms and paraphrase

The most straightforward strategy appears to be that of replacing the missing word with a semantic equivalent, whether by means of a perceived synonym, where the replacement is also a single word, or of paraphrase, where the missing word is replaced by a description of its meaning instead: (8.20) K 1;8 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %com:

(8.21) S 3;3 %sit:

hearing the garbage collection van approaching. carro sujo. dirty car. the target for Karin’s word is carro do lixo , lit. ‘car for garbage’.

describing the symptoms of her current bad cold and stomach flu. *SOF: Sofia tem barriga enorme. %eng: Sofia has huge tummy. *SOF: Sofia tem cabelo quente e coćegas ‘‘quente’’ tambe´m.


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%eng: Sofia has hot hair and hot tickles too. %com: Sofia uses the word cabelo ‘hair’ for testa ‘forehead’ (she had a fringe at the time), and coćegas ‘tickles’ for pescoço ‘neck’ (the neck is where she is most ticklish). (8.22) M 2;11 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %com:

playing cards with Mother. eu baralho e tu estragas. I shuffle and you spoil. the target for Mikael’s word estragas ‘spoil’ is partes ‘break’.

Although the children’s actual vocabulary in utterances such as these may appear baffling, the choice that it reveals makes a lot of sense as a strategy to keep the exchange going. This strategy is productive among all three children for quite some time. Later examples are: (8.23) K 5;7 %sit:

Mother is getting ready to go out, and puts on highheeled shoes. *KAR: hoje levas sapatos de pulo? %eng: are you wearing hop shoes today? %com: the target for sapatos de pulo is sapatos de salto ‘highheeled shoes’. The word salto means both ‘(high) heel’ and ‘hop (N)’. The word pulo means ‘hop (N)’.

(8.24)

(8.25)

M 5;1 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %com:

reporting what he just had for snack at school. comi paõ com coisas la´. I had bread with things in it. Mikael refers to a sandwich, Ptg sandes .

M 5;6 %sit: *MIK: %eng:

Mikael is attempting to read books by himself. estou a poˆr as letras na minha cabeça. I’m putting the letters in my head.

Mikael’s utterance in (8.25) aptly describes what learning to read is about, although the description itself is rather nonstandard. His choice of paraphrase in (8.24) is interesting for the additional reason that he appears to be avoiding a codeswitch into English, the children’s school language. Both the Portuguese and the English words for ‘sandwich’ were of course well known to him. Ptg sandes /s~dS/ is a direct

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borrowing from English, i.e. in fact an English word pronounced the Portuguese way. Upon coming home from an all-English environment, the Portuguese word may have momentarily appeared to him as too close to the English word, and hence risked being taken as a mix if used. The paraphrase keeps the exchange safely monolingual. Other conflicts that may arise when attempting to report in one language events that took place in another are discussed in ‘Making a home for a new language’ in Chapter 10. Semantic vagueness: All-purpose words

Finding out what words mean also involves finding out that some words may not mean much. Or, rather, that some words in fact mean too much, because their meaning varies widely, depending on situation and context. The semantics of vague words has been the object of recent research, which agrees on the apparently paradoxical claim that vagueness is essential to efficient communication. Channell (1994) argues that being vague is a deliberate strategy that vouches for mastery of communicative competence, and Jucker et al . (2003) add that vagueness is more effective than precision for the accurate transmission of an intended meaning. The children in this study appear to be clearly aware of the central role played by vague words in communication. Fuzzy words are handy words, which can be used as replacements in virtually any context. A few examples of their use of these words follow, concerning the word assim ‘like (this/that)’, which was extensively used by the children: (8.26) K 2;9 %sit: at a doctor’s waiting room, an extremely angrylooking man storms in and takes a seat without greeting. Karin stares at him for a long while and then addresses Mother. *KAR: porqueˆ o senhor tem a cara assim? %eng: why does the gentleman have his face like that? (8.27) S 2;11 %sit: Sofia is practising bodily representations of several objects. %act: Sofia makes a cross with both index fingers. *SOF: aviaõ e´ assim. %eng: aeroplane is like this. %act: Sofia throws herself sideways on the floor, crossing her ankles tightly together and curling both lips out with her fingers.


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*SOF: peixe e´ assim. %eng: fish is like this. [. . .] (8.28) M 1;8 %sit: Mikael asks Mother to draw a snail, and Mother quickly draws a simple spiral. *MIK: assim?! %eng: like that?! %com: Mikael sounds puzzled, probably at the lack of detail in the drawing. He then realises that he can easily replicate the drawing. %act: Mikael draws several spirals of different shapes, sizes and colours and with different degrees of pressure on the paper, and speaks as he draws. *MIK: e´ o caracol, assim? assim, ma´mi? %eng: is it the snail, like this? like this, mummy? %com: Mikael’s drawing and verbal exchange go on for several minutes, with the same utterances. (8.29) M 1;10 %sit: at dinner, Mother has just delivered a rather wordy lecture to Karin and Sofia, telling them off for having their elbows on the table. Mikael cannot resist the chance of rubbing in his sisters’ misbehaviour. %act: Mikael leans forward on his high-chair and places both elbows on the table. *MIK: aqui, Fia assim. assim naõ. %eng: here, (So)fia like this. like this, no. %com: Mikael looks at both girls in turn, but apparently does not dare to address his eldest sister by name. Karin’s use of assim in (8.26) reflects the strong impact that the man’s facial features had on her (frowning, flushed, clenched jaw), and that she therefore needed to refer to, but for which she lacked descriptive words. In (8.27), Sofia uses the word to describe the core identifying features of widely different referents, similarly to its use in (8.28), where the word appears to guide Mikael in his attempts to isolate what makes a snail a snail, i.e. what can be sanctioned as a representation of a snail. His successive probes for different visual features are all successfully represented by one single word. In (8.29) Mikael’s short utterance

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accurately summarises both the misbehaviour associated with the visual cue that he provides, and what must be done to correct it. Words like Ptg assim , or coisa(s) ‘thing(s)’ as in example (8.24), have been termed placeholders, in that these words are sanctioned to act instead of another (see Linguist List, 2003a). Other fitting labels for these words would be (empty) carriers, fillers, proforms, dummies, all familiar from the literature, and all referring to units that perform deputy functions. Enfield (2003: 102) argues that these words enjoy ‘relative conventionality [. . .] in the linguistic system’, and that their use means that the speaker is either ‘thinking of the thing, and could not think of the word for it [or does] not know the word for it’ (p. 103). Enfield’s proposed label for these words, ‘recognitional deictics’, encapsulates observations that the use of these words, far from showing resort to vagueness, is anchored on a shared cultural common ground in that they include reference to the participants in the exchange. By their use in the examples above, the children demonstrate their awareness of the common knowledge that is tacitly assumed of their interlocutors: they know that they know what they mean. The children’s use of replacive words for lacking Portuguese equivalents of English words is discussed in ‘Making a home for a new language’ in Chapter 10. Phonological equivalence: Malapropisms

The strategies discussed above concern associations between words that are mediated through perceived elasticity in the words’ meanings. But words can also be associated, and substituted for one another, because of perceived elasticity in their sound patterns. One case in point concerns malapropisms, words that are misused for other words in speech, usually resulting in a comical effect. Like spoonerisms, malapropisms are unintentional, and constitute examples of nonsystematic kinds of speech error. Unlike spoonerisms, which affect syllable structure, malapropisms are lexical slips that affect whole words and generally concern open-class items of the language. The earliest example in the data comes from Karin: (8.30) K 2;6 %sit: listening to a tape with child songs, Karin recognises a familiar theme song from a TV programme about a child and her grandfather, whose lyrics repeat the word avoˆzinho /vogziłu/ ‘grandpa’. *KAR: e´ a cantiga do arrozinho, mama˜! %eng: it’s the song about the rice, mummy! %pho: for arrozinho [‰ogziłu]

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Unlike the kinds of substitution involved in synonymy and paraphrase, a malapropism has no obvious semantic relation to its target. On the other hand, like the examples of synonymy given in (8.20) /(8.25), malapropisms result in the use of a wrong word that may have baffling effects on the listener. The added comical effect of malapropisms lies not only in the absence of semantic appropriateness to the context in which they end up being used, but mostly in that they retain phonological similarities to the word that should be there. There are very few studies dedicated to malapropism in general, and to child malapropisms in particular, in all likelihood because of the incidental nature of this kind of slip. Investigation of child malapropisms is usually contained in literature addressing children’s speech errors in general, as in Elbers (1985) or Vihman (1981). Consensus among available studies is that children generally make most of the same type and proportions of slips as adults (Jaeger, 1992; Stemberger, 1989; Wijnen, 1992), although this claim is qualified in different ways by different authors. Wijnen (1992), for example, found that malapropisms are less common among children. Like in the present study, data for these studies were collected in naturalistic settings, and concern spontaneous slips. Malapropisms are unintentional uses of language, and so is their collection. More recently, Ferber (1995) has questioned the validity of this kind of online collection of slip data, particularly where diary recordings of their occurrence is concerned. The argument is that there is no way to confirm the accuracy of the recorded diary entry, a problem that tape-recording solves. Ferber’s argument appears to me to apply to any data collection that includes diary notes: there is no reason why diary entries concerning other features of speech should be more amenable to double-checking than those dedicated to slips. On the other hand, given the sporadic nature of speech errors, exclusive reliance on machine-bound records would be of very impractical implementation, unless the research concerns experimentally elicited slips, whose reliability in mirroring spontaneous processes that cause slips could in turn be questioned. For the data in the present study, three conditions apply for a child production to qualify as a malapropism. First, both the malapropism and the target word must of course be words of the language in question, which are besides semantically unrelated. Second, the difference between a malapropism and a developmental form of a word is that the phonological shape of the malapropism cannot be related to that of its target by means of processes that account for the remainder of the child’s productions. A third condition is that both the malapropism and its target must be words that are known to the child. The following examples from Sofia’s data may help clarify this issue:

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(8.31)

(8.32)

S 4;5 [gtı˜t] [gtı˜t] [fiw] [fiw] [tmeR]

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trinta tinta frio fio tremer

/gtRı˜t/ /gtı˜t/ /fRiw/ /fiw/

‘thirty’ ‘ink’ ‘cold (N)’ ‘thread/string (N)’

/tR(‹)gmeR/

‘to shudder/to shake’

The first productions in each of the pairs in (8.31) are words of the language that share similarity in form with their respective targets, like malapropisms and, like malapropisms, they are wrong words. For example, the child says tenho fio ‘I am string (lit. I have string)’ for tenho frio ‘I am cold (lit. I have cold)’. All four words in (8.31) are known to the child. The child form in (8.32) is also homophonous with a word of the language, but one that is not part of the child’s vocabulary (the word is temer, a formal synonym of ‘to fear’). The form in (8.32) and the first productions in the pairs in (8.31) can be related to their targets by means of typical phonological processes in child speech, that besides are apparent in other data from the same child at the same age: Sofia had unstable use of the alveolar tap in consonant clusters up to age 4;6, often dropping it altogether. None of the words in (8.31) and (8.32) therefore qualifies as malapropism, whereas Karin’s form in (8.30) does. The malapropism is a one-off target-like rendition of another word. In these children’s data, they occur rarely and once only for each target word. Because of their incidental nature, malapropisms are generally labelled as ‘nonsystemic’, or ‘nonsystematic’, uses of language (Stemberger, 1989; Wijnen, 1992, respectively). What these labels characterise is the fact that there is no way to predict how and why a particular word shape will trigger the occurrence of another word in its stead. That is, malapropisms do not systematically replace the same target words, showing instead a temporary disruption in accessing the target. Unlike other child productions, malapropisms are thus not predictable by means of, for example, phonological processes known to operate in child language. However, as discussed below, the relationship between malapropism and target is as systematic as the relationship between actual production and target, in other child productions that are predictable by rule. To my knowledge, there are no studies addressing malapropisms in bilingual children. The linguistic mechanisms underlying the production of malapropisms lie at the core of several proposals concerning mental lexical organisation, access and retrieval (e.g. Fay & Cutler, 1977). Derek Smith’s web pages (Smith, 2003) give a comprehensive overview and discussion of different models, and also provide a fine review of


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literature on speech errors in general. Jaeger (2005) is another state-ofthe-art monograph addressing the significance of child slips for our understanding of language development. Given this background, it may be of interest to investigate the nature of malapropisms in developing learners of more than one language. Examples of these children’s malapropisms follow, with a brief comment on each: (8.33) K 5;5 %sit:

*KAR: %eng: %pho: *MUM: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %com:

(8.34) S 4;6 %sit: *SOF: %pho: %eng: %com: (8.35) S 4;6 *SOF: %eng: %pho: %com:

Karin finds a rusty ring in the garden and asks Mother who may have left it there, which Mother does not know. se calhar foi o coelho das pastas . maybe it was the case bunny. for coelho das pastas : [kug·u dS gpaStS] o coelho queˆ?? the what bunny?? aquele coelho que deixa os presentes no jardim. the bunny that leaves presents in the garden. the word pasta means ‘schoolbag’, ‘briefcase’ and other similar carriers. The target phrase is coelho da Pa´scoa /kug·u d gpaSkw/ ‘Easter bunny’.

Sofia is playing football with Mother, who awkwardly lets a goal pass. estavas estearina, ma´mi! for estearina [StjgRin] you were stearine, mummy. the target for estearina is distraı´da /d(‹)StRgid/ ‘absent-minded’. eu adoro a Cinderela! depois vem a Fada Magrinha, [. . .]. I love Cinderella! then comes the Skinny Fairy, [. . .]. for Magrinha , [mggRił]. the target for Magrinha is Madrinha /mgdRił/ ‘Godmother’.

(8.36) S 4;7 %sit: watching a puppet show on TV. *SOF: olha ma´mi, saõ cotonetes!

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%eng: look mummy, they’re cotton buds! %pho: for cotonetes , [k&t&gnotS] %com: the target for cotonetes is marionetes /maRj&gnotS/ ‘puppets’. (8.37) S 4;8 %sit:

*SOF: %eng: %pho: %com:

wanting Mother to repeat the story of a kidnapped child that impressed her very much when reported on TV. ma´mi, conta a histo´ria do menino rebuçado. mummy, tell the story of the candy boy. for rebuçado , [‰‹bgsadu] the target for rebuçado is raptado /‰apgtadu/ ‘kidnapped’.


Sofia has a stubborn itchiness on her finger. ma´mi, po˜e gasolina no meu dedo. mummy, put some petrol on my finger. for gasolina , [gzuglin] the target for gasolina is vaselina /vz(‹)glin/ ‘vaseline’. *MUM: vaselina. e naõ e´ isso que queres, e´ pomada, naõ e´? %eng: vaseline. and that’s not what you want, it’s ointment, right? *SOF: pois. tomada e´ que e´. %eng: that’s right. power point is right. %pho: for tomada, [tugmad] %com: the target for tomada is pomada /pugmad/ ‘ointment’.


Sofia has been ill, and needed a suppository to lower her fever for the night. She wakes up refreshed. dormi taõ bem! foi o lavato´rio que fez! I slept so well! the washbasin did it! for lavato´rio , [lvgt&Riw] the target for lavato´rio is suposito´rio /supuzigt&Riw/ ‘suppository’.


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(8.40) S 4;10 %sit: watching Mother dialling up a phone number and hanging up without speaking. *SOF: o telefone esta´ entupido? %eng: is the line clogged up? %pho: for entupido , [e˜tugpidu] %com: the target for entupido is impedido /ı˜p(‹)gdidu/ ‘busy’. (8.41) M 3;0 %sit: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %com:

waking up with a high fever. a minha roupa esta´ toda despenteada. my clothes are all uncombed. for despenteada , [dSpe˜gtjad] the target for despenteada is transpirada /tR~SpigRad/ ‘sweaty’.

(8.42) M 3;7 %sit: fascinated with his sisters’ wobbly teeth and the prospect of becoming temporarily toothless himself, addressing Mother. *MIK: tu ja´ partiste os teus dentes? %eng: have you already broken your teeth? %pho: for partiste, [pRgtiSt] %com: the target for partiste is perdeste /p(‹)RgdeSt(‹)/ ‘lost’. Despite the uniqueness of each malapropism per se , a comparison of malapropism and target word reveals a number of systematic features across the board, that have been addressed in the literature. Typically, malapropisms involve confusion between two polysyllabic words, as is the case for the data above. Dealing with adult data, Fay and Cutler (1977) found that a significant proportion of malapropisms not only belonged to the same word-class as their targets, but had the same number of syllables and the same stress pattern as their targets. The data from the children in this study support these claims. In all of the examples except (8.34) and (8.37), both with a noun for an adjective, the word class of malapropism and target is the same. In (8.34) and (8.37), however, the word class of the malapropism is appropriate in the syntactic slot where it occurs. Both NP and AdjP are grammatical after the verb estar, as in (8.34), or after a noun, as in (8.37). Malapropisms thus obey the distributional constraints of the language. In the data, the number of syllables of the malapropism and the target does not match in (8.39) and (8.41), but all malapropisms and their targets have the same

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number of syllables from the lexically stressed syllable. All but one of the words involved in the data are paroxytones, penultimate stress being the default stress pattern of Portuguese words (Cruz-Ferreira, 1999a; Mateus & Andrade, 2000). Additional observations from the data are that the words in question are mostly nouns, whether malapropism or target. All but the word pair in (8.42) have the same vowel in the stressed syllable, and there is a pattern of either proper rhyme or assonance for all word pairs. That is, there are segmental matches between the word pairs too, besides suprasegmental ones. Although the relevance of these observations may be marginal for a limited set of data like the one above, taken together they do point to regularities that do not appear to be merely coincidental. The interplay between sound and meaning that emerges from the data also deserves some comment. The children’s use of appropriate intonation in these utterances shows their well formedness according to their intended meaning. In (8.34), for example, Sofia used a typical condescending tone before the vocative tag. The rhythmical pattern of the intended utterance is preserved, which also shows in the prosodic shape of the misused words. This lends support to observations made elsewhere in the present study, that prosodic planning is in place before the utterances are fleshed out with words. In this sense, malapropisms can be viewed as a kind of strategic empty carrier too, in that access to their meaning appears to be blocked. The strategy lies in treating similarly sounding words as appropriate words to be accommodated into the overall prosodic shape of the utterance, in any suitable syntactic position. As the data show, phonological similarity operates across word class. The intended word is accessed through its form, entailing the speaker’s temporary disregard for the meaning of both malapropism and target. What is thus retrieved is a word that respects form, regardless of meaning. The reason why malapropisms are labelled as instances of, literally, inappropriateness , lies with the listener, who treats them not as prosodically well formed empty carriers, but as the full lexical units that they in fact are. It is perhaps interesting to note that Sofia, the most prolific producer of malapropisms among the children, was also the one who was most interested in exploring word association by means of sound from age 4;1, when malapropisms became more common in her speech. One example is (5.45), concerning the phonetic similarity of the English words ‘paper’ and ‘tape’, and another example of her malapropisms occurs in (10.13). The children’s data also show that malapropisms appear to have had particular incidence at the ages illustrated above, although available studies on child malapropisms do not appear to allow any generalisation of this observation concerning language development itself. From the overall data discussed in this chapter, the children’s ways of dealing with their available vocabulary at different stages in

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development offer insight not only into budding metalinguistic abilities but also into emerging features of lexical organisation. Whereas allpurpose empty carriers and querying for words suggest lexical gaps, semantic manipulation and malapropisms group lexical neighbours together, through meaning and sound, respectively. In this sense, lexical strategies may give clues to what may have prompted the child to query or to use a particular word in a particular situation, and therefore to what is the meaning of the word to the child. The simultaneous availability of several words during production has been modelled for adult speech, where Gershkoff-Stowe (2002: 666) found that ‘accessing a word in the lexicon involves the activation and competition of multiple candidates’. Motter et al . (2002) shed some intriguing light into the nature of this activation, and the related organisation of semantic networks, finding that semantic links among English words average only three degrees of separation. That is, semantic association between two words whose meanings appear unrelated may be triggered by semantic associations of each word with a third word. For example, the word white is associated in some cultures with virtuosity and with medical staff attire, which may invoke association between virtue and ill health. Motter and colleagues do not discuss associations triggered by sound, but there may be interesting insight to be gained here too, concerning what goes together with what among child lexical systems. Child strategies of the kind discussed in this chapter may follow small network paths of this kind, whose activation by association may well shed light into child wordmeanings, and prove central to children’s progressive acquisition of well populated lexical inventories. The children’s strategies also show that learning to command words is not simply learning to comply with the rules of the naming game. Part of becoming a competent user of language is also knowing that, as Sampson (1997: 140) observed, although in a different connection, ‘[t]here is no copyright in words’. Each new word is new to the child, freshly minted and ready to be made to work for its user, not only as a vehicle of communicative needs but in the quest for other words. ‘Lack of words’ appears to be no excuse to avoid communication nor, importantly, to resort to mixes. The children’s data support independent access to each language in production, as Costa and colleagues found for adult bilinguals (Costa & Caramazza, 1999; 2002; Costa et al ., 1999). Phonological similarity is negotiated within the system of one single language, triggering association and recall within the language accessed during linguistic exchanges, as malapropisms show, but not across languages, as shown in the children’s clear differentiation of cognate words across their languages in ‘Make each language maximally different’ in Chapter 5. In addition, all of the nontarget words in the children’s productions, from overextensions to synonyms through malapropisms, show use of

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Portuguese-specific resources available to them at different stages, which preserve language integrity and boost the acquisition of fluency in it. Lending support to Grosjean’s (2001) findings about the independent activation of the language modes of a bilingual, the children’s handling of Portuguese takes place in Portuguese.

Chapter 9

A New Language: Intruder or Guest? This chapter concerns the children’s acquisition of languages other than Portuguese and Swedish. Special emphasis is given to their acquisition of English, which marked the family’s transition from a bilingual to a trilingual environment. The chapter also discusses perceptions about the children’s multilingualism, from adults and peers, including their own.

Learning Languages for Communicative Purposes The children’s contact with English started from birth, as a natural consequence of the fact that only a handful of speakers of each of the children’s two languages with whom the family has contact speaks the other. In gatherings involving both sides of the family, English was and continues to be the lingua franca. The same is true of guests and friends, whether monolingual speakers of English or of other languages. Interest in languages forms a significant part of the children’s curiosity about their surroundings, which they make clear by the means at their disposal at different ages. One episode, concerning Karin aged 2;1, illustrates this point. The family hosted a monolingual speaker of English, Margaret, during a one-off, 12-hour visit in between flights. Margaret instantly became Karin’s idol. She reported that Karin not only followed her everywhere around the house, including when she was showering, changing and re-packing, but always positioned herself in such a way as to be able to see her face. Karin went about pointing at different objects and humming questions, Margaret responded in English, and Karin nodded acknowledgement before proceeding to the next question. ‘She was learning language’, was Margaret’s comment on Karin’s behaviour. Karin was applying, to this new language to her, the same strategies that she used in (7.9), in order to elicit tokens of it. The children also enjoy language for its own sake, as well as representations of it. By the age of 3, they could say words beginning with different letters in their languages. One of their favourite activities at that age was to play with paper and pencil, pretending to write letters to friends and relatives, or drawing letters of the alphabet and commenting on their shapes and sounds. They showed no problem with the different sound/letter correspondences in different languages. Later, they would revel in tongue twisters. Favourites were Ptg um tigre, dois tigres, treˆs tigres ‘one tiger, two tigers, three tigers’, playing on the 210

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consonant clusters /tR-/ and /gR-/ of treˆs and tigres , respectively, Sw sex laxar i en laxask ‘six salmons in a salmon-box’, playing on /-ks/ and /-sk/ in laxask, Eng Peggy Babcock, playing on labial /velar versus labial /labial, velar /velar consonant sequences in each word. From age 3, they entertained themselves with learning by heart the full text of several CD-ROM stories with click-and-hear activities, not only in English but in the Spanish version that came with them, and would then play out the dialogues on their own or with one another in their own renditions of those languages. Memorising and delivering text, in a replica of the traditional school activity of recitation, plays an important role in the children’s linguistic development. Putting into practice the well attested principle that practice makes perfect, the children repeated aloud for themselves whole dialogues of what went on at home or in school, fluently roleplaying and taking turns. In fact, several of their dialogues with schoolfriends at times appear lifted from structural drills in languageteaching textbooks: (9.1) K 3;8 %sit: Mother is driving Karin and her Swedish playmate Sanna to school along a road by the sea. Karin and Sanna chat all the while. [. . .] *KAR: vad ta¨nker du pa˚? %eng: what are you thinking about? *SAN: titta, havet! %eng: look, the sea! *KAR: ja, det a¨r havet. va’ fint! a¨r det inte fint? %eng: yes, it’s the sea. so beautiful! isn’t it beautiful? *SAN: ja, havet a¨r ja¨ttefint! va’ fint havet a¨r. %eng: yes, the sea is very beautiful! how beautiful it is. *KAR: sa˚ bla˚tt! %eng: so blue! *SAN: och stort! %eng: and big! *KAR: sa˚ fint havet a¨r! %eng: so beautiful the sea is. [. . .] Ready-made lines from stereotyped dialogues also found use outside of the particular situations where they habitually occurred. The start of schooling indeed marks a clear change in the children’s use of language,

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not only in the trivial sense that new words and grammar go on developing through school nurturing, but in the more acutely clear sense that the children start expressing themselves in ways that are unusual in the household (see Chapter 11 for more discussion on this). These linguistic imports into the home environment (and, in all likelihood, exports from it too) presumably reflect as many attempts at fitting uses of language that the children understand as sanctioned by reliable speakers into different situations that they somehow interpret as parallel. Karin’s reply in (9.2) is an example, which is likely to be inspired by a comment from a caregiver at school: (9.2) K 3;2 %sit:

*DAD: %eng: *KAR: %eng:

Father is helping Karin put on her pyjamas after her bath, and comments on the dirty clothes that she threw around in her bedroom. va’ sto¨kigt det a¨r ha¨r! what a mess in here! ja, det a¨r mycket barn ha¨r. yes, there’s a lot of children here.

When it became clear to Karin and Sofia that they would need new languages in the countries to where the family was moving, the two girls’ attitude was one of excitement and purposefulness. The languages were also associated with school, ‘school’ being a concept that aroused further anticipation. The first language of schooling was Swedish, German and English, for Karin (3;0), Sofia (3;1) and Mikael (3;1), respectively. For each of the children, the school language became a new, exciting pool of possibilities to explore, not only as the medium of learning, but as the medium of peer-communication. It was the language to use with other children in the same situation as themselves, who were perceived to be cooperating towards a common goal. The languages and their learning appeared to be very much on their minds, even when engaged in apparently unrelated activities, as in the following example: (9.3) S 3;0 %sit:

playing a Memory card game, a few weeks before Sofia’s much-longed-for school start in Austria. Sofia turns a card that shows a lemon. *SOF: o limaõ B/—/. Sofia ‘‘tame´m’’ escola ‘‘apeˆner’’ ‘‘ulimaõ’’ . %eng: the lemon B/— /. Sofia also school to learn German. %com: Sofia pronounces Ptg o limaõ /uligm~w ˜ / ‘the lemon’ and Ptg alemaõ /l(‹)gm~w ˜ / ‘German’ in the same way, [uligm~w ˜ ].


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Reports on the children’s use of languages other than the home languages, from teachers or playmates’ parents, generally agree on their fluent and uninhibited use, from the children’s earliest contact with these languages. For example, two months after the start of school in Austria, the girls’ teachers reported that the girls were quite comfortable communicating in German. The children’s degree of comfort in their new languages is also apparent from their early recruitment as actors or readers in school shows and plays. Several of the adults who had contact with the children took pleasure in reporting the children’s strategies in their first attempts at communicating with minimal linguistic resources. One episode, with Karin aged 4;6, was recounted by her teacher in Austria. Karin had seen Sofia walk clumsily into a wall at school, causing a severe nosebleed. She ran to report the accident to the teacher by pointing at her own nose and saying in German ‘Die Sofia hat Rot hier’, ‘Sofia has red here’. Paralleling the strategies used in their first languages, discussed in Chapter 5, the children did not choose silence here either, nor did they attempt to use other languages. They appeared to have it as clear as before not only that they need to make themselves clear, but that they need to do this in a particular language. As referred in Chapter 3, the two girls started private English tuition shortly before the family’s move to Hong Kong. The girls were tutored together, in the room that they shared at home. Their tutor, Renato, a South African of Italian descent in his early 20s, had just moved to Portugal to pursue a career in language teaching. He neither spoke nor understood Portuguese. In their first lesson, Renato assessed Sofia (4;10) as ‘absolute beginner’ and Karin (6;8) as ‘quite advanced’, but he nevertheless decided to tutor the two girls together as planned. Incidentally, Karin’s assessment was quite puzzling for the parents, who had no idea that she knew any usable English at all, besides what she reproduced from overheard conversations in that language, or from TV shows. Whereas Karin complied readily with this new routine, it took roughly one week for Sofia to oblige. In the first few lessons, she would storm out of the room several times, banging the door shut and yelling at it Naõ ‘Ingalish’! ‘No English!’, a phrase that also constitutes one of the earliest examples of a Portuguese /English mix in the children’s data. She would sit somewhere else and sulk for a few minutes, then inform her mother that Eu estava so´ a brincar ‘I was only joking’, and then knock politely on her bedroom door before going in again. Renato, who let her do as she pleased during her tantrums, explained that they were probably due to his shifts of attention from Sofia to Karin in class. He sensibly found ways of engaging Sofia by doing in class what she wanted to do, and doing it in English. After the first full week of tuition, Renato reported significant progress for both girls. He asked the mother whether she had

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started using English with Sofia at home (which she had not), and added that she knew many more words than he had taught her / which were probably eavesdropped from Karin’s quota of the lessons. Karin could by then solve simple crossword puzzles in English, where a list of given words had to be fitted into a grid with pictures as cues. From then on, the girls started a phase of innumerable questions about English, constant repetition of new English words and songs, and of almost exclusive interest in English-language television programmes. Sofia explained why: (9.4) S 4;10 *SOF: porque tenho que aprender ‘‘ingueleˆs’’. la´ so´ ‘‘fala’’ assim. %eng: because I have to learn English. that’s all they speak over there. The children never felt that their own languages should be used with them, and never asked anyone else to do so: it is them who must learn other people’s languages. Their reasoning seems to be to nurture the new language as their welcome guest, so that they themselves can in turn become welcome guests in the new country that speaks it. The children’s awareness that different languages are needed to communicate with different people, and that language switches are therefore a condition to make themselves understood, is manifested as a natural extension of the one parent/one language policy. In cases of communicative breakdown they have no difficulty realising that the fault may lie with the use of a wrong language: (9.5) M 2;8 %sit: at the usual time of Renato’s lesson, the doorbell rings, signalling a visitor at the building’s main door. The bell rings a different tone at the flat’s door. Mikael rushes to grab the intercom receiver, and speaks into it. *MIK: ‘‘qui’’ e´? %eng: who is it? %com: Mikael gets no answer, and yells the same question several times, unaware that the intercom is operated by pressing a switch. He then looks at the receiver and appears to realise something. *MIK: hello!! %com: Mikael yells as loudly as before, with the intercom still off.


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Inanimate objects, besides their own toys, also appear to require proper linguistic treatment: (9.6) K 3;11 %sit:

Mother is serving a type of cake for tea that is new to Karin. *KAR: isto o que e´? %eng: this is what? *MUM: bolo ingleˆs. %eng: lit. ‘English cake’. %act: Karin looks pensively at the slice on her plate and then addresses the slice. *KAR: hello!

Newly landed in Hong Kong, their first English-speaking surroundings, and still at the airport, Sofia (5;1) continuously interrupted her mother to ask her what she was saying when she spoke English; or, when the mother commented on the novelty of it all with the children, to ask her how to say all that in English; or, to ask her how to say, in English, words or expressions that she wanted to be able to use. Her siblings were rather more subdued in the unfamiliar environment. The first few weeks in Hong Kong were spent in a hotel, whose television channels broadcast in both English and Cantonese. The mother tuned to English-language channels showing child programmes, reasoning that this would be an entertaining way of improving the children’s English. Karin and Sofia immediately switched to Cantonese-language channels, claiming that they already knew English, and that they therefore needed to learn Cantonese because, in their words, ‘everybody speaks it here’. It apparently did not matter that ‘everybody’ with whom the children had contact spoke English too. At the hotel, or when on outings during these weeks, one strategy used by all three children was to address people in English to get their attention, starting with ‘hello!’ or equivalents, attempt to engage them in conversation in that language, and then proceed to ask them how to say all that had been said in Cantonese. (Understandably, the hotel staff soon started avoiding the children by all means possible.) In their later everyday contacts with adults and children, locals as well as expatriates, the children went on attempting to find ways to use what they perceived as their interlocutors’ native language, be it Cantonese or French. Another strategy was to repeat greetings and other fixed phrases that they overheard back to their chosen interlocutors, for example, French ‘bonjour’ to French speakers, and proceed from there with body language and interrogative intonation.


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It is possible that at this time the children somehow felt that English was as ‘foreign’ to speakers of other languages as it was to them then, which is interesting in light of the status that English acquired for them later on. The children did understand the status of English as a lingua franca, on the pattern of this language’s use as such between speakers of the two languages in their family. Before starting any regular contact with English at school, Mikael, aged 3;0, epitomises their self-assured attitude about the language and this use of it, which reflects in their social strategies too. From his first day at a playground in Hong Kong, he would first survey his surroundings from a distance, with his hands on his hips in an apparent display of casualness. He would then barge into clearly established playgroups of expatriate or local children, introduce himself as ‘I Michael’ with the English pronunciation of his name, and then use all of the few English words that he knew, particularly ‘yes’ and ‘no’, in different combinations and with several different intonations in quick succession, together with abundant displays of body language. Mikael was using, for his new language, a similar strategy to the one he used before, in (5.20), for his perceived lack of command in Swedish. This strategy proved largely successful for the purposes of peer acceptance, and he started adopting it to engage adults too. The point is that limited means of expression never seemed to constitute an obstacle to engage in linguistic communication, and often initiate it. The children appear simply to assume that if they can make themselves clear in two languages already, the same will be true of a new language. The children were soon able to talk about their new language too, and to test their parents on their knowledge of the new words that they learned every day: (9.7) M 3;7 *MIK: %eng: %pho: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %com:

sabes o que e´ yyy? do you know what yyy is? for Mikael’s last word: [ghaida] e´ ola´? hi, there! is it hi? hi, there! naõ, naõ! e´ esconder! no, no! it’s ‘hide’. Mikael meant ‘hide there’, and he is appalled at his mother’s ignorance.

The new language also involved experiencing things in apparently unexpected ways, as in Mikael’s realisation that using a new language does not guarantee immunity against familiar unpleasant experiences:


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(9.8) M 3;0 %sit: Mikael is playing at home with an English friend. Both boys dart about wildly and talk non-stop. Suddenly Mikael stumbles, bumps his head, and runs whining to Mother. *MIK: magoei-me! em ‘‘gueleˆs’’! %eng: I hurt myself! in English! Settling down in the new home also meant a newfound use for English, in that the family hired a live-in helper, a Filipino national, with whom communication proceeded in this language. The situation was maintained in Singapore, with a different housekeeper, also Filipino, who has been with the family since the move to this country. In this way, English can be said to have become one of the ‘family’ languages. The next chapter details the children’s adoption of English as their own peer language.

Learning Languages for Curricular Purposes In view of the children’s undeniable curiosity about languages, and engagement with them, it is interesting to give here a brief description of how they tackled classroom language-learning, i.e. of their behaviour as foreign-language learners. As is true of any schoolchild, curricular language lessons mark these children’s first encounter with the need to learn a language for purposes other than everyday communication in it. From Grade 6, the school curriculum included one core living foreign language, which the family agreed should be Mandarin, given the chances to practice it locally as one of the official languages in Singapore. As detailed in Chapter 3, several other languages were compulsory school-subjects too. Regardless of language, the children’s attitude towards school-bound language learning was one of reluctance from the very first day. This was often coupled with, and compounded by, despair at poor grades obtained despite ‘hard studying’. Several reasons may be suggested for this. For example, that the children were being exposed to two or three additional languages besides their native ones and English, or that Mandarin and Latin are expectedly difficult, one because of a novel script, the other because it is a dead language. These reasons would, however, fail to explain why exposure to additional languages caused the children’s smooth learning of German and English, or why French met with the same reluctance. Another reason that may be suggested for these children’s poor foreign-language performance is that, by then, they were simply too old. This explanation would find favourable echo

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among subscribers to the so-called ‘Critical Period Hypothesis’. The original formulation of this hypothesis, attributed to Lenneberg (1967: 97), is found in a few sentences claiming that there is a ‘universal maturational timetable for early language development’ and that ‘automatic acquisition from mere exposure to a given language seems to disappear [after puberty], and foreign languages have to be taught and learnt through a conscious and labored effort. Foreign accents cannot be overcome easily after puberty. However, a person can learn to communicate at the age of forty. This does not trouble our basic hypothesis.’ (p. 176). The central claim to the various offshoots of this hypothesis is that there are maturational constraints on the acquisition of language. That is, that the explanation for why older learners apparently do not reach levels of linguistic competence that are comparable to young children’s is to be sought in the different ages at which both populations start their language learning. If there were no critical period, the reasoning goes, then older learners should replicate child language learning. The fact that they do not therefore proves the existence of a critical period, or at least lends strong support to its assumption. Nativist-minded acquisitional studies add the corollary that second-language learning involves only nongenetic features of language, which would explain Lenneberg’s claim of a ‘labored’ learning effort, apparent from these children’s data too, against the presumed ease of first language acquisition (see Birdsong (1999) for a review of related research). The explanation for the ease and naturalness of child language acquisition is that learning will take place regardless of the quality of the input (e.g. despite ‘um input foneticamente degradado’ (Freitas (2000: 511), ‘a phonetically degraded input’, my translation, MCF). Whereas for later, unnatural language learning the explanation is that no amount of adequate input will result in learning after the window of opportunity has run its course (see Grimshaw et al .’s (1998) case-study and review of research carried out to validate the critical period hypothesis). There is no argument that older, including adult second language (L2) learners reported in the literature show less linguistic competence than a child (L1) learner. The question is of course whether L1 and L2 acquisition are essentially the same process, and therefore comparable in such a way that the age factor may be legitimately isolated as the variable. The lack of agreement on what exactly characterises the critical period as a testable ‘hypothesis’ has apparently not inhibited extensive research on it. It has also spawned more confusion than enlightenment on the issue. Recent studies find, for example, both that L1-like perceptual linguistic abilities are lost with age (Pallier et al ., 1997), and can be learned regardless of age (Escudero & Boersma, 2002a; 2002b), or that brain activation patterns involved in linguistic processing are


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fundamentally different and fundamentally similar for first language learning in childhood and for second language learning after puberty (Neville et al ., 1992; Friederici et al ., 2002, respectively). Or, the evidence provided against the critical period in the core area of accent, for example in the line of Bongaerts’ (1999) work, is diluted in Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson’s (2003: 572) attempt to strike a compromise in favour of the critical period by introducing a new construct, ‘near-nativeness’, to the effect that all native-like L2 learners are in fact ‘near-native like’ because of ‘non-perceivable near-nativeness’. No comments are made on the usefulness of distinguishing between perceivable and nonperceivable features of language use nor, therefore, on how near-native proficiency is to be distinguished from native proficiency, except by the circular argument that non-native users are near-natives by definition. Here, as in other similarly contradictory and perplexing interpretations of bilingual data, for example the use of child mixes as support for one versus two underlying linguistic systems (see ‘The language(s) of bilinguals’ in Chapter 2), the conclusion might rather be that the presumed issue is in fact a non-issue, because the hypotheses are in fact assumptions that can therefore neither be proved nor disproved. As far as the critical period ‘hypothesis’ is concerned, there are no findings, because no study can claim to legitimately compare the two populations that are said to be compared, child versus adult language learners. The generalised use of two labels, ‘acquisition’ versus ‘learning’ to characterise the process leading to language mastery for each population should already warn of some misfit across populations. Besides the clear difficulty in circumscribing useful concepts and streamlining experimental approaches, the presumed findings rest on a fallacy. Just like monolingualism is assumed as a norm against which to assess bilingualism (see ‘Bilingualism vs. dual monolingualism’ in Chapter 2), child first language acquisition is assumed as a norm against which to assess adult second language learning, with disregard for practices of language use in the first case, and for mode of acquisition in the second case. In science, this is not a fair comparison. That the populations are not comparable is besides shown by the lack of consensus on experimental methods, specific learning and/or teaching situations, generalisability from particular languages and case studies, and, crucially, on the age span itself when the critical period is said to be operating (see Sampson (2001) for a lucid critique of this issue). Typically developing children play with their language, use it in rhymes, song, recitation, one-to-one dialogues, under the daily, day-long benign supervision of native elders with whom they share a home. They are besides free to talk, in their new language, about whatever arouses their curiosity, so that language naturally becomes the tool to find out about what interests them. Typical older language learners sit in smaller

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or larger groups that meet once or twice a week in a classroom, on the receiving end of curricular, often printed texts in standardised language that contain stereotyped dialogues, rules of grammar and lists of vocabulary, to be learned and talked about as-is, often with a non-native instructor. A good measure of the inequality in learning conditions might be given by trying to imagine an older second-language learner using some of the strategies typically used by children, for example, those illustrated in (6.8) or (8.18), and further described in Chapters 6 and 8 for the children in this study. The suggestion may not be a simple, idle thought experiment, given that other instances of typical child languagelearning conditions appear to have a favourable effect on adult languagelearning too. For example, Golinkoff and Alioto (1995) showed that the use of motherese in adult foreign-language teaching significantly facilitated the learning of vocabulary. In the few reported cases where child and adult learning conditions are made comparable, findings are that adults and children alike attain similar levels of competence, including in accent, as Neufeld (1987) made clear almost two decades ago. In an important recent monograph, Kjellin (2002) provides ample theoretical and practical evidence that replicating, with adult learners, the modes of child language acquisition inevitably results in native-like proficiency. Not least, Kjellin shows that starting where children start, by sorting out the rhythmical and prosodic patterns of a language, provides the necessary scaffolding that allows the remainder of the language to fall into place naturally. Kjellin’s book is so far available in the original Swedish language only, but see Cruz-Ferreira (2003) for a review in English. In addition, the maturational claim itself, if taken seriously, means that there is in fact no possible learning at all from a certain age onwards. This is an interesting assumption on the fossilisation of linguistic abilities that are at the same time claimed to be inherently creative and open-ended, with no qualms about the paradox. The assumption stems from current models of the human brain that, equally interestingly, represent it as one of the offshoots of human creative brain power itself, namely, computers, in a theoretical move that is no different from representing, say, the human eye by means of a photographic camera and conclude on the properties of human eyesight on the basis of observed camera function. A mature brain is thereby taken to remain stable, with computer-like fixed processing power, a central dogma pervading most research in neuroscience, that Gage (2003) deconstructs. Celebrating the ‘Decade of the Brain’, Scientific American published a series of papers that not only demonstrate the inherent plasticity of the brain, but also reveal the extent of our ignorance and associated prejudice about its learning mechanisms, in language as elsewhere. Kempermann and Gage (1999) and Stix (2003) report that the mature human brain renews itself by producing new


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nerve cells and synapses throughout life, and Holloway (2003) concludes that the brain was constructed to change, depending on how experience, linguistic or otherwise, pushes it. As far as we know, computer hardware does not renew itself in the same way that the human central processing unit does. Researchers, like all human beings, are of course bound to base beliefs and definite opinions upon what they do not know, or do not think is possible to know, often with religious-like zeal. Whereas Lenneberg could not have known about these findings, and so naturally fashioned his theory according to the ‘scientific belief’ of his time (Kuhn’s (1970: 4) term), current assumptions about the critical period fly in the face of what we now know about learning mechanisms in the brain. Attractive labels like ‘critical period’ have a way of enduring and of insidiously acquiring the status of proven facts, even when what they stand for is found to be baseless. This is particularly so when they purport to offer a ‘speculative but spectacular explanation’ for observed phenomena, as Trask (2002: 77) argued of a different, but equally enduring set of labels. Postal (2004: 287/288) recently exposed the thin validity of much conceptualisation in linguistic research in a set of ‘theoretical moves’, of which two suitably apply to the ‘critical period’. First, the ‘Phantom Theorem Move’, through which the ‘solution’ to lacking proof for one’s theory is ‘[s]imply assert’, preferably ‘aggressively’. And he continues: ‘Nothing could be easier than simply saying that the desired consequence follows from your theory without giving any proof’. In view of its generalised use and success in linguistic theorisation, this move is neither ‘risky’, ‘disreputable’ nor ‘hard to get away with’. Second, the ‘Phantom Principle Move’, which consists in proposing a name that ‘could well be the designation of a linguistic principle’, and then ‘simply to assert that whatever facts you want follow from the principle’. Postal adds that ‘the charm of this strategy [. . .] is that nobody can ever show that the facts do not follow from [it]. And if the claim that they follow is not false, it must, according to propositional logic, be true.’ The critical period claim finds no support either in the ‘ease’ of child language acquisition, which is often derived from arguments about speed of acquisition. Sampson (1997: 33) aptly debunks the rationale for such arguments by asking ‘[w]hy is it appropriate to regard a learning period of two years or so as ‘‘remarkably fast’’ rather than ‘‘remarkably slow’’? [. . .] The truth is that the only reason we have for expecting language acquisition to take any particular length of time is our knowledge of how long it actually has taken in observed cases’. Sampson adds (p. 33) that the reason for the endurance of the speed of acquisition myth lies in that ‘[a]dults tend to be favourably disposed towards small children’, and that therefore an argument praising child achievements naturally becomes appealing, against arguments holding that children

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are slow, or that there is nothing special to say about their learning speed. Besides, claims that language acquisition is complete within any specific time-frame, whose span varies from author to author, are based either on quite different meanings of the word ‘complete’ (see e.g. Cruttenden (1985), or Slobin’s (1971) and Staats’s (1971) opposite takes, in the same volume of collected essays), or on an interesting reversal of which of the two populations, child versus adult, to assume as norm: child language learning is quick, compared to the lengthy period of time that adults take to learn language. Arbitrarily shifting between norms cannot but selffulfil the assumptions about those norms, and has of course nothing to do with science. It attests, instead, to the ideological nature of similar theorisation. Anyone who has had close daily contact with young children along their first years of life knows that language does not come easy to them. There is effort, and quite a lot at that. Learning eventually takes place not because it is inevitable, but because there is motivation, with a clear purpose behind it. The research on brain mechanisms discussed above also shows that learning has to do not only with the brain’s own make-up and workings, however ill understood these may be yet, but crucially with the kind of stimulation that is made available to it. No matter how deeply anchored the ‘common wisdom’ about learning may be, teaching an old dog new tricks depends not so much on the age of the dog and its brain, as on the perceived usefulness of the trick. The reason people learn languages is to be able to speak them. First German, and then English, were welcome guests for the children in this study, languages that were there to be used, and in which the children were nurtured for what languages are there for. Curricular languages were intruders, languages that are not languages in the sense that the children understood this word. If there is no perceived use for a language other than satisfying a teacher and a syllabus in order to pass a compulsory subject at school, no wonder the motivation is lacking to treat the ‘language’ as anything other than a ‘discipline’, literally, as required. In my view, the children’s newfound aversion to learning languages finds a more plausible explanation in the learning mode, for at least three reasons. First, the new languages are presented, from the outset, in printed form. Whereas the methodological need for this may be selfevident in the case of Latin, the continued practice of initiating the teaching of living languages by means of printed texts and paper-andpen exercises has no pedagogical excuse. In fact, it spawns spelling pronunciations and therefore a persistent, strange accent in the language from the very outset. Second, there appears to be no stated purpose for what the children are made to learn in the new language, other than that the textbook includes that particular material. Learning someone else’s lists of vocabulary for their own sake is hardly a motivating task. Third,


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the new language is taught by means of another language, in which translations and explanations are provided, with the effect that the new language is in fact being portrayed as a variation of a familiar language, to which it can be reduced and resorted to. Interestingly, as far as the parents in this study could ascertain from the schools’ foreign language syllabus descriptions and teaching/learning materials, there is no significant difference between the methods that are currently used with their children and those that were used for their own foreign-language schooling several decades before. Both rely on printed texts, annotated in the first language of the learner, and both aim at rote learning. One example is the children’s first French homework, consisting in a sheet of English-rendered pronunciations of French numerals to be memorised for the next lesson, of which the following are a sample: (9.9) 1: 3: 8: 32:

ern terwa wheat tront tay der

Attempts by the mother to bring the children closer to a reasonable French accent came to no effect. The children went on reproducing their teachers’ own accent, which was the available model, and the required model, for schooling and assessment purposes. Learning languages, as many as needed, is a smooth endeavour if those languages are meant to be put to relevant use with peers or in meaningful communicative situations. Being ‘gifted’ for languages, or having several languages already in your repertoire, clearly play no significant role, despite common beliefs to the contrary. As in all learning, the two factors that play role are motivation and method. The former has long been recognised as a key player in L2 learning (Schumann, 1994). More recently, Manolopoulou-Sergi (2004) provides similar insight into the correlation between motivation and obtained results among foreign language learners. Anyone can learn any language any time, if the need to use it is clear, and adequate learning conditions are in place, including motivation on the part of whoever facilitates the learning too. These are the reasons why babies learn their language(s) in the first place. In order to break into a new language, aspiring users must allow themselves to go through the linguistic initiation rituals that hold the key to its uses, and ideally secure the engaged supervision of the keepers of the secret code. The children’s perception of Mandarin, currently their one curricular foreign language, was eventually given a positive boost by the twin factors of being a language spoken in their country of residence, and of the lucid hands-on policy followed by the Department of Asian Languages of the children’s second school in Singapore. The language

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curricula comprise extramural activities, including Mandarin-only outings to Chinese restaurants, museums and shops, and home-stays over long weekends with Mandarin-speaking families, who are required to use only this language with the schoolchildren. Such a policy makes all the more linguistic sense, as a number of very recent collected studies have questioned traditional forms of assessment of learners’ command of a foreign language. Williams and Lukin (2004) focus on meaningoriented linguistics in order to understand the emergence of language dynamics in children, both as first- and second-language learners, whereas Gardner and Wagner (2004) show that non-native use of language in casual conversation and for the purposes of negotiating daily routines gives a far more accurate measure of second-language proficiency than the controlled, and often threatening, classroom environment.

Attitudes Towards the Children’s Multilingualism From adults Both sets of relatives, Swedish and Portuguese, reported some effort in getting used to the children’s bilingualism. Although both families have regular contact with speakers of other languages, at home or abroad, this was their first hands-on encounter with bilingualism within the family. The parents’ consistent use of their languages with the children was made clear from the outset and well accepted by other relatives, although the grandparents, for example, reported that it took some time for them to find it natural to hear their grandchildren being addressed and responding in a language that they themselves did not understand. The children often settled, in their own way, what must have seemed like awkward situations of this kind to them too. One example is (5.38). The children have always lived away from their extended families, which means that relatives and friends in both countries were not used to their individual ways of expressing themselves. One consequence of this was that any deviation from Swedish or Portuguese developmental norms that was perceived in the children’s speech was inevitably attributed to their bilingualism. This makes sense, in that bilinguals necessarily develop differently from monolinguals, but one problem was that sometimes the comments were made in a negative sense, and often in the presence of the children. For example, the children were overtly pitied for having parents who ‘forced’ them to speak two languages. In this connection, it would be interesting to check which of the two languages each side of the family would choose for generalised monolingual use, and for what reasons. The children’s vocabulary was also described as limited and liable to impair their communication with peers, who used the latest slang and fashionable discourse markers. The


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reason for this shortcoming is of course not that the children are multilingual, but that they do not live in the same country as their monolingual peers. Incidentally, the same is true of the parents in this study, who notice a similar lack of trendy slang in their own speech, in the family’s yearly visits to their home countries. The children notice this too, at times stating that the parents ‘speak differently’ from other adult relatives and friends, which probably reinforced the children’s awareness that ‘speaking differently’ in this sense is part and parcel of expatriates of any age. There were also attempts at explaining the children’s apparently baffling uses of language by means of interference from the other language. One example was Karin’s extended use of the word for ‘turtle’ to designate a potty (see example (5.10) for Karin’s reasons), whose rationale requires a knowledge of everyday objects around the child that was unavailable to other relatives. The advantage in comprehension of child speech that siblings and parents enjoy over other relatives has been established (Weist & Kruppe, 1977). Other examples are, simply, children’s non-sequiturs. Just as we cannot say with certainty why a child’s interest suddenly shifts from, say, jigsaw puzzles to finger painting, we cannot aspire to explain rationally everything that children say, and why, as was noted in the discussion of (5.44). Children, like adults, do not always make sense, or they make sense in their own idiosyncratic way. Another example concerned Sofia’s reluctance, from around age 3, in sitting cosily on an adult’s lap and having stories read to her from a book. This was attributed to her poor understanding of the languages in question, whereas the reason lay in her inability, with her back turned to the reader, to use lip-reading cues to assist her failing hearing at that age. In short, the natural concern of grandparents, in particular, over their grandchildren led to some tendency to scrutinise the children’s use of their languages with extra care, and to attribute any communicative glitches to the children’s multilingualism. Other adults showed that they felt ill at ease with the children’s bilingualism, in different ways that might unwittingly confuse the children. For example, the Swedish speakers who addressed Karin in Portuguese, as described in ‘Use speakers of each language as symbols for each language’ of Chapter 5, later admitted that their purpose in switching languages had been to ‘check’ whether the child was indeed able to understand the two languages. They then commented, in Karin’s presence and in a language that she understood, how ‘odd’ it must be for a young child to be able to use two languages. Yet other adults apologised profusely to the children for not being able to use their other language with them, which, for some reason, they assumed was ‘the’ language of the children. The twin beliefs apparently held by these adults, that bilinguals have one single language, that is besides a ‘foreign’

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one, mirrors researchers’ reluctance to assign native status to bilingualism, discussed in Chapter 2. Interestingly, reactions and comments of this kind come also from long-standing expatriates or, perhaps more accurately, pseudo-expatriates in multilingual countries. These are monolingual users of a language and a culture regardless of the number of years living abroad, and despite the amount of contact with users of other languages and cultures. There are no so-called ‘expatriate compounds’, or areas designated for expatriate residency, in the countries where the family has lived, but physical walls are not a precondition of cultural isolation. Intellectual walls are. It is of course no fault of the children nor of their bilingualism that their early world was peopled by monolinguals with naturally monolingual attitudes towards language and language use. On the other hand, it is perhaps fair to acknowledge as reasonable some of these adults’ concerns about bilingualism and its effects, when faced with demonstrations like Mikael’s in (5.20). Any worries about the children’s linguistic development, particularly on the part of relatives, were eventually assuaged, not least because the children’s holiday stays in Sweden or Portugal regularly resulted in instant progress in each language. The family faced the first overt challenge to the children’s bilingualism shortly after the move to Singapore, in connection with schooling. Karin aged 8, attended Primary 3, Sofia aged 6 attended Primary 2, and Mikael aged 4 attended Nursery. Although their English-medium schooling started in Hong Kong, no issues were raised there about the family’s use of language at home. In Singapore, the issue arose because of behavioural problems that Sofia was reported to have in school. These were communicated to the parents in the form of an official letter booking an urgent meeting with the school’s psychologist, on behalf of Sofia’s form teacher. The letter was all the more puzzling because the parents had no previous warning of any problem at school, and Sofia was behaving as usual at home. In that meeting, the teacher reported Sofia’s ‘refusal to learn’, including walking out of the classroom in mid-lesson, and general aggressive behaviour, including towards adults and on the school bus. He concluded his presentation by saying that ‘clearly’ the child’s ‘instability’ was due to having to adapt to a new language, besides everything else that was involved in the recent move, and to the fact that two other languages were used at home. He added that Sofia often boasted about her ability to speak Portuguese and Swedish. Upon further probing from the school’s psychologist, it was found that Sofia’s overall grades gave no reason for concern on the academic side of her performance. She had top grades in science, maths and anything involving handicraft. It was also found that she never stormed out of the classroom when these subjects were being taught, and did so particularly during story time or assembly, when teacher and pupils sit


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cosily on the classroom’s floor to discuss various matters. The teacher added that, when Sofia chose to remain in class on these occasions, she had difficulty expressing herself and was mostly silent and uncooperative. It was then decided that Sofia should be referred to a Special Needs teacher at school, for further assessment. This teacher enrolled Sofia in her class, for extra English, and agreed with the form teacher that ‘there is no way’ a child can cope with so many languages at once, especially an ‘unstable’ child like Sofia. She demanded of the parents to stop using other languages than English at home, if they were interested in seeing Sofia’s problem solved. She warned that the use of languages other than English would inhibit progress in this language and therefore in schooling, and that the use of several languages to a child causes impairment or delay in the child’s overall development. She added that it was fortunate that only one of the children had so far shown problems of this kind, and that similar behavioural disruption should be expected from Sofia’s siblings if the family did not address the matter immediately. The lessons from this episode are many, including the consequences of ascribing labels like ‘instability’ and ‘refusal’ to a child, labels that are kept in official school records and inherited by future form teachers, and the arbitrary assertion that if a bilingual child shows behavioural deviations from expected norms, then the reason lies in the child’s multilingualism. One consequence of this assumed entailment is that multilingual children with possibly real behavioural or linguistic problems will be ‘treated’ for their multilingualism, not for their problem. The Special Needs teacher was not of course voicing her own view, she was attempting to implement an officially sanctioned policy on how to ‘deal with’ multilingual children. To my knowledge, there are no available surveys of the reasons for, and the results of, counselling practices of this kind directed at multilingual families, including the currently trendy referrals of their children to speech and/or psychiatric ‘therapy’, often offered by monolingual therapists. This is a study that needs urgent addressing, together with a survey of how these children fare in their personal, social, academic and linguistic development if advice of this kind on therapy and language use is heeded. As I have stated elsewhere, on the findings of Yamamoto (2001), a study that did more than scratch the surface of this global misguidance for one particular pair of languages in one particular country, ‘the core of noxious sociolinguistic taboos and myths about child multilingualism [needs] urgent social, political and educational counter-measures in order to provide children who happen to be multilingual with a healthy family and institutional environment in which to grow and thrive’ (CruzFerreira, 2001). Needless to say, the ‘experts’ who voiced their opinions in the incident concerning Sofia are all monolinguals.


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Fortunately, Sofia’s parents had some personal as well as scholarly knowledge about child multilingualism, which I suspect is not the case for the majority of mixed families whose children are summarily assessed in this way, and who therefore may heed ‘expert’ advice out of ignorance, and the alarm that goes with it. The parents in this study agreed with all that the school authorities had to say, and went on using their languages at home exactly as before. It is interesting to get some insight into Sofia’s own perspective on this episode. She agreed to tone down her aggressive instincts towards other children, even when ‘they started it’, and she agreed that aggression towards adults is inexcusable in any circumstances. She had, however, great trouble accepting that you do not leave rooms where classes are going on, even when you are bored to death. She reported that story time and assembly were ‘very boring, too long’, because she found the discussion topics uninteresting and she was besides forced to sit still. Sofia’s ‘problem’ was no longer an issue after a few months of extra English tuition. Incidentally, English tuition was also arranged for Karin, whose teacher reported ‘some difficulties’ with vocabulary, although no behavioural problems. Karin’s teacher had no comments either on her multilingualism. In the case of Mikael, his teacher in fact expressed surprise at the fact that he spoke other languages, in that his use of English was no different from that of his classmates. From peers Comments on the children’s multilingualism come from other sources too, including themselves. Children, like adults, assume that what constitutes part of their world must belong in the natural order of things. Their world is the standard, from which anything different is not only different, but deviant. The children’s views on their own multilingualism as opposed to other people’s monolingualism, naturally express the same kind of bigoted judgements of value that monolinguals, naturally, hold about bilinguals. ‘Naturally’, because just like young monolinguals may not know that several languages exist, young bilinguals may not know that some people go through life with one language only. The following exchange provides one example. (9.10) S 4;2 %sit:

in the first weeks of Swedish kindergarten, Sofia and Mother discuss how Sofia is adapting to the new school. *SOF: tem m[en]inos ‘‘munto’’ [es]quisitos. %eng: there are some very odd children there. *MUM: meninos esquisitos? esquisitos como?


%eng: *SOF: %eng:

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odd children? how, odd? papa´ e mama˜ fala[m] sueco. mum and dad speak Swedish.

Unfortunately, I have no data to ascertain how Sofia satisfied herself among her peers that other children’s parents indeed use the same language with them. All three children reported sporadic instances of bullying directed at their multilingualism, particularly at school in earlier grades, or at gettogethers with friends. As far as I could ascertain, bullying never involved physical aggression. It generally took mild forms, where other children would taunt them and giggle at them from a distance, either babbling away in prattle intended to represent a foreign language, or commenting on the children’s physical features like hair or eye colour. The sporadic incidence of these episodes might be explained by the children’s philosophical attitude towards them, which probably discouraged further harassment. The children’s attitude draws on their selfassurance as belonging to a mixed family which, naturally, uses several languages. The children either chose not to respond, or basically agreed with what was said, countering with compensatory measures. The following examples, (9.11) and (9.12), are reported by the children themselves. They are included here on the assumption that the children were speaking the truth when reporting them, and reproducing the episodes in good faith. (9.11) K 10;5 %sit: the children have been playing outdoors with neighbours and other friends. Karin storms into the house, all red in the face, and declares that she hates one particular boy with whom she had already experienced several unpleasant episodes. *MUM: porqueˆ? o que e´ que ele fez? %eng: why? what did he do? *KAR: começou a dizer aos outros que eu sou assim porque falo muitas lıńguas. %eng: he started telling everyone that I’m like this because I speak several languages. *MUM: e tu, o que e´ que fizeste? %eng: and what did you do? *KAR: nada. disse-lhe uns palavro˜es em sueco e ele ficou ainda mais furioso porque so´ sabe falar ingleˆs. e´ burro, coitado, so´ aprendeu uma lıńgua.


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%eng:

nothing. I told him a few swearwords in Swedish and he got even madder, because he can only speak English. he’s dumb, poor thing, learned only one language.

The children in fact used their multilingualism as a weapon for counter-attacking, thereby expressing their realisation that speaking a language is as valuable a skill as any other. In the following example, Mikael explains to his mother how he reacted to a classmate who made fun of his lack of skill at maths: (9.12) M 6;4 *MIK: eu disse-lhe que se calhar naõ sei fazer contas, mas sei falar portugueˆs e sueco e ele naõ! %eng: I told him that maybe I’m no good at math, but I can speak Portuguese and Swedish and he can’t! On a few occasions, the parents witnessed other forms of taunting, particularly from peers in either Portugal or Sweden, which became more evident when the children were approaching their teens. Other preteens took pleasure in pointing out to the children their shortcomings in their two first languages, whether making fun of their choice of vocabulary, or deriding their ignorance of fashionable goings-on in the two countries, concerning happenings, music idols or language use itself. For example, they made a point of using massive quantities of the latest slang, guessing pretty accurately that the children would not be familiar with it. Or they would refer to local institutions and school subjects and then feign exaggerated surprise at the children’s ignorance of them. The children never felt belittled by these episodes, reasoning instead that those friends were perhaps not such good friends after all. Their usual reaction was to request clarification about the missing piece of information and in turn inform the interlocutor that whoever does not live in a country does not know about daily happenings and fashions in it. On the opposite side of taunts and negative comments, the children’s development in English and their smooth growth into the local peer culture of their new countries would not have been possible without the caring nurturing of teachers, classmates and friends who realised the children’s commitment to learning the new language, and their engagement as sociable individuals. At ages 6;11 and 5;4, respectively, Karin and Sofia had their first school admission interview, in Hong Kong, which was conducted privately by the headmaster, also a monolingual speaker of English. The girls’ fledgling English was deemed sufficient to operate comfortably in that language at school, and they were both judged


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capable of committed work. On their first school day they were each allocated a ‘buddy’, a ‘veteran’ classmate, whose task it was to guide the newcomer around school premises and routines until no longer required. Both buddies played a crucial role in making the girls feel welcome and accepted in a wholly new social and linguistic environment. Their support is also the likely reason for the girls’ relaxed attitude towards their own shortcomings in their new language. Classes proceeded as usual, and in the first few days of school, both girls reported, matter-offactly, that they did not understand much of what was going on, and that they therefore had not dared to speak up. Karin put it this way: (9.13) K 7;0 %sit: describing her first day at her English-medium school. *KAR: percebi algumas coisas mas fiquei muito caladinha. tenho que ouvir, naõ e´? %eng: I understood a few things, but I kept really quiet. I must listen, right? The girls added that this was no problem, because the teacher and the other children knew that they were new, and because either the teacher or the buddy would be available at the end of the school day if their help was needed. The girls felt confident that in time, and with adequate ‘listening’, in Karin’s words, they would become fully-fledged members of their respective new communities. From his side, Mikael reported immediate friendship with another 3-year-old, a native speaker of English, at his new Hong Kong school. This school was also Englishmedium but taught a few periods in Cantonese. According to Mikael, both boys found it extremely hilarious to have exactly the same pronunciation problems in Cantonese songs and nursery rhymes. Support from caring peers was of course crucial throughout the first few years, as in this later example: (9.14) S 6;10 %sit: in the car, Mother is driving Sofia and Lisa, an English classmate and best friend, home from school. [. . .] *SOF: and then he ‘‘cutted’’ it. *LIS: you don’t say it so, Sofia, you say ‘he cut it’. *SOF: then he cut it. %com: Sofia gives extra emphasis to the word ‘cut’. *LIS: you see? it makes more sense. Given this ideal introduction to a language and its users, it is no wonder that the children’s engagement with English flourished


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exponentially, beyond strict classroom requirements. English ended up becoming the children’s own language not only because it is the language of schooling, a powerful model, but especially because it is the language of their peers and of play, an irresistible model. As noted by Keesing (1981: 20), juvenile play is a crucial factor in human bonding, which forms ‘the bases of adult attachment’. English has also the added appeal of being used by different speakers across different countries. The children’s perceived association of their home languages with a clear-cut, restricted number of speakers shows in their perplexed comments about the generalised use of each language in their home countries, particularly after settling down in countries where a third language is used. The following two examples concern Swedish: (9.15) K 5;9 %sit:

on the first day of a summer vacation in Sweden, Father takes Karin and Sofia to buy sweets. The booth-assistant asks the children what they want. *KAR: pratar du svenska?? %eng: do you speak Swedish?? %com: Karin’s tone is tentative, and she speaks very softly.

(9.16) M 5;9 %sit: *DAD: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %com:

just landed in Sweden for the summer vacation. ser du, Micke, alla pratar svenska ha¨r. see, Mikael, everybody speaks Swedish here. alla? svenska?? everybody? Swedish?? Mikael looks flabbergasted.

Due to the family’s several moves to different countries, and despite residual contacts with monolingual children in both Portugal and Sweden, Portuguese and Swedish remained ‘parental’ in their status, mother (and father) tongues in the literal sense of these words. The next chapter discusses how the guest language made itself at home and finally became a family language.

Chapter 10

Language Input and Language Management in a Multilingual Environment The use of several languages within the family raises matters that concern not only linguistic usage among interlocutors, but the more general issue of apportioning of linguistic space to each of the languages. This chapter discusses the children’s perception and practice of each of their three language’s individuality and scope, including the ways in which English came to play a central role in their lives.

Who Speaks What to Whom, When, Where and Why Parents are the initiators of language practices within families, purposefully or not. Whether they are maintainers too, of the uses they purport to follow, is a different matter. For the family in this study, the parents’ choice of adopting one language for use within the family was in fact no choice at all, if we take the word ‘choice’ to mean a selection from a range of more or less equivalent alternatives. The parents were of course well aware of the consequences of raising children bilingually, and discussed these, particularly in what concerned monolingual relatives from both sides of the family. However, given that both parents started their lives as monolinguals, there was no ‘choice’ but to do what was natural and use their own languages with their own children. There was no conscious effort either to implement one particular language policy as such, or to ‘teach’ the children one particular language. What can be said is that uses of language within the family depend on factors that include addressee and situation, as encapsulated in the heading of this section, loosely plagiarised from Fishman’s (2000) title.

One person /which language? When asked about what languages they use to address their children and respond to them, the parents in this study invariably answer Portuguese or Swedish, respectively, reflecting their perception of themselves as monolingual users of language with their children. The family would therefore be said to follow the so-called OPOL policy. The English acronym, constructed from translation of its original French formulation ‘une personne, une langue’ attributed to Grammont (1902), stands for ‘one person/one language’, and probably ‘one parent/one 233


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language’ too. But the issue of who speaks, encapsulated in the label ‘OPOL’, cannot easily be dissociated from whom that person speaks to, which amounts to an inherent ambiguity in the terms ‘person/parent’ and ‘language’ in that label. From a pragmatic viewpoint on person/language use, i.e. one that reflects spontaneous everyday interaction, each member of the family uses one particular language as default language, depending on interlocutor. The label ‘default’ is meant in the sense that the language of a particular exchange involving particular interlocutors is the same. Language choice is, then, not so much a consequence of the active user, but of use itself. Figure 10.1 represents the current default use of language within the close family circle. The diagram represents the linguistic situation that emerged roughly three years after the children started their schooling in English, and that still holds at the time of writing. However, it should be kept in mind that models, in the shape of diagrams or otherwise, remain models. Language use, monolingual or multilingual, is not amenable to modelling in any straightforward way, because models are formal representations frozen in space and time and language use is inherently dynamic. Language use naturally changes, not only along time, but according to factors such as need, appropriateness, situation and purpose. This is of course also true, perhaps particularly true of multilingual families, involving a ‘[dynamic] process of going through many changes and readjustments in [. . .] language milieu and language use’, as Yamamoto (2001: 130) observes, and despite parental claims of strict observance of language policies.

Father

Swedish

Swedish

Karin

English

Mother

Portuguese

English

Mikael

Sofia

English

Figure 10.1 Default uses of language within the family

Language Input and Management in a Multilingual Environment

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In most of the literature, language separation by parents is taken as advantageous in nurturing fluent child bilingualism (Clyne, 1987; Genesee 1989). Most research on bilingually raised children therefore opts to work with families where the OPOL is said to be enforced, as in the recent surveys by Do¨pke (2001) and Barron-Hauwaert (2004), in the belief that this policy ensures regular, equivalent exposure to both languages from birth, as Do¨pke (1998) argues. But person/language separation cannot of course guarantee comparable exposure, because there is always an imbalance in the amount of time, as well as in the quantity and quality of linguistic input, that the same child receives from each parent. This imbalance is in fact what makes a bilingual a bilingual, as discussed in Chapter 2. On the other hand, research on these same families reports that children’s mixes are likely to be due to mixed input, raising doubts about the strict separation of languages claimed as a condition for the studies’ viability. There are then two points to consider. First, whether so-called OPOL families indeed observe person/language separation. Romaine (1989) doubts the strict separation of languages by person in everyday interaction, and Goodz’s (1994) data showed use of both native and non-native language with children for all parents investigated in her study, despite their own assertions to the contrary. The matter of reliance on self-reports about language practices is in fact a tricky one, and no different from claims about the features, or variety of language, that people say they use as opposed to what they actually use, as amply shown for example in Labov’s work (1972b; 1974; 1994). Second, whether person /language separation is indeed a necessary condition for nurturing fluent bilingualism, a matter that is further complicated by the common equation of ‘fluent bilingualism’ with ‘mixfree’ lingualism, i.e. in fact with fluent dual monolingualism. Genesee’s (1989) observation that a mixed input is a non-negligible factor in the mixed output of children continues to find echo in literature that stresses the undesirability of mixed speech (see discussion in ‘Mixed speech and bilingual fluency’ in Chapter 2). Taken at face value, common claims in the literature on child bilingualism entail not only that mixed input necessarily results in mixed output, but also that parents who are themselves bilingual must force themselves, as it were, to choose one single language for use with their children. The fact is that discussions of the OPOL policy have contemplated only the minority of parents, worldwide, who are monolingual, or who claim to practise monolingualism with their children. It would be interesting, for example, to follow up on which language(s) the children in this study will one day use with their own children. Mismatches between parents’ claims and practice about enforcement of person/language separation prompted reanalyses of the definition of ‘OPOL’ itself. For example, Do¨pke (1998) proposes that the policy is best

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taken as a framework allowing for a cline from monolingual to bilingual uses of language, in an apparent attempt to rescue a label whose application to real situations may be, in Do¨pke’s own words, unrealistic. By this reanalysis, the label becomes undistinguishable from its counterpart ‘mixed-language policy’, despite what the words in each label are meant to mean, and thereby loses its usefulness as a theoretical construct, by being made to apply to any use of language in an opaque, idiomatic way. Other research has shown that rigid adherence to a language policy, OPOL or otherwise, for the sake of the policy itself, in fact may result in obstruction to communication, or in failure to guarantee the child’s bilingualism (Yamamoto, 2001). These are problems that may be compounded after the children reach school-age, and among families with more than one child. Noguchi (1996) based her study on this and other feedback of this kind from bilingual families, including reports of difficulty with strict adherence to person /language separation. In addition, recent research shows that mixed input does not necessarily result in semi-lingualism, nor in necessarily mixed child output. A study by See (2004) compared the development of Hallidayan language functions and of question forms in the English of two bilingual children, one raised according to the OPOL policy, the other raised with a mixedlanguage policy, finding no difference in both children’s production. This study also found, perhaps more importantly, that the parents practising the mixed-language policy are confident in its success in nurturing their child’s bilingualism. A look at some of the commonest queries to Ask-a-Linguist, the Linguist List’s online consultation service (Linguist List, ongoing), recent as well as past, gives a good sampling of the disquiet aroused by matters of language use in mixed families. Many bilingual parents lay bare the anxiety that goes with split feelings about what they suspect should be a natural use of language with their children, the one dictated by their caring instincts, and what they have read, or heard, or been persuaded, should be the ‘proper’ way of raising fluent bilinguals. The twin myths that mixed speech is no different from semi-lingualism and that mixed input necessarily results in mixed output force many families to adhere to the OPOL, unnatural though this choice may prove for particular cases, and even in cases where this choice appears to lack motivation, or a good purpose. On the other hand, parents appear persuaded that parenting roles include the ‘teaching’ of their language to their children, and that linguistic training is the sole purpose of linguistic interaction; worse, that the way to do this is to observe a strict version of the OPOL, having each parent speak one single language regardless of addressee. These families appear to take it as a necessary evil of nurturing child bilingualism that the parents will have to communicate with each other in two languages, one for production, another for reception, in the stern


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belief that this will confuse their children less than having one parent speak different languages to different people. In the first place, linguistic competence is a natural consequence of linguistic interaction, not of teaching sessions. Crucially, what children have to say, whether they are toddlers or teenagers, is what must be taken seriously, not the quality of the language in which they package their message. Children must have a fully functional language in place, not a linguistic syllabus, to say what they have to say to their parents, along their development from childhood to adulthood. Secondly, the reality seems to be that any language policy enforced for its own sake is doomed to failure. The commonsense view about language use in multilingual families appears in fact to be to recognise that there is no single best way of raising bilingual children, one that is applicable across the board. Each family is unique, with unique communicative needs, as De Jong (1986) observes, and so is each child. What matters is the naturalness in everyday communication, which in multilingual families may, and often does, involve the use of more than one language by the same person. The multilingual nature of language interaction in the family The family in this study is no exception to other self-labelled OPOL families. Language mixing is true of both the children and the parents, because the parents are also bilingual in at least one sense of this word: they too make ‘alternate use of two or more languages’ (Mackey, 2000: 27) in their daily interaction. As noted several times along this book, bilingual speech cannot but be mixed. Even among young children, mixing has been found to result from a choice, and not from factors associated with cognitive development (Do¨pke, 1992). Another way to look at mixed speech is then to say that the evidence consists in that languages, their words and expressions are there to be used as needed. Mixed speech is speech that makes use of all linguistic resources available, in a way that need not necessarily be equated with disfluency. Claims of strict child-directed monolingual uses in mixed families in fact cannot hold, on two counts that are also true of the present family. First, the ‘pure language’ claim is untenable, among bilinguals as well as monolinguals. It is nearly impossible to use an unmixed language in contemporary cosmopolitan, globalising settings. Quay (2001) makes a similar point, saying that person/language separation is impractical from a social and pragmatic point of view in situations where monolinguals or even multilinguals who share only one of the bilingual child’s languages are present. In the same way that fashion, gadgets and social ambitions are exported, imported and exchanged across countries, the words used to refer to these travel in the same way too. ‘Karaoke’ is an English word, as much as software is a Portuguese word, or fajtas ‘to


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fight’ is a Swedish word, the latter disguised in a native-friendly spelling and grammar (see ‘Mixed speech and bilingual fluency’ in Chapter 2 for more discussion on this issue). Given that words and expressions from one language are used in another, because this language either lacks the words for these referents or because their speakers feel more comfortable about the word-meaning when the word-form is borrowed too, it is natural that bilinguals proceed in a similar fashion, for similar reasons. The parents in this study resort to mixes of this kind, whether discussing characteristic features of each of their countries or recurrent daily events, and keeping the original pronunciation of the mixed words. Other instances of mixes are the uses of proper names in their original language, as in (5.24). A few other illustrative examples follow. (10.1) *MUM: %eng: %com:

o jantar e´ sill. dinner is ‘sill’. ‘sill’ is Swedish-style pickled herring.

*MUM: %eng:

naõ te esqueças das pja¨xor! don’t forget your skiing boots!

*MUM: %eng:

tiveram assembly hoje ? did you have assembly today?

*MUM: %eng:

deixa-me ver o homework diary. let me check your homework diary.

*DAD: %eng:

vad har ni fo¨r activity ikva¨ll? what’s your (school) activity tonight?

*DAD: %eng:

vi har ingen sa˚n connection pa˚ den ha¨r datorn. there’s no such connection on this computer.

(10.2) %sit: summer 1999 in Sweden. *DAD: jo barn, snart a˚ker vi till Portugal, och sa˚ fa˚r ni a¨ta bacalhau varje dag. no forno, com batatinhas B/— / %eng: right, children, we’ll soon be in Portugal, and then you’ll get to eat ‘bacalhau’ every day. in the oven, with roast potatoes B/— / %com: ‘bacalhau’ is Portuguese-style dried salted codfish. *SOF: usch! kan vi inte stanna i Sverige och a¨ta kra¨ftor ista¨llet?


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%eng:

yuk! can’t we stay in Sweden and eat crayfish instead? *MUM: kra¨ftor?! entaõ isso e´ comida de gente? bacalhau e´ que e´. %eng: crayfish?! is that proper food? ‘bacalhau’ is the thing. *DAD: och sen ska vi till Feira Popular B/— / %eng: and then we’re going to ‘Feira Popular’ B/— / %com: ‘Feira Popular’ is a local amusement park in Lisbon. Second, the ‘one language’ claim holds only with the added proviso ‘according to situation’. Nursery rhymes and songs, for example, formed an important part of the children’s growth, from the very beginning of their lives (for a discussion of the role played by rhythm in their linguistic development, see the first section of Chapter 6). When Karin was born, the mother naturally repeated to the baby the Portuguese rhymes that she had herself been brought up with. During the family’s stay in Sweden, Karin started attending a local playschool from age 1;1, one of the reasons being to foster her use of the Swedish language. All her playmates were monolingual Swedish speakers, and so were the caregivers. Playschool routines included free play indoors and outdoors, mid-morning snack and nap, plus general assembly with songs and rhythmical physical exercises to go with them. A few weeks into her new social life, Karin started requesting to hear the Swedish nursery songs at home too. She would mimic the gestures that accompanied the songs, hum a few notes, and she would quickly throw serious tantrums at the blank response from her mother. Not having been raised in a Swedish environment, the mother remedied her ignorance about this aspect of Swedish child-culture by having Karin’s caregivers record a tape of assembly songs, to which mother and child could sing along. The same tape was later used with Sofia and Mikael, who never lived in Sweden, for the same purposes of boosting their contact with the language and its culture. Nursery rhymes in both languages, from the same parent, were therefore part of the children’s routine. English rhymes and songs came later, also via school-recorded or commercially available tapes, and also with the mother’s participation. Later, the same parent’s use of different languages became a necessity not for reasons of language nurturing, but because different languages have different uses. Namely, because of knowledge gathering, which necessarily proceeds through a particular language. The mother, who continues to be the main caregiver, regularly assists with homework tasks from both English-language school and Swedish School (as stated in Chapter 3, the children have had no formal schooling in Portuguese). The father also contributes homework assistance, although on a more


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sporadic basis. Both parents quickly realised that the children need to acquire competence to discuss concepts and points of view in the language in which the tasks are set. The first insight into the need to use the language of schooling came through revision of times tables. The mother instinctively used Portuguese in her questions, not least because this is the language in which she learned and knows her times tables, and became unsettled at what she deemed was an abnormally long reaction time before the response came, also in Portuguese, until she realised that the children were translating the numbers into English, in order to compute the sums in English as they had learned in school, and then retranslating the final result into Portuguese, to answer the mother’s questions. When queried, the children confirmed that this was in fact the answering procedure that they were using. Homework supervision thus currently proceeds in English or in Swedish as the need arises, that is, according to task and regardless of parent. This inherent association of task with language raises interesting issues about division of languagebased labour and corresponding issues of bilingual proficiency, but which are beyond the scope of this study. Malakoff (1988) showed that language-specific factors had significant effects on logical reasoning among bilingual children, depending on the language of instruction, and the section on ‘Defining language territories’ in this chapter gives a number of comments on this issue. Given the non-naturalness in the use of a different language with the children, the parents typically give warning of the language switch, as in example (10.3), with Mikael aged 8: (10.3) %sit:

Mikael reads aloud, in English, his homework assignment about the planning of a written report. *MUM: OK, agora falamos ingleˆs. do you understand ‘paragraph’? %eng: OK, now we speak English. do you understand ‘paragraph’?

The children never had any doubts about using one particular language with each parent, although they have it equally clear that there is no need to use one particular language with one particular person in the family: all are users of all. But habit does play a strong role, and makes them feel uncomfortable when on the receiving end of an unusual language from a parent (or a sibling, see ‘Defining language territories’ in this chapter). The children’s bafflement at unexpected uses of language from their parents started early, as discussed in ‘Refuse to accept one particular language’ in Chapter 5. Another example is given by Mikael, aged 3;8, who had his mother read a story to him. He chose a Peter Rabbit book, and the mother announced that she would have to


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read it in English. Mikael agreed, but nevertheless sat restlessly on his mother’s lap throughout the book, constantly turning to look at her with a half-amused, half-puzzled expression on his face. The task-based use of language expectedly went through a rather lengthy and difficult adaptation period, and not without misgivings, particularly on the part of the children. Two other examples follow, both from the same child and both during homework, one from the first attempt by the mother to use English, the other from several years later. (10.4) K 7;0 %sit:

Karin has just read, in English, a short story that she needs to report on for homework. *MUM: bem, filhinha! agora fazemos assim: can you tell me the story in your own words? %eng: well done, darling! let’s do like this now: can you tell me the story in your own words? %act: Karin stiffens and frowns. *KAR: ma´mi, naõ fales isso comigo. fica assim pateta porque tu e´s portuguesa . %eng: mummy, don’t speak that to me. it gets like, silly, because you’re Portuguese.

(10.5) K 10 *MUM: so, tell me how you build a chart out of all these data. *KAR: 0. *MUM: do you know how to do charts? *KAR: 0. *MUM: o que e´ filhinha, naõ percebes ? %eng: what is it darling, you don’t understand? %com: Mother is referring to the homework task. *KAR: fica assim esquisito . %eng: it gets like, funny. %com: Karin speaks very softly. *MUM: o queˆ, o gra´fico ? %eng: what, the chart? *KAR: naõ, falar ingleˆs contigo. e´ assim esquisito . %eng: no, speaking English to you. it’s like, funny. *MUM: e´ naõ e´? eu tambe´m acho . %eng: it is, isn’t it? I think so too. %act: Karin nods.


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*MUM: mas olha, faz de conta que esta´s na escola e que esta´s a falar com a professora. e´ que tens que saber isto em ingleˆs, naõ e´? vamos experimentar? %eng: but listen, let’s pretend you’re in school talking to your teacher. you need to know this in English, right? shall we try? The explicit suggestion to ‘pretend’ is often the one that clinches the language contract, as it were, and that finally overcomes intensive preparatory swallowing and blinking when the children appear to be putting the required language into gear. The ‘funny’ language is thereby no longer being used to communicate with the parent, but to playact a communicative situation. Very often though, and despite the agreement, the children revert to their preferred use of their parents’ languages with them: (10.6) S 8;4 %sit:

reading the clues to a homework crossword puzzle about the human skeleton. *SOF: [. . .] and it supports the axis of the body. que e´ isso? %eng: [. . .] and it supports the axis of the body. what’s that? %com: Sofia is asking what the ‘‘axis of the body’’ is. In the heat of homework discussions, and once the initial discomfort wanes, the children show no problem in playacting in different languages with their parents, although they still report, now in their teens, that these parent/child uses of language sound ‘very odd’ to them. Incidentally, they also report the same feeling of oddness about their mother’s use of Swedish with their father, despite their parents’ regular use of this language to communicate with each other since the children’s birth. Apart from these strategic uses of other languages, the parents adhere to their own languages in exchanges with the children including, for example, to admonish or to cajole during homework sessions. Except for responses to explicit requests for equivalents in different languages, the parents also do not resort to translation when problems in communication arise. The same is true of the children’s enquiries about the meaning of unfamiliar words in Portuguese or Swedish, even when the parents know that the children are familiar with the equivalent word in another language. Examples (10.7) and (10.8) illustrate this point: (10.7) S 7;1 %sit:

Sofia and Mother are going through the required shopping list for school-start. *MUM: temos que comprar pontas de feltro.


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%eng: *SOF: %eng: %com:

we need to buy felt-tip pens. o que e´ pontas de feltro ? what’s pontas de feltro? the English word ‘felt-tip pen’ is well known to Sofia. *MUM: aquelas canetas de cores com bico macio. %eng: those coloured pens with soft tip. (10.8) S 10;0 %sit:

Sofia is interested in Mother’s crossword puzzle, with a word that she recognises from a nursery game. *SOF: o que e´ uma falua? %eng: what’s a falua ? %com: the Eng equivalent of Ptg falua is ‘barge’. *MUM: e´ um barco grande, assim chatinho, para carregar coisas. %eng: it’s a large boat, like, flattish, to carry loads. *SOF: barge? *MUM: isso. %eng: that’s right.

The children’s judgements of unnaturalness about parental uses of other languages appear to restrict themselves to family situations where adults are involved. Although the children never felt self-conscious about using Portuguese or Swedish in front of relatives who are nonspeakers of the languages, they started asking permission to switch language, or doing so spontaneously with their parents, in the presence of their cousins from both sides of the family, or of English-speaking friends. The matter was discussed with the parents, and settled on the grounds that it would be ‘rude’, in the children’s words, or it would make the other people ‘feel uncomfortable’ to go on speaking in a language that they do not understand in their presence. The purpose of the required language switch is that of including the people who are present in the ongoing exchange. One example of a strategic language switch for the same purpose, although among speakers of the languages involved, is given in (10.16) below. Perhaps because of the contractual ‘playacting’ nature of uses of language in these circumstances, the children report no feelings of oddness about using and receiving another language to and from either parent in this way.

The Children’s Apportioning of Linguistic Space among their Languages Independently of their parents’ language choices, the children allot linguistic space and linguistic appropriateness to each of their languages,

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as observed from their use of the languages, their comments about their use, and their opinions about why and when certain languages must be used. Their choice of peer language is of particular relevance. Parent/ child and child /parent default uses of language have remained as in Figure 10.1 since the children’s birth, but the children’s own peer language changed / and is changing again at the time of writing. In the light of the children’s regular use of three languages, the following discussion also addresses issues concerning the problematic status of concepts like ‘native speaker’ or ‘mother tongue’ within studies on child multilingualism, as well as matters concerning language dominance. The languages of the home As noted above, parents are the initiators of language practices within families, in that parents are the natural first role-models determining children’s overall social behaviour. The children in this study accordingly started their linguistic lives by using Portuguese and Swedish as expected of them. Given that Portuguese is the language to which the children are mostly exposed at home, including during their first years, this language naturally became their first peer language. Parents, however, are quickly taken over as models, because children learn linguistic and other behaviour from several sources, which include several other people. As children grow up, they become not only aware of what can constitute adequate or inadequate ways of interaction with other people, but they also become able to base their behavioural choices on these perceptions, depending on their expectations about interaction with those people. From around the age of 3, the people who matter as far as role-modelling is concerned are peers, not elders. The children in this study accordingly probed with different accents and different choices of vocabulary in their languages, depending on the ways of speaking of different friends. Peer-modelling is also the single major reason behind the children’s adoption of English as their own language, to the detriment of Portuguese. English was the popular newcomer, with which the children had stable daily contact over several years. The adoption of a new peer language is the result of a broader process of mingling into a new, interesting environment, involving similar shedding of old habits and accommodation of new ones. Portuguese nevertheless kept a trace of its former role, now demoted to second-best. In the presence of English-speaking peers, this is the language that the children choose still today to, for example, discuss among themselves whether a particular child should be allowed to join their group, or whether a particular game should be played with that child / or to threaten to report to one parent if sibling-induced disruption of fun and games with English-speaking friends is deemed to have gone too far.


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Given that the children are the ones who make use of all three languages for communicating with different family members (see Figure 10.1), it is interesting to take a closer look at the uses that the children found for each of their languages. Languages and language use fall into place naturally in everyday interaction, in the sense that no one announces the use of one particular language before using it, with the specific exceptions discussed above. One language is found, for some reason, to have more appropriate use than another in certain contexts. This was so in the children’s first exchanges among themselves, where each of their two first languages was used for different purposes. The early tradition of having Portuguese as the default language for communication among themselves can be safely said to have been started by Karin, the eldest sibling, who naturally addressed the newborn Sofia in Portuguese, in all likelihood prompted by the fact that this was the default household language around her. The younger siblings followed suit. However, even in her earliest exchanges with her sister, Karin did make use of the two languages at her disposal for different purposes, thereby assigning different pragmatic status, as it were, to each. When Sofia’s behaviour for some reason got on her nerves, because of loud crying or, later, when Sofia started snatching Karin’s possessions to inspect them, Karin would systematically use Swedish to shush the baby or to tell her off: (10.9) K 2;1 %sit: Mother is unsuccessfully trying to get Sofia to nap. Sofia wiggles and screams loudly. *KAR: ‘‘Fosia’’! tyst, sova! %eng: Sofia! quiet, sleep! (10.10) K 2;4 %sit: Karin pulls at a building block of her own, that Sofia is frantically biting. *KAR: det a¨r min! min!! %eng: it’s mine! mine!! Examples (10.9) and (10.10) show that, like her parents, Karin also decides on a language strategy with her younger sibling. She apparently switches to Swedish in order to indicate some distancing from the baby’s behaviour, including an assertion of her own seniority and privileges. Portuguese was the language of communion and of empathy, as in the following two examples:


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(10.11) K 2;1 %sit:

Karin is delighted that Sofia (0;3) finally shows interest in playing with her, and demonstrates for the baby how to make different levers and buttons rattle on an activity panel. *KAR: olha ‘‘Fossia’’, b[r]inca, b[r]inca! %eng: look, Sofia, play, play! %com: Karin speaks in a tiny voice.

(10.12) K 2;2 %sit:

at the doctor’s, Sofia just had her shots and wails loudly. *KAR: naõ ‘‘cho´la’’, pica naõ doí! %eng: don’t cry, jab doesn’t hurt! %com: Karin’s tone is comforting, and she speaks in a tiny voice.

The relevance of peer input in child productions became clear for these children from the birth of the third child, when Sofia started using with the newborn Mikael the same patterns of language use that Karin used with her (for discussion of sibling-related issues in language development, see Chapter 3). It is clear that a lot of language learning goes on among siblings, and through sibling input. These are peer-sanctioned uses, that therefore enjoy tacit appeal and approval, and over which parents have little say. Some of this ‘learning’ at times results in the perpetuation of creative productions or interpretations that do not match adult targets, and which may lead to fossilisation through cumulative use. These uses are passed on and back from child to child, and the children are fully comfortable with them for purposes of communication among themselves. Malmstrom and Silva (1986) give an extensive review of sibling language uses of this kind, as background to their study on twins’ idioglossia. One example is the children’s reanalysis of the Ptg idiom ter que (‘have to’), composed of verb ter and particle que , as one single verb, resulting in the inflected present tense form *tem ques for tens que (‘you have to’). The endurance of this particular use may also be explained by the children’s functional illiteracy in this language, depriving them of visual cues to the two words forming the idiom. Two other examples of peer-induced language use are: (10.13) K 6;0 S 4;2 %sit:

at the zoo, the children have just bought a bag of peanuts.


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*SOF: olha macacos! vamos dar pinguins? %eng: look, monkeys! shall we feed them penguins? %com: Sofia uses pinguins (‘penguins’) for amendoins (‘peanuts’). Feeding the monkeys kept in a particular enclosure at the Lisbon Zoo is allowed. *KAR: naõ e´ pinguins, S[o]fia, e´ ‘‘minduins’’! %eng: it’s not penguins, Sofia, it’s ‘‘minduins ’’! %com: Karin uses an equally nontarget form for the word amendoins . %pho: amendoins /me˜gdwı˜S/; pinguins [pı˜ggwı˜S];‘‘minduins ’’ [mı˜gdwı˜S]. (10.14) K 10;0 S 8;2 M 5;11 %sit: all three children are in the car with Mother. Mikael sees a car of the same model and colour as one that he and Mother had seen crashed against a lamp-post a few days before. Karin and Sofia know nothing about this episode. Mikael addresses Mother. *MIK: [. . .] lembras-te quando o carro *crashou*? %eng: [. . .] remember when the car crashed? %com: Mikael’s word *crashou* is a blend of Eng ‘crash’ with Ptg regular 3rd-person past tense inflection -ou . The blend is a novel word, and he pronounces it with Ptg accent, [kRgSo]. *KAR: qual carro? *crashou* aonde? %eng: what car? crashed where? %com: Karin addresses Mikael. *SOF: *crashaste* o carro?? %eng: did you crash the car?? %com: Sofia addresses Mother. *MUM: naõ *crashei* coisa nenhuma!! %eng: I did not crash anything!! *SOF: tu viste? %eng: did you see it? %com: Sofia addresses Mikael. *MIK: vi! *crashado* numa luz! %eng: I did! crashed against a light!


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In (10.14), Karin and Sofia immediately follow suit on Mikael’s blend, taking it, as he did, as a regular Portuguese verb. All three children show perfect ease with the new word and its assumed morphology and syntax, inflecting the verb accordingly. The assumed verb remained part of their Portuguese vocabulary for quite a while, despite the mother’s repeated attempts to enforce the use of chocar ‘to crash’ in its stead. Her unwitting use of the form *crashei* in the exchange of course reinforced the children’s assumption of *crashar* as a legitimate Portuguese verb. Endurance of use is also true for example (10.13). After this episode, Sofia (and Karin) used the form ‘minduins ’ for amendoins for several months. The children naturally abide by the parents’ use of language to them, without argument. There was never any question of refusal, on the children’s part, to use the parents’ languages with them. Their expectation of the use of a particular language with each parent shows in their apparent disregard for their knowledge that the parents understand both languages, as in the following example: (10.15) K 4;6 %sit:

*KAR: %eng: %com:

%act: *KAR: %eng: %com:

Karin and Sofia are playing a game with Father, and the conversation turns to the topic of age differences. Karin addresses her sister. quando tu tens treˆs anos eu tenho cinco, e quando eu tenho oito tu tens seis. when you are three years old I am five, and when I am eight you are six. Karin uses nonstandard indicative verb forms in tu tens treˆs and eu tenho oito for the subjunctives tiveres and tiver, respectively. Karin turns to address Father. eller hur, pappa? na¨r Sofia a¨r tre jag a¨r fem, na¨r jag a¨r a˚tta hon a¨r sex. right, daddy? when Sofia is three I am five, when I am eight she is six. Karin uses a nonstandard word order, jag a¨r fem and hon a¨r sex for a¨r jag fem and a¨r hon sex, respectively.

Later, the expected pattern of parent/language separation naturally results in language switches:


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(10.16) K 10;0 %sit: at dinner, Karin is complaining about the children’s tennis coach. She addresses Father first, and in mid-utterance turns to face Mother. *KAR: han kastar bollarna sa˚ ha¨r la˚gt, como e´ que ele quer que a gente as apanhe? %eng: he throws the balls this low, how can he expect us to catch them? %com: Karin uses an appropriate hand gesture to indicate what she means by sa˚ ha¨r la˚gt ‘this low’. Example (10.16) shows a way of making both parents take part in what the child has to say. Mixes of the kind illustrated here are the result of the awareness of having to communicate in one single language, the one required by each interlocutor. This example also illustrates the continued usefulness that the children find in body language, like turning to face the addressee who represents a language, to signal mixes and the necessity of mixing. The children’s earlier uses of body-language strategies for similar purposes are further discussed in ‘Use any language-specific device’ in Chapter 5.

Making a home for a new language The stable apportioning of linguistic space to Portuguese and Swedish was in time disrupted by the appearance of English in the children’s lives, which marks a significant realignment in their language use among themselves. English has widespread use in the countries where the family settled from 1993. The take-over effect of the language of the environment upon previous uses of language, by children or adults, is well attested in the literature, e.g. in Haugen’s (1953) classical study of Norwegian immigrants to America and, recently, in Quay (2001), who reports preference for Japanese for one German/English bilingually raised child in Japan. The language of schooling, in particular, with its associated promise of peer communion and play, easily acquires a status of its own within established norms of communication. A few months before her much longed-for school start in Austria, Sofia explains how the demarcation takes place: (10.17) S 2;8 *SOF: mama˜ diz ola´, papa´ diz hej, e escola diz Gru¨ß Gott.

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%eng: mummy says ola´, daddy says hej and school says ‘‘Gru¨ß Gott’’. %com: all three words in question translate as ‘hi’. As it happened before with their two home languages, the language of schooling became topic-bound too or, rather, school matters became language-bound. These matters are preferentially addressed in the school language, because the issues, names and descriptions discussed at school make better sense in the language in which the children first became aware of them. One early example concerns the realisation that calendar years are designated by numbers, large numbers. The daily routine at the Swedish kindergarten in Portugal included choral repetition of the day’s date, printed in large letters on the blackboard. After the first few months of attendance, Karin, aged 3, would consistently read out what she identified as a calendar year in any printed form as Sw nittonhundranitti(o) ‘nineteen-ninety’. The language-bound nature of different matters and experiences is also what explains the emergence of consistent mixes from English into the children’s two first languages, which persists at the time of writing. One example is: (10.18) K 9;5 S 7;7 *KAR: Sofia! where are you?? *SOF: wait! estou a mostrar o meu project folder a` mama˜. %eng: wait! I’m showing mummy my project folder. These mixes may involve single vocabulary items or larger syntactic constructions, as well as features of pronunciation, including prosody. Their virulence is particularly acute when the children return home from school or from outings with friends, and proceed to report on what happened. Human beings talk mostly about daily happenings that somehow mattered or left a lasting impression worth reporting. Clearly, one large portion of what matters to the children goes on at their workplace, as is the case for many adults too. The conflict that the children appear to face then is that of fitting into one language the description of an event that took place in another. It is therefore small wonder that both languages end up being used. Two examples from Sofia illustrate this point: (10.19) S 7;11 %sit: with Mother, describing the construction of a mummy-case for her Ancient Egypt school project. Sofia uses many hand gestures throughout to describe activities and sizes.


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*SOF: no´s primeiro pusemos glue, assim tudo a` volta, naõ e´? depois pintei tudo white, e depois usa´mos paint, naõ foi felt-pens, foi mesmo paint para pintar tudo. ficou taõ bonito, tem gold tambe´m, eu fiz a *cobra* gold, tambe´m com tinta . *e´ assim grande*. %eng: first we put glue, like all over, right? then I painted it all white, and then we used paint, it wasn’t felt-pens, we used real paint to paint it all. it was so pretty, it has gold too, I made the snake gold, also with paint. it’s this big. %com: the word cobra ‘snake’ is pronounced in Portuguese, except for English-like aspiration of the initial plosive, [gkh&bR]. The syntax of the phrase *e´ assim grande* is calqued from Eng ‘it’s this big’. The Ptg equivalent is e´ deste tamanho (lit. ‘it’s of this size’). (10.20) S 7;11 %sit: with Mother, commenting on guitar playing after her lesson at school. *SOF: a primeira vez that you do that a gente acha que e´ difıćil . %eng: the first time that you do that you think it’s difficult. Unlike German and Swedish, which were the children’s other school languages for restricted periods of time, English ended up claiming territory as their peer language, in all likelihood because of continued support for this language from both school and community over several years. Importantly, English was also the language in which all kinds of new experiences took place, in the children’s crucial formative years. Their switch-over to English as peer language progressed over time and, as such, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact date when English took over. Nevertheless, the data show exclusive use of English among the children in their spontaneous interaction by ages K 11;7, S 9;9 and M 7;6. It should be noted that, for several years, attempts by the children to use English among themselves were rejected by the parents, particularly in the parents’ presence. Whereas the parents took this language as an intruder upon the well established language situation in the family, the children viewed it as a guest, one that naturally belonged to them within that language situation. ‘Naturally’ because, tellingly, the children ask permission to use English with their parents (see the next section, ‘Defining language territories’), but not with one another. The parents

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eventually yielded to the new family language, not least because the children went on using the parents’ languages with them. The gradual emergence of English manifested itself in several ways. The following examples, (10.21)/(10.31), concern Portuguese and English and illustrate a sample of processes that are common to all three children. Early attempts at using English naturally show mixes into this language: (10.21) K 7;5 %sit: explaining chess rules to a friend. *KAR: [. . .] and the *horse* moves one here and two here. %com: the Ptg word for the knight is cavalo , ‘horse’. (10.22) M 3;8 %sit: playing racing trains with the family’s helper. *MIK: this *comboy* is very special. it’s red and very fast. %com: the blend is modelled on Ptg comboio /ko˜gb&ju/ ‘train’, and pronounced [gko˜b&j]. The children’s realisation of their lack of equivalents for English words or expressions designating new referents also prompted resource to what can be termed recognitional deictics, borrowing the term used in Enfield’s (2003) engaging discussion of English expressions like ‘whatd’you-call-it’ and ‘you-know-what’, that involve vague reference: (10.23) K 7;4 %sit: explaining to Mother what a certificate of merit is. *KAR: se lemos bem ou fazemos as contas certas a professora dańos assim um papel. %eng: if we read well or do our sums right the teacher gives us like, a piece of paper. (10.24) M 5;11 %sit: describing his first electronic keyboard practice at school. *MIK: a gente tocou uma coisa que parecia um piano pequenino mas fazia mais barulho . %eng: we played something that looked like a small piano but made more noise. Example (10.23) marks the first time that Karin heard about a certificate of merit by that name. She rightly suspected that there must


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be paper equivalents to it in Portuguese schools, for similar rewarding purposes, and that her mother would know about them. The word assim ‘like (this)’ aptly covers her intended meaning. Mikael’s use of coisa ‘thing’ in (10.24) serves a similar purpose, introducing his description of the new musical instrument, for which he has no Portuguese word. The children’s use of strategies involving vague reference words such as these in their monolingual probing of Portuguese is discussed in ‘Replacive words’ in Chapter 8. The children also make use of hedges, which set the stage for a mix. The mix is marked either by hesitation before it, or by reporting someone else’s use of the mixed word. (10.25) K 9;10 %sit: with Sofia, rummaging through Sofia’s sewing basket. *KAR: aquele pano azul com B/— / *stripa* amarela parece a bandeira sueca . %eng: that blue cloth with yellow B/— / stripe looks like the Swedish flag. %com: the blend, from English ‘stripe’, was pronounced [gstRip]. The Ptg target is risca /g‰iSk/. (10.26) M 3;2 %sit:

Mikael just drew a shark. Mother asks him what is in the drawing. *MIK: e´ um shark, as professoras dizem . %eng: it’s a shark, my teachers say. *MUM: e tu, como e´ que dizes? %eng: and how do you say it? *MIK: B/‹ff / ‘‘tabaraõ’’! %eng: shark!

The strategy exemplified in Mikael’s first line in (10.26) explicitly acknowledges the mix as a mix. Another example of its use is (5.28). Assigning ownership to words appears to serve a function that is similar to the language contract discussed above for examples (10.4) and (10.5), whereby the use of unusual languages between child and parent is sanctioned. Given the accumulated need to use compulsory mixes of this kind to refer to their new world of experiences in English, the children came to make liberal use of this strategy, as a handy way of mixing intentionally whilst at the same time excusing themselves from doing it.


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Other mixes go unmarked, involving a wide variety of mix types, similar to those found in (10.18)/(10.20), above: (10.27) K 9;6 %sit:

after leafing through a folder containing all her school certificates. *KAR: preciso de poˆr todos back *em * order? %eng: do I need to put them all back in order? %com: the words of each language are pronounced in their original accents. Ptg target for ‘back *em * order’: por ordem outra vez (lit. ‘by order again’).

(10.28) S 7;10 %sit: after a discussion on mad-cow disease, and on why we should avoid eating beef. Sofia’s first sentence refers to the beef-burger industry. *SOF: eu acho que esses people learned a lesson. podemos comer chicken, naõ e´? %eng: I think that those people learned a lesson. we can eat chicken, right? (10.29) M 4;4 *MIK: parece uma *futebola*. %eng: looks like a football. %com: the blend, for the target bola de futebol (lit. ‘ball for football’), is pronounced with Portuguese accent, [futgb&l]. (10.30) M 4;6 %sit:

Sofia and Mikael have been arguing for a while in Mikael’s room. Mikael comes to Mother. *MIK: ma´mi, a Sofia naõ ‘‘ta´’’ sharing. %eng: mummy, Sofia is not sharing. *MUM: entaõ vai la´ dizer-lhe para te deixar brincar tambe´m. %eng: then go tell her to let you play too. %act: Mikael goes back to his room, and addresses Sofia. *MIK: mama˜ disse para tu fazer[es] sharing. %eng: mummy said you do sharing.

(10.31) M 5;9 %sit: Sofia and Mikael are fighting. Sofia grabs him by his shirt.


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*MIK: Sofia!! naõ podes agarrar as *outras pessoas shirts*! %eng: Sofia!! you can’t grab other people’s shirts! %com: the last two words in Mikael’s blend were pronounced [gpsoasgS¢ts]. Ptg target for as *outras pessoas shirts*: as camisas das outras pessoas (lit. ‘the shirts of the other people’) Whereas many mixes occurred for things for which the children had never heard a name in Portuguese or Swedish, others occurred for no apparent reason. In examples (10.25)/(10.31), the children knew the equivalent words and used these words in other utterances at the same ages. Romaine (1989: 89) offers the likely explanation that ‘fluent bilinguals are in many [. . .] cases unaware of switches’, which would also explain why the children do not hedge or otherwise mark their mixes in several of the examples above. All three children in fact report surprise (and often amusement) when confronted with their own examples of mixes. They remember the dialogues and the episodes where they occurred, but they do not remember that mixes did occur. Sofia’s explanation in (10.32) supports the likelihood of their unawareness of mixing: (10.32) S 9;4 %sit:

Mother has just picked up Sofia from Swedish School, which takes place after regular school. Sofia’s Portuguese is speckled with English and Swedish mixes. *MUM: querida! que lıńgua e´ que esta´s a falar?! %eng: sweetheart! which language are you speaking?! %act: Sofia stares blankly at Mother for a brief moment. *SOF: uma qualquer, p[a]ra dizer o que eu quero! %eng: whichever, to say what I want to say!

The emergence of English in the family’s language structure meant not only that the children started mixing English into both their first languages, but also that they started mixing more Swedish into their Portuguese and more Portuguese into their Swedish than ever before. It was as if the newcomer language had revealed to them the yet largely unexplored possibility of using several languages in the same utterance. A long-familiar language appears in fact to acquire as much ‘invisibility’ as familiar traits from people, happenings and places, like a well worn shoe. The following anecdote, in its self-contradiction, illustrates this point:


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(10.33) K 7;2 %sit:

*KAR: %eng: %com: *KAR: %eng: %com:

three months after the move to Hong Kong, at Swedish School, Karin cheers on a Swedish child taking part in a race. du ma˚ste springa fast! you must run fast! Karin falls suddenly silent, and then, amused and slightly embarrassed, turns to address Mother. como e´ que se diz depressa em sueco? agora so´ sei em ingleˆs! how do you say ‘fast’ in Swedish? I can only say it in English now! Karin apparently did not notice that she could say the word, depressa , in Portuguese too.

English has the pleasure of novelty and is besides ‘cool’, in the children’s own assessment of English, in English. It is therefore no wonder that the children explore its novelty in all possible ways, like they will watch and comment on the same ‘new’ film, or listen to the latest trendy song over and over again. English is the language that takes over from their first languages, and from which they borrow words, syntax and prosody. Haugen (1953: 370) made similar observations among his informants, noting that ‘it is the language of the learner that is influenced, not the language he learns’, a phenomenon that Harley et al . (1995: 47) later termed ‘backward transfer’. More recently, similar effects of later-acquired languages over first languages have been reported, for example, in Nicoladis and Grabois (2002) and Cook (2003). For the children in this study, prosody was in fact the feature of English that took over first, which is interesting in the light of their clearly differential use of intonation from the very outset of their linguistic lives (see Chapter 5). For example, the children went through a stage when they mixed English intonation into their otherwise Portuguese utterances, with the effect that they started sounding out of tune, literally, when speaking Portuguese. A sample of examples and discussion of these types of mixes is given in Cruz-Ferreira (1999b). But novelties are necessarily time-bound. They last until the children find out how they work and why they give them pleasure, when their interest in playing with them begins to wane. Languages appear to be no different. One sign of the parity with which the children eventually started treating English shows in the reappearance of mixes into this language, roughly three years after the family’s first move to an Englishspeaking country. The following are examples of different types of blends:


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(10.34) K 10;2 *KAR: Sofia, *close the light*! %com: the blend is calqued from Ptg fecha a luz (lit. ‘close the light’). Eng target: ‘turn off the light’. (10.35) S 8;4 %sit:

waiting for the school bus at the home compound’s gate, commenting on the recurrent breakdowns of the gate and/or the remote that controls its function, to a bus-mate. *SOF: this is so silly! they give you the *command* and all, and then you can’t use it because the gate’s not fixed. %com: the blend is modelled on the Ptg word for ‘remote control’, comando.

(10.36) M 9;7 %sit: inspecting a half-buried dead lizard in the garden, with Sofia. *MIK: leave it. he’s dead, he’s *begraved*. %com: the blend is modelled from the Sw verbal participle begravad /beggr"fvad/ ‘buried’, pronounced with English accent as [bIggreIvd]. The children’s down-to-earth use of English mixes in their home languages made it difficult to resist imitating the naturalness and the accuracy of their ways of expressing themselves. Several such words and expressions first used by the children became common patrimony in the family, as several examples in (10.1) illustrate. The parents did enforce the use of Portuguese or Swedish equivalents for the children’s mixes in cases where the mix appeared unwarranted, for example: (10.37)

KSM: %eng:

preciso de school shoes novos . I need new school shoes.

KSM %eng:

vou sair com uns friends. I’ll be going out with some friends.

In cases like these, the parents consistently ask for repetition of the utterance, by means of equivalent prompts to ‘pardon?’ or ‘I don’t understand’, which invariably result in a mix-free repetition of the utterance. In other cases, the parents’ attempts to find Portuguese or Swedish equivalents for the children’s mixes turned out to result in the futile task of ‘coining’ words for the sake of sticking to one language in which they may have no relevance. Example (10.18) is one case in point,

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in that ‘project folders’ did not exist in the parents’ school life. Any constructed equivalent would be artificial and therefore doomed to communicative failure. Compounding the matter of strict avoidance of mixes, it is extremely difficult to explain to children why words like Ptg futebol ‘football (game)’ that the children clearly understand as a borrowing from English, are accepted, whilst ‘project folder’, equally English in origin, is not. These are the reasons why English words like ‘project folder’ did end up becoming the words for their referents in the family, just like Sw sill or Ptg bacalhau before them, and other words illustrated in (10.1) and (10.2). These words are bound to their languages in a way that words like ‘school shoes’ or ‘friends’ in (10.37) are not. Fine though the line may be between the reasons to accept the former and reject the latter, the children clearly understand it and comply with it.

Defining language territories Young children tend to be quite bigoted in their opinions about what is right and what is wrong, and views about language and language use are no exception. Perhaps because of the parental management of language use in the family, this is particularly true in what concerns the demarcation of language territories, i.e. which language should claim entitlement to appropriate use in particular circumstances. Mikael expressed his awareness of appropriate choice of language for example in the following episode: (10.38) M 1;7 %sit: at dinner. Karin is unwell, and finishes a very small helping of food without appetite. Father addresses her. *DAD: vill du ha mer? %eng: do you want some more? %act: Karin does not react. Mikael becomes restless, darting his eyes from Father to Karin and back, and finally addresses Karin. *MIK: mais? Karin, mais? %eng: more? Karin, more? Mikael apparently interpreted Karin’s absence of reaction to the father’s question as failure to understand his language, which is not the usual language that household-bound matters are handled in. He therefore attempted to correct the matter by repeating the question in the right language.


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The children’s awareness of the special status attributed to Portuguese at this time resulted in a phenomenon that is perhaps worth mentioning. Default languages have a way of screening off other languages, as it were, much like monolinguals will see their linguistic world divided into their language and all the others. A similar effect appears to have taken place at one brief stage, for Sofia and Mikael, when they treated languages other than Portuguese not like individual languages on their own but as ‘non-Portuguese’, in a kind of binary organisation of their linguistic space. This was so regardless of language and including Swedish. One example is: (10.39) M 3;1 %sit: after the first day of school, commenting on his teacher. *MIK: ela fala ‘‘ingueleˆs’’, como o papa´. %eng: she speaks English, like daddy. Other examples concern Sofia who, during the family’s stay in Austria, would address her father in German when he returned home from long stays away. At age 3;11, newly landed in Sweden from Austria, she sought contact with all local children in playgrounds by using German (e.g. ‘darf ich?’ ‘may I?’), her peer language away from home of the time. She went on with this practice for quite a while, despite the exclusive use of Swedish around her then. The two children appeared to lump together Swedish, English and German in a kind of ‘nonPortuguese’ category. Although I am unsure about the significance, if any, of this treatment of their languages, binary organisation of languages in multilinguals may be worth investigating, given observations in the literature about the essentially bilingual nature of, for example, mixes observed in trilingual speakers (see Clyne, 1997; CruzFerreira, 1999b). Accents and language varieties also have their clearly allotted places. As noted in Chapter 5, from around age 3, Karin and Sofia would enact scenes from favourite child films only in the accents spoken in these films. In their wholesale quest for what goes together with what, be it words with meanings or people with languages, the children appear to want to adhere to strict housekeeping rules, as it were. Examples concerning their discomfort in being addressed in the ‘wrong’ language were noted above, in (10.4) and (10.5), and also, for example, in ‘Use speakers of each language as symbols for each language’ in Chapter 5. At times, the children would also refuse to sanction particular words or expressions from particular people, within the same language. Two examples follow:


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(10.40) K 2;3 %sit: *MUM: %eng: %com:

%act: *KAR: %eng: %com:

*MUM: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %mod: (10.41) M 2;6 %act:

Mother is on the phone with her brother, Karin is playing beside her. [. . .] e´ porreiro! [. . .] that’s great! the mother uses very colloquial slang for ‘great’, common in her brother’s speech but not in her own. Karin comes to Mother and starts slapping her knee. e´ tio Ze´! e´ tio Ze´! it’s uncle Ze´! it’s uncle Ze´. the given gloss concerns the mother’s interpretation of Karin’s utterance. Karin repeats her actions and her utterance several times, with growing intensity. sim, querida, e´ o tio Ze´. quer dizer ola´? yes darling, it’s uncle Ze´. want to say hello? naõ!! tio Ze´ ‘‘reio’’! no!! uncle Ze´ ‘‘reio’’. for tio Ze´ ‘‘reio’’ , [tigo g‰ju] for tio Ze´, /tiwgzo/; for porreiro , /pug‰jRu/

Mikael has just had his bath, and is playing around with bath toys while Mother attempts to towel him dry. *MUM: ‘‘ta´’’ quieto, Miguelaõ! da´ ca´ mas e´ o rabete para eu limpar. %eng: keep still, Mikael! let me dry your bottom instead. %com: the mother’s use of rabete [‰gbet] for ‘bottom’ is unusual, and probably prompted by current contact with her own mother, for whom this word is standard when addressing the children. %act: Mikael freezes in place, then gives Mother a displeased look. *MIK: rabete naõ! e´ rabinho. vo´vo´ diz rabete. mama˜ naõ diz nada rabete. mama˜ diz rabinho. rabete naõ. %eng: not rabete ! it’s rabinho . granny says rabete . mummy doesn’t say rabete at all. mummy says rabinho . not rabete .


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%act:

Mikael says this very quickly, with a deep frown to Mother. %com: the mother usually switches between rabo [g‰abu] and rabinho [‰gbiłu] for ‘bottom’, the latter being her preferred form. In both cases, the children appear to be ascribing exclusive ownership of a word to a user. The two words in question in fact characterised the speech of the children’s uncle and grandmother, respectively, and all of the countless other words shared by the Portuguese side of the family caused no similar reaction. These episodes took place during Karin’s and Mikael’s first respective long-term stays in Portugal (which was also the only one, for Mikael) and the reason for their reactions in (10.40) and (10.41) may lie in that they had never heard the words porreiro or rabete used on any regular basis before the move to the country. With increasing contact with their uncle and grandmother, the words became in some way a defining trait of their speech, on which their mother was intruding. The reasoning seems to be that since different adults, like mother and father, use different words for what is apparently the same referent, it may be the case that other speakers are entitled to idiosyncratic words too. Other manifestations of their intolerance came, interestingly, with the realisation that languages can be translated into each other. With their growing command over English, and despite their own use of translation for the benefit of their interlocutors, as in (5.38) or (10.38), they expressed dismay at their realisation that they had been enjoying several of their favourite cartoon videos, like Sleeping Beauty, which was dubbed in Portuguese, or The Little Mermaid, which was dubbed in Swedish, in a language that did not belong to them. Given that they can understand the original language of the films, the idea of dubbing appeared to them as quite nonsensical. In Karin’s words: (10.42) K 7;0 *KAR: se este video e´ ingleˆs, e´ um disparate fazer estas trapalhadas de lıńguas. %eng: if this video is English, it doesn’t make sense to mess up all these languages together like this. Almost overnight, the children lost interest in their dubbed videos, and the family had to invest in a new collection of the same films spoken in their original English language. Still today the children are quite averse to the idea of reading books in translation. Sofia explains:


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(10.43) S 14 *SOF: naõ e´ a mesma coisa. em portugueˆs a gente diz as coisas de uma maneira, em ingleˆs diz doutra e em sueco diz doutra. e´ muito diferente. %eng: it’s not the same thing. you say things one way in Portuguese, another way in English and another way in Swedish. it’s very different. Cutting across the association between a language and its users, each language also seems to be inextricably linked to objects and happenings, or rather, to the language in which these were first experienced. For example, Karin and Sofia always used German to ‘play school’ from their first days of kindergarten attendance during the family’s stay in Austria. In the home’s daytime all-Portuguese environment, Swedish was also used for initiating exchanges that relate to this language, as in (10.44) and (10.45). Swedish-based mixes occur for the same reason, as in (10.46) and (10.47): (10.44) K 2;1 %sit: showing Sofia the teddy-bear that Father gave Karin on her first birthday. *KAR: titta ‘‘Fosia’’, nalle fin? %eng: look Sofia, (is) teddy-bear lovely? (10.45) S 2;8 %sit:

after biting around a slice of bread to make it the shape of a boot, talking to herself. *SOF: Emi[l] [s]ko. %eng: Emil(‘s) shoe. %com: a Swedish video featuring a boy named Emil with large loose-fitting boots is one of Sofia’s current favourites.

(10.46) M 2;10 %sit: Father taught Mikael to flush the toilet after use. Mikael has just used the toilet under Mother’s supervision, who reaches out to flush. *MIK: eu *spolo*! %eng: I flush! %com: the blend is constructed from Sw stem spola ‘to flush’ and Ptg 1st-person verbal inflection -o . The target form is puxo ‘I flush’.


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(10.47) K 11;0 %sit: with Mother, recalling a favourite story told by Father about his childhood, that all three children found hilarious. *KAR: lembras-te, ma´mi, daquela histo´ria do caõ que o papa´ tinha que lambeu o gra¨dde B/— / toda do bolo que era para os anos dele? depois fingiu que naõ, mas ficou com os morrha˚r todos brancos? %eng: remember, mummy, that story about daddy’s dog licking the B/— / cream (Sw gra¨dde) off his birthday cake? it then pretended it hadn’t, but its whiskers (Sw morrha˚r) were white all over? %com: Karin’s hesitation appears to mark a discrepancy in her use of Ptg gender with the Sw noun gra¨dde. The noun is preceded by a mc. modifier and followed by a fm. one, o and toda . The equivalent Ptg noun is fm. nata . The equivalent of morrha˚r is mc. bigodes . Example (10.47), sampled much later, shows the enduring nature of the association between language and event. Given that this story was originally told in Swedish, this is the language in which its key words are remembered whilst reporting in another language. It is as if the children wish to preserve the original flavour of the episode, despite recounting it in a different language, or precisely because of that. Enduring associations of this kind involving a particular language stand, I suspect, for a large proportion of mixes in these children’s data. Mixes such as those illustrated in (10.46) and (10.47) occur for no other apparent reason, given that the children know the equivalent words in the other language too. The overall nature of these children’s patterns of mixing is under current investigation. In other cases, the act itself of switching language appears to serve a particular purpose: (10.48) K 9;10 %sit: Karin and Sofia are playing a card game. Karin doubts Sofia’s fair-play. *KAR: you’re cheating, you’re cheating! %com: Karin chants, on descending minor thirds. Sofia ignores her, and goes on playing the game. *KAR: Sofia! pa´ra de fazer batota! %eng: Sofia! stop cheating!


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Besides its likely intention as an attention-caller, Karin’s switch in (10.48) signals change of purpose of her utterances, rather than a particular purpose associated with the use of Portuguese instead of English. She is no longer commenting, she is commanding. This interpretation is supported by examples like (10.49)/(10.52): (10.49) S 7;11 M 5;8 *MIK: *SOF: *MIK: %com: *SOF: *MIK: %eng: %com:

‘‘wanna’’ play cards? no! why not? Mikael knows that Sofia loves to play card games. 0. queres jogar bisca-bisca? want to play bisca-bisca ? Mikael uses his old baby-word for the name of a favourite card game that he and Sofia have played together for a long time (target: bisca), and an entreating tone. *SOF: naõ!! %eng: no!!

(10.50) S 9;7 M 7;4 %sit: Sofia is in a common room, playing one of the children’s favourite CD-games, one that they have never managed to win. Mikael is in his room, chanting to himself in English. Sofia calls out to him excitedly. *SOF: Miguel, estou a ganhar! %eng: Mikael, I’m winning! %act: Mikael rushes to her. *MIK: fa˚r jag se?? %eng: can I see?? (10.51) K 9;0 M 4;11 %sit: Mikael has just learned to name the letters by which several words start. Karin is reading an English book with him, whose words are printed in handwritten style, all lower-case.


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%act: Karin points at the word ‘girl’. *KAR: girl. aqui esta´ escrito girl, veˆs? com que letra começa? %eng: girl. that’s ‘girl’ written here, see? which letter does it start with? *MIK: nove! %eng: nine! %com: the handwritten ‘g’ does look like the number ‘9’. *KAR: oh, so sweet!! %com: Karin snorts softly and uses a prolonged high-falling tone with a tiny voice. She then proceeds without pausing, with her normal tone of voice. *KAR: Miguel, nove e´ um nu´mero, naõ e´ uma letra. %eng: Mikael, nine is a number, not a letter. (10.52) K 9;3 M 5;2 %sit: Karin and Mikael are playing in their quarters. They start arguing, raising their voices as they do. *KAR: pa´ra de chatear! %eng: stop teasing! *MIK: pa´ra de chatear! %com: Mikael imitates Karin’s utterance, adding a babyish high-pitched tone to it. *KAR: pa´ra!! %eng: stop it!! *MIK: pa´ra!! %com: Mikael imitates Karin, as above. *KAR: I’ll tell mum!! %com: Karin uses a threatening tone. Hoffmann (2001) notes that the use of codeswitching deserves particular attention in what it can reveal about multilingual children’s pragmatic language competence. Lanvers (2001) also found that infant bilinguals can alternate between their languages appropriately, according to the psychosocial context of the interaction, for purposes like emphasis and appeal. Language switches, among the children in this study, assist pragmatic fluency, in that the children’s utterances would otherwise fall short of their pragmatic impact. The use of language switches in the examples above also raises the interesting issue addressed by Auer (1995; 1999), who analyses codeswitching as a tool of contextualisation that mediates the negotiation of meaning in bilingual conversation. In these children’s data, there seems to have

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been a progression in their use of language switches from a discoursal effect achieved by the particular languages between which the children switch, as in (10.9), to a different effect achieved by the act itself of switching, as in (10.51) or (10.52). In other words, there seems to have been a progression from the association of one set of meanings with the use of one language (one purpose /one language, as it were) to a broader realisation that switching language marks a set of meanings, regardless of language (one purpose /one switch). Although I have not analysed the data in detail from this perspective, there might be a trend towards a use of language switches that is conventionalised, in the sense attributed by Myers-Scotton (2000: 138) to conventionalised exchanges as ‘interaction for which speech community members have a sense of ‘‘script’’.’ The children resort to ‘scripted’ switches because of the tacit convention about their discoursal effect that in turn created the convention. Given this linguistic backdrop in the household, there were of course periods in which the parents reported trouble in keeping to their languages, and in keeping them whole. Instinct stands for much accommodation to interlocutors’ uses of language. Examples involving the mother are her line in (10.14), as well as (10.40) and (10.41). As any user of several languages will know, instinct also stands for keeping to the language in which the exchange was initiated, regardless of the content of that exchange. One example is Sofia’s last line in (10.49). Although her refusal to cooperate with Mikael’s suggestion is unchanged, she complies with conversational rules in terms of language, much like one follows suit in a card game like the one Mikael ended up not playing. The typical homecoming situation from school or outings with friends involves the children naturally reporting in English whatever happened to them in English. On a few occasions the parents unwittingly prolonged the dialogues in English. The effect of this on the children was immediate and twofold, first stunned silence and then switch to the parent’s language. But switching language also means that the recounting loses its original flavour, besides taxing the children’s patience at the end of their working day, or even risking their loss of interest in the whole issue of reporting happenings to their parents altogether. In attempting to strike a compromise between their comfort in using English and the nonparental nature of this language, the children resort to the simple solution of asking permission to retell, in English, fresh episodes from their peer lives, with questions like posso falar ingleˆs agora? ‘can I speak English now?’ or tenho que dizer isto em ingleˆs, posso? ‘I’ve got to say this in English, may I?’. Sofia’s explanation of why they ask summarises their reasons:


(10.53)

S 8;2 *SOF: %eng:

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a minha cabeça ainda esta´ cheia de ingleˆs . my head is still full of English.

The word ainda ‘still’ in (10.53) says it all. It takes time to switch gear into a different language. Like all fluent bilinguals, these children also realise that a language can be an asset or a limitation. Their reasons are generally quite pragmatic. A language can prove extremely useful, for example, as a secret code. When having friends over for the day, the children often switch to Portuguese to ask their mother, in the presence of these children, whether they are allowed to stay for dinner or for sleepovers, thereby sparing their guests the unpleasantness of a possible negative answer to this request. In the following episode, Sofia is out shopping with her mother, and they meet Sofia’s Swedish School teacher. Being her usual absent-minded self, Sofia failed to recognise her own teacher in the unfamiliar surroundings. Realising that the conversation clearly had something to do with herself, Sofia quickly asked her mother in Portuguese who the lady was and got a reply. As soon as her teacher turned to go, Sofia expressed her relief at the ability to resort to a ‘secret’ language to ascertain her identity: (10.54) S 9;2 *SOF: ainda bem que ela naõ percebe portugueˆs, senaõ se calhar ficava triste. %eng: lucky that she doesn’t understand Portuguese, or she might feel sad. On the other hand, the children also realise that the strong bond between a language and its purposes can be a hindrance to the pursuit of particular goals. When the family first mooted the option of the children’s IB schooling in Sweden, their first reaction was one of hesitation, assuming that schooling would proceed in Swedish. Upon realising that English would remain the language of schooling, their relief was patent. They cannot, in their own words, talk about physics or economics in Swedish, despite their fluency in the language and their attendance of Swedish School. Swedish is not ‘the’ school language, English is. The same bond between language and purpose is perhaps what also explains a stumbling block that appears to be emerging in the children’s current peer language situation. As noted above, the transition from peer Portuguese to English went smoothly, and probably unnoticed by the children themselves. At the time of writing, Karin has now attended the first year of her IB studies in Sweden. Given her new

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linguistic environment, Swedish has apparently become a new peer language, and she has accordingly started addressing her siblings in this language, whether on the phone or via online chat. Whereas Mikael is more laid-back about this development, Sofia’s reaction was one of clear discomfort. Karin, she claims, ‘never used Swedish to me before, so why should we start using it now?’ Sofia is of course aware of Karin’s new environment, one that she will herself soon move to and will want to likewise merge with. Her reaction is probably due to the fact that, being away from her sister, the transition to Swedish came to her as an unannounced, one-sided break of habits, not as mutually nurtured as the transition to English was. It is as ‘funny’ to speak Swedish to your siblings as it is to speak English to mum or dad. Just like appropriate switching involves a ‘script’, so does the use of one language. Swedish ‘says’ things in different ways from English, and its use for the children involves a different profiling of their identities. Switching language means not only a new way of looking at things, but of looking at the interlocutors too. The common culture that was built up through English, discussed in the previous section and in ‘Identity and cultural camouflage’ in Chapter 11, thereby risks crumbling, with no immediate replacement available. The current turmoil in the children’s peer language situation shows that abrupt changes in language habits continue to be unwelcome, but it also shows the ease with which bilinguals adopt and discard languages. The absence of use of one language for particular purposes, whether absolute or for long periods of time, does not necessarily entail irretrievable loss of that language. Language dominance? Bilingualism involves imbalance among the bilingual’s languages, or it would be no bilingualism. The same imbalance, arising for similar reasons, is true of monolingual uses of language. People speak differently to different people for different purposes, and bilinguals besides speak different languages differently to different people for different purposes. The acquisitional processes that answer for this kind of competent flexibility in language use are the same. Given that there is no suggestion in the literature that a flexible, fluent user of one language lacks native competence in that language, it is interesting to note that one added complication to the controversial definition of bilingualism is that there seems to be a reluctance to define a bilingual as a native speaker of two languages. Going by what the term is intended to designate, native speakers are, literally, ‘born’ into a language, or languages, the first one(s) they learn, which are then their native language(s). However, in studies on bilingualism, the implicit assumption is that bilinguals are one thing, native speakers are another (see e.g. Watson (1991) who compares


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‘bilinguals’ to ‘native speakers’). Gupta (1994: 14) also notes that ‘[l]inguists often use native speakers as a reference point for proficiency’, and she adds: ‘The archetypical native speaker is a monolingual who has always lived in a community which is monolingual in the same language’. Yamamoto (2001: 37ff.) lucidly points out the terminological confusion pervasive in these studies, including in uses of the phrase ‘native speaker’. The dichotomy native versus non-native furthermore appears to be in fact a cline, given formulations like Bloomfield’s (1933: 55) ‘native-like’ or Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson’s (2003: 572) ‘nearnative’. A similar nebulosity holds for the concept of ‘mother tongue’. Skutnabb-Kangas (1981) proposes a number of criteria for the definition of a bilingual’s mother tongue. These include, for example, competence (the language(s) one knows best), or function (the language(s) one uses most), but it is clear that their application will give different mother tongues for the same bilingual at different times, besides needing definition of quantifications like ‘best’ or ‘most’. A mother tongue can also be assigned administratively. This is the case for example in Singapore, where ethnic background decides: Singaporean ethnic Chinese, for example, will have Mandarin as their official mother tongue, regardless of whether this language is used in their family and of whether the family identifies with it. In other words, you need not be a native speaker of your mother tongue. On the other hand, being a native speaker is a birthright, in the sense that you can neither become one in later life, nor cease to be one, even if for some reason you acquire native proficiency in other languages, or lose native proficiency in your own one(s), respectively. This is suggested by the strangeness of hypothetical formulations like ‘I became a native speaker of English at age 8’ or ‘I stopped being a native speaker of English at age 30’. In other words, you may be a native speaker of a language that you in fact do not speak. Clearly, as Gupta (1994: 14) concludes, the ‘whole concept of native speaker becomes problematical outside a monolingual context’, and this appears equally true of ‘mother tongue’. The indeterminacy in the application of these terms to bilingualism stems from the hesitation in assigning full linguistic status to bilingual uses of language (see discussion in Chapter 2). Bilingual imbalance has been addressed in the literature in various ways, from the perspective of the speakers or of the languages themselves. For example, Weinreich (1953) and Baker (2001) propose a classification of bilinguals and bilingualism according to a conceptual organisation of the different languages, and to the order of their acquisition, respectively, whereas Myers-Scotton’s (1993; 2002) work proposes a set of grammatical criteria from observed patterns in mixing to account for the unequal participation of different languages in bilingual speech. The natural, parallel imbalance found in bilingual uses of language has often been discussed

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in the literature as a hierarchy in terms of dominance of one language over another (see Cutler et al ., 1989; 1992; Fernańdez, 2003; Heredia & Altarriba, 2002; Hoffmann, 1985). The assumption seems to be that one language must be dominant for all human beings, monolinguals as well as bilinguals. The dominant language has been said to correlate with observations of bilingual mixes, whether mixing is taken as dependent or independent variable. For example, Nicoladis and Genesee (1997) see mixing as a function both of input and language dominance, whereas Spradlin et al . (2003) use patterns of mixing to determine and reinterpret assumptions about dominance. Bilingual imbalance, and its assumed effect on so-called semilingualism, has also been discussed from the perspective of its counterparts, ‘balanced’ bilingualism or ‘balanced’ bilinguals, all terms that have been shown to designate fictional entities. ‘Balanced’ mastery (equally good or equally bad) of two or more languages in fact begs the question of bilingualism itself: why would bilinguals need two languages, if they can do exactly the same thing with both? It is clear that even bilinguals who make bilingualism their professional commitment, like simultaneous interpreters, cannot have perfectly matched mastery of both languages, and that near-equivalence of their languages is true of particular areas of specialisation only. Romaine (1989) accordingly refers to ‘balanced’ bilingualism throughout her book with this word in between quotation marks. More importantly, Romaine (1989: 251) observes that ‘[t]he term ‘‘balanced bilingual’’ also reveals a static conception of language’. Judging by the data from the children in this study, there is in fact one language that is dominant, but in each situation and/or for particular purposes. There is no one language that can be said to be ‘once dominant, always dominant’, as it were, or to ‘take over preferentially’ in an absolute sense. One language is dominant where another cannot be. Shifts in dominance in bilingual use, of different kinds and for different purposes, have been attested in other literature. Both Kohnert et al. (1999) and Lanvers (1999) report shifts in dominance along age, depending on requirements from the children’s environment, and LaBelle (2000) found different patterns of dominance in one child, which were attributable to factors like input and ease of articulation. In other words, there is alternate dominance among the languages of a bilingual. The concept of ‘language dominance’ thereby becomes indistinguishable from bilingualism itself, raising doubts about its usefulness as an analytical tool from which to approach bilingualism across the board. This is especially true of dominance criteria that may be defined for child bilingualism, particularly early child bilingualism, because the children are in the process of acquiring their languages.


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Language dominance cannot be defined in a vacuum. The database for this study shows little support for assumptions about dominance of any one of the children’s languages. The children have native accents in all three languages, including intonation. Their use of mixes is equally indecisive, in that they mix grammatical constructions or vocabulary from and to any of their three languages. The same holds for the language in which they initiate an exchange and, in particular, for the language in which they continue it. Compliance of this kind with the interlocutors’ choice of language can only occur in cases of equivalent competent mastery of the languages involved. The children’s own views on this matter further support the equal status in which they hold their languages. They once joked that asking them which is their ‘best’ language was like asking younger children whether they like mummy or daddy best: it depends. The language that is most used depends on whom they are addressing, when and where, and about what. Their best language similarly varies, depending on degree and amount of exposure in different countries during school term or on holidays. The language that they use spontaneously, or instinctively, can also be any of their three. Counting and math reasoning is sometimes said to decide which is your dominant language, but math is clearly nurtured in a school language, as much as skiing is nurtured in a home language. They dream, swear and insult each other in all three languages, and they embrace and dethrone peer languages among themselves. The new language, like any welcome guest, does not encroach upon what was there before. It builds instead a territory of its own that, through its uniqueness, demarcates the uniqueness of the other languages too. Clyne et al . (2004) in fact report a strengthening effect of the third language of young bilinguals upon their two first languages. Other recent research (Grosjean, 2001) has, additionally, felled the myth that one language must be dominant in the brain, if not in linguistic practice, by proving the commonsense observation that the languages of a bilingual must, naturally, be activated at all times. Grosjean besides showed that bilinguals maintain access to both languages even in monolingual settings, when they rarely mix (for some discussion of language (de)activation in trilinguals, see Hoffmann, 2001). Part and parcel of being bilingual is that one must think in the language that one is speaking, at the same time that one must be able to switch language instantaneously. The children’s management of their languages defines not only a linguistic space for each language, but a comfort zone, by its accumulated use. The following extended extract, involving all five members of the family, illustrates several of the points made in this chapter, from the children’s assignment of a parallel territory to each language, to their comfortable management of several languages in ways that are


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intelligible to all participants. At the time of the recording, the children’s use of English among themselves had been a fact for a few years, something to which the parents still reacted negatively. (10.55) K 14 S 12 M 10 %sit:

[. . .] *KAR: %eng: *DAD: %eng: *SOF: %com:

*KAR: %eng: *DAD: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %com:

*DAD: %eng: %com: *DAD: %eng: *KAR: %eng:

October 2000, at dinner-time. Towards the end of the meal, Karin asks Father her usual dinner-time question, always in the same stereotyped way, that generally triggers a child-like exchange of some sort between father and daughter. och hur var det pa˚ jobbet idag? and how was it at work today? jag lekte kontor. I played office. a˚a˚a˚a˚a˚a˚h!! Sofia groans, showing her dismay at the silly dialogue that she knows is coming. In the following lines, the words in between quotation marks are deliberately mispronounced by the speakers. var det ‘‘loligt’’ a˚ leka kontor? was it fun to play office? ja ‘‘Kalin’’, det var ‘‘ja¨tteloligt’’ a˚ leka kontor. yes Karin, it was great fun to play office. lekte du med dom andra tjurarna? did you play with the other bulls? Karin reproduces the line, the tone and the accent of the narrator in a cartoon film dubbed in Swedish, popular at Christmas time on Swedish television. The film is about a gentle bull that refuses to take part in bullfights. ja ‘‘Kalin’’, under korkeken hela dagen. yes Karin, under the cork-tree the whole day. Father follows up on the cartoon setting. fast med luftkonditionering. though with air-conditioning. va ‘‘bla’’! how nice!


*SOF: %eng: *DAD: %eng: *SOF: %eng: %com: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *DAD: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *DAD: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *SOF: *MIK: *DAD: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *DAD: %eng: *MUM: %eng:

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att ni orkar! how can you go on! vi lekte dator, vi lekte inko¨p B/—/ we played computer, we played purchase B/— / ma´mi, ja´ conseguiste arranjar o computador? mummy, have you managed to fix the computer? Mother has been having trouble with her computer. naõ filha, [es]ta´ ali parado e naõ faz nada. no darling, it’s just lying there doing nothing. que horas saõ? what time is it? sete e vinte. twenty past seven. ah. a`s sete e meia e´ o Popeye. right. Popeye’s on at half-past. ska du titta pa˚ teve nu igen? are you going to watch TV again? vada˚?? jag har inte tittat pa˚ hela dagen. what?? I haven’t watched the whole day. han fa˚r faktiskt, fo¨r mig. det var en hel del la¨xa han hade idag. it’s OK, for my sake. he had quite a lot of homework today. mamma ska¨mmer bort er. mum spoils you all. jag bara gjort hemla¨xa. I did nothing but homework. yeah sure, Michael. and you were not playing football outside when I came home. what?? I was doing homework the whole day, mum made me! a¨r mamma stygg da˚? is mummy that mean? ja, hon a¨r som du! yeah, she’s just like you! ho¨rde du, du B/— / listen, you B/—/ olha la´ o´ B/—/ listen, you B/—/

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%com: Mother and Father speak at the same time, and both stop abruptly. *KAR: coitadinho. e´ so´ trabalho! %eng: the poor thing. it’s all work! *MIK: Karen!! *SOF: no football, no friends. *MIK: ma´mi, a Karin e a Sofia estaõ a chatear!! %eng: mummy, Karin and Sofia are nagging!! %com: Mikael is furious now. *MUM: meninas, caladas! tu, tira mas e´ os cotovelos da mesa. %eng: girls, shush! you, take your elbows off the table instead. %com: Mother addresses first the two girls, and then Mikael. *SOF: did you see Mutiny today? he just took off. man, was I scared. %com: Sofia goes back to a previous topic, discussing the horses that she and Karin rode in their earlier riding lesson. *KAR: yeah, but you didn’t have to canter straight into me. Lobo just freaked out. *MIK: did he kick Mutiny? *KAR: he started bucking. Sarah told me he B/—/ *DAD: kan ni sluta prata engelska! a˚tminstone na¨r vi a¨ter tillsammans! %eng: can you stop speaking English! at least when we’re having dinner! *KAR: ela disse-me que ele ja´ atirou mais um no domingo . they were jumping B/— / %eng: she told me he threw yet another guy on Sunday. they were jumping B/—/ %com: Father’s a¨ter tillsammans and Karin’s ela disse-me are spoken at the same time. *MIK: did he die? *SOF: very funny. can you stop being an idiot? *DAD: men sluta da˚! jag vill inte ha engelska vid matbordet. %eng: will you stop! I don’t want English at the dinner table. *KAR: ja, Micke, sluta prata engelska.


%eng: *MIK: %com: *DAD: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: %com:

*MIK: %eng: *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: *DAD: %eng: %act: *DAD: %eng: %com: *SOF: %eng: *MUM: %eng: %com: *KAR: %eng: *MUM:

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yes Mikael, stop speaking English. shut up!! Mikael yells. Micke! vad a¨r det fo¨r stil? Mikael! what kind of attitude is that? men dom bra˚kar hela tiden! but they’re always annoying me! despacha-te la´, se queres ir ver o Popeye. naõ ligues nenhuma. hurry up, if you want to go watch Popeye. forget about them. the family fall silent. Mikael finishes his meal ahead of everybody else, takes his plate to the kitchen and comes back. posso ir ver televisaõ agora? can I go watch TV now? vai la´, filhinho, vai. yes darling, run along. tack fo¨r maten, fa˚r jag ga˚ fra˚n bordet? may I be excused? ja det fa˚r du, sa˚ slipper du dom elaka systrarna ett tag. kram. yes you may, so you get rid of the ugly sisters a while. give me a hug. Mikael hugs Father and runs upstairs. varfo¨r a¨r ni pa˚ honom hela tiden? a¨r det roligt att se honom ledsen? why are you always at him? is it fun to see him unhappy? a few seconds’ silence. neeeej B/—/ jo! han blir helt ro¨d i ansiktet. nooo B/— / yes! he goes all red in the face. Sofia, que mazinha! Sofia, you’re so mean! Mother chuckles. e´ taõ miu´do! he’s such a baby! pois e´, filhinha. e pensa que quando tu tinhas dez anos naõ tinhas uma chata velha como tu a dar-te cabo do juı´zo.


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%eng:

that’s right, darling. and remember that when you were ten years old there wasn’t any crabby old one like you around to mess about with your patience. *SOF: eu tinha! %eng: there was for me! *MUM: pois tinhas, e agora vingas-te no juńior, e´? %eng: that’s right, and now you take it out on the little one, do you? *SOF: e´ giro! %eng: it’s fun! %act: Sofia nods repeatedly. *MUM: voceˆs saõ duas chatas. %eng: you’re a pain, the two of you. [. . .] %act: Sofia finishes her meal and gets up, chewing hurriedly. *SOF: tack fo¨r maten, fa˚r jag ga˚ fra˚n bordet? %eng: may I be excused? *MUM: tens mesmo que te levantar ainda a mastigar? %eng: do you really need to leave the table still chewing? *SOF: vou la´ para cima. volto a`s oito para acabar o trabalho de casa. %eng: I’m going upstairs. I’ll be back at eight to finish my homework. *MUM: tens muito? %eng: is it a lot you’ve got? *SOF: so´ cieˆncias. o resto ja´ fiz. %eng: only science. I’ve done the rest. *DAD: vad ska du go¨ra? %eng: what are you going to do? *SOF: jag ska titta pa˚ Popeye jag med. %eng: I’m going to watch Popeye too. *KAR: I’m on the computer! %com: Karin addresses Sofia, to book computer time for herself after dinner. %act: Sofia runs upstairs. *SOF: yeah, sure. *KAR: ma˜e, precisas da net? %eng: mum, do you need the internet? *MUM: naõ, filha, o computador esta´ estragado.


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%eng: *KAR: %eng: *DAD: %eng:

no, darling, the computer is broken. ah, esqueci-me. pappa, ska du pa˚ na¨tet? right, I forgot. dad, will you be using the internet? du kan ga˚ nu, men sen beho¨ver jag kolla mejlen. you can have it now, but I’ll need to check my mail later. *KAR: okej. sa¨g bara till. %eng: OK. just let me know. %act: Karin goes upstairs.

If one were to single out one emblematic feature of child bilingualism, it would have to be its evidence that the use of different languages, like different uses of the same language, flows in time and space. The flexibility in the children’s use of linguistic resources appears to apply across the whole of their linguistic repertoire. These children, like presumably all bilinguals, do not seem to view a language as a repository of treasured norms, nor themselves as its curators. Rather, languages are commodities to be explored, put on hold, disposed of or recycled for the purposes of making linguistic sense, or of arousing particular feelings in an interlocutor. The children’s management of their languages also reflects their awareness that different languages come associated with particular ways of experiencing and expressing things, i.e. with particular cultures. The next chapter, closing presentation of data on these children, gives an overview of the children’s assessment of the bond between language and culture.

Chapter 11

Balancing Culture and Identity Growing up bilingual meant, for the children in this study, growing up bicultural too. Along with each language, they learned to make sense of two types of cultural organisation, making themselves at home in each. This chapter describes the ways in which the children learned how to be ‘idiomatic’ in different cultures, that is, to produce and expect behaviour according to social norms that go together with each of their languages, and to switch between these as they do between their languages.

Languages and Cultural Mindsets I take the term ‘culture’ in its generally accepted meaning of social, rather than genetic, transmission of behaviour, i.e. as the ‘man-made part of the environment’, as discussed in Keesing (1981: 68). In this sense of nongenetically transmitted behaviour, human beings are not the only cultural animals, as a wealth of current research amply demonstrates (de Waal, 2001; Hauser & Konishi, 2003; Whiten & Boesch, 2001). In this sense too, a language is part of a cultural heritage: no one learns to use language on their own for the same reasons that no one acquires a culture on their own. A language is also the prime means of keeping a culture alive. Mastering a language does not necessarily entail mastery of the culture associated with it, as demonstrated by everyday circumstances like school learning of foreign languages or uses of a language as a lingua franca. But, as Fishman (1989: 471) remarks, ‘maintenance of a culture is impossible without maintenance of its language’. It follows that doing well in a culture means doing well in the use of its language. Languages come associated with particular ways of experiencing things. It is through language that the same event, say, the birth of a child or the sharing of a meal, can be assigned different meanings that, as part of a common cultural heritage, endure across generations. Because culture involves a shared patrimony, it needs to replicate itself in order to survive, in the sense of cultural replication made popular by Dawkins (1976: 206ff.). The acquisition of cultural tenets proceeds through imitation, as does its transmission: elders imitate what they learned, and youngsters learn from this imitation. Indeed, as Tomasello (1999) argues, the uniqueness of human cultural institutions could not have been achieved without cumulative imitation across generations. The resulting common practice of shared features bonds individuals across time and space. Imitation appears to be a necessary condition not only of learning, but also of adapting, in order to ensure a smooth blending of 278

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one’s individuality into the common cultural pool and vice versa , in order to ensure that the commonality of cultural features becomes apparent despite one’s individuality. Adaptive behaviour is of course a prime survival strategy, itself adapted to achieve comfortable interaction in social settings. Languages are also the means of expressing identities, whether individual or social, taking identity as what makes each individual an individual part of a larger common whole. Identity is constructed from being social individuals, and I therefore take the term ‘identity’ to refer to what is shared, i.e. identical, across individuals, and to one’s selfperception as identifying with a shared set of cultural practices. Because individuals share common practices by learning from one another, the cultural identity of one group tends to diverge from that of another. This is true of different linguistic communities, as it is of families from the same cultural background, and of groups within each family, like those formed by, say, the parents with each of their individual children, or by different sets of siblings. In what follows, the account of some of the features of Portuguese and Swedish culture concerns its practice among the family in this study, taking its Portuguese and Swedish members as representative of their own cultural backgrounds. The views that are reported of the children are gleaned from their own comments on different occasions.

Precursors to Socialisation Human beings learn by imposing order on their experience, by devising models that are able to capture it in a comprehensible manner. It is through the mediation of language that we can model the world around us, drawing on constructs whose nature is clearly cultural (see the second section of Chapter 1 for discussion). This is why we have different theories, popular as well as scientific, about the universe, the weather or about language itself, that can besides be incompatible. This is also why cultures can be as unintelligible as languages, to the uninitiated. As systems of symbolic behaviour, different cultures can in fact be said to constitute different languages with their own grammatical rules, in a broad interpretation of these words. Culture is ‘something in the mind’, in the words of Keesing (1981: 70), an approach to culture that is discussed in similar terms by Gopnik (2001). Culture is closely intertwined with language and with the ways of using it: ‘what speakers know about the world, and draw on to evoke and interpret meanings cannot be sealed off from their grammatical knowledge’ (Keesing 1981: 78). Put another way, as argued by Lucy and Gaskins (2001: 258), there are ‘classification preferences’ across languages, in that ‘no child or adult speaks a generic Language understood by all, but rather one or more

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particular languages shared within a community’. Language sets, as it were, our understanding of the world, thereby providing us with ways of discussing the knowledge gathered from it, building on this knowledge and passing it on to others as part of a common cultural heritage. Cultural events in the life of a child can be said to begin at birth. Babies are not so much born into the (wide) world, as into a very specific culture, including natural, traditional, assisted or trendy practices preceding, surrounding and following the birth itself. Newborn babies find themselves instantly set in cultural routines that, later, will be theirs to make sense of. These include ways of holding and of accepting body contact from the child, of reacting to its cries, gurgles and coos and, of course, ways of speaking and of using one’s voice to it. In some cultures, there is a distinct set of linguistic practices associated with speech addressed to children by other speakers, called motherese. The term was coined by Henry Gleitman (Newport et al ., 1977), and has had an unsteady fate in the literature. On the grounds of a presumably necessary association between the stem of the word ‘motherese’ and the speech that is used by mothers only (see Snow, 1986: 69), terms like ‘child-directed speech’, ‘infant-directed speech’ and ‘baby-talk’ are sometimes used in its stead. Because the assumedly misguiding association between wordstem and speaker is not clear to me (Portuguese is not the speech of the Portuguese only, for example), and because this form of speech is not necessarily directed exclusively to children, nor used around children, I will keep to the original term in the following discussion. Although there is some evidence that infants prefer to listen to speech that is directed to them (Pegg et al ., 1992), there is controversy in the literature about whether speaking to young children in a particular way, or speaking to children at all, is beneficial, detrimental or indifferent to their linguistic development, and I will not detail this controversy here (see Castro, 2002; Goodz, 1994; Huttenlocher et al ., 1991, for overviews). Both sides of the family (and friends) in this study, Portuguese and Swedish, use motherese to address children. This means that the type of speech that adults direct to young children is different from their speech directed to other adults. There appear to be certain sex-related differences in the use of motherese, both in what concerns each parent to the same child (‘motherese’ versus ‘fatherese’, as possible hyponyms of ‘parentese’) and the same parent to children of different sexes (Berghout Austin & Braeger, 1990; Crain-Thoreson et al ., 2001; Davidson & Snow, 1996; Fernald et al ., 1989; Gleason, 1987; see also Barton & Tomasello, 1994). This is true of parents that share the same language and a similar cultural background. Given that the parents in this study belong to different cultural traditions that favour different ways of engaging with children, including by means of speech, generalisations about motherese modes in this particular family would likely be speculative. Motherese


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does not seem to be a language across languages, as it were. Although Ferguson (1964) reports common features of parental speech across a number of languages, Fernald et al . (1989) showed that findings about motherese in one culture are not necessarily generalisable to another. In the context of the present study, it would be difficult to establish whether particular motherese practices, qualitative or quantitative, result from the sex of the parent or from their cultural background / or, of course, from their own personality. In the remainder of this section, I give a broad qualitative report on Portuguese uses of motherese, with comments on how these appear to have shaped the children’s own use of it. The following is a (very reduced) sample of motherese features taken from the mother’s speech, which illustrates its most consistent features. Examples (11.1) /(11.6) concern interaction with Karin during her first year. The situation of the exchange and target forms in the %mod line are given where relevant only. In these examples, the mother uses the high range of her register, unless otherwise noted. (11.1) *MUM: ‘‘ta´ mudeˆ’’ no dedo? voceˆ ‘‘num’’ sabe ‘‘sussar’’? %gls: esta´ a morder no dedo? voceˆ naõ sabe chuchar? %eng: are you biting your finger? don’t you know how to suck? %pho: gta mugde nu gdedu # v&ge łu˜ gab ugaR %mod: (S)ta () muRgdeR nu gdedu # v&gse n~w ˜ gsab(‹) SugSaR %int: FH/RF in both tone groups. %com: the same intonation pattern is repeated in a sing-song delivery that emphasises the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. (11.2) %sit:

trying to elicit vocal imitation from Karin, who remains silent. *MUM: ‘‘ataõ filo´ta?’’ %gls: entaõ filhota? %eng: well then darling? %pho: gt~w ˜ figl&t %mod: e˜gt~w ˜ fig·&t %int: HH/HR.

(11.3) *MUM: %gls: %eng: %pho: %mod:

‘‘que´ binca´, que´?’’ quer brincar, quer? you want to play, do you? ko bı˜gka # ko koR bRı˜gkaR # koR


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%int:

(11.4) *MUM: %gls: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int: %com:

1tg, HH/LR; 2tg, LR. ‘‘mina quida. ’’ minha querida. my darling. gmin gkid gmił gkRid FH/HF. the intonation pattern of this phrase varies, including different types of falls and rises.

(11.5) %sit:

Karin has toppled a potted plant all over herself. *MUM: seu be´be´zaõ malandraõ! %eng: you naughty little big one! %pho: sew bobogz~w ˜ ml~gdR~w ˜ %int: FH/eLF. %com: very low register.

(11.6) *MUM: %eng: %pho: %mod: %int:

o´ coisinha fofinha! you sweet little thing! g& kojgił fogfił g& kojgził fogfił FH in steps/LF

Features of Portuguese motherese illustrated here include, for example, free variation between dental and palatal sonorants [l/·] and [n/ł] as in (11.2) and (11.4), and the use of tag questions, particularly constant positive polarity tags as in (11.3), whose syntactical and intonational make-up are associated with markedly affective overtones (see Cruz-Ferreira, 1981). There is also extensive use of diminutives, with forms in -ote/-ota , or in -inho/-inha , as in (11.2) and (11.6), respectively, as well as of augmentatives, with forms in -aõ, as in (11.5). Grammatical features of motherese largely reflect those of child language or, rather, those features that are expected in child language at different developmental stages. In the data above, they mostly concern typical omissions and replacements that occur in the children’s own speech, e.g. the absence of syllabic codas as in (11.3), consonant cluster reduction as in (11.3) or (11.4), and sibilants rendered as [] across the board, as in (11.1). Different aspects of uses of motherese in European Portuguese are


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discussed in Faria and Ramos Pereira (1995), Frota and Viga´rio (1995), Ramos Pereira (1992), Rebelo and Diniz (1998), and Viga´rio and Frota (1992). Noteworthy in the present data is that omission and substitution affect segmental material only, especially consonants. Motherese shows no disruption of intonation contours, although their pitch range and register may be motherese-specific. Preservation of prosodic contours to the detriment of segmental material is also found in the speech of the children in this study, as discussed in the second section of Chapter 6. The same is true of reduplicated intonation patterns, discussed for these children in ‘Practising the components’ in Chapter 6. Although the mother’s use of motherese often has an overall raised pitch, her tone of voice spreads through her full register, namely, to distinguish between speech acts. For example, she uses top high pitch as an attention-caller and bottom low pitch for reprimands, as in (11.5). Alternating uses of low and high pitch, together with features of voice quality like breathiness or whispering are also strategies to maintain the children’s interest in an exchange. The children respond particularly well to strongly rhythmical utterances reproducing features of music and song, especially involving rhyme, as in (11.1) and (11.6), which often make them giggle. These and other prosodic characteristics of motherese have been argued to be universal (Fernald, 1993; Frota & Viga´rio, 1995). Infants have been shown to be particularly responsive to prosodic features of speech (Fernald (1993), see also discussion in Chapter 6), including before birth (Lecanuet, 1998). Other features of motherese support the central role of prosody in capturing and retaining the child’s attention at the earliest stages of parent/child interaction and, later, in inviting the child’s active participation in it. There is a predominance of questions and commands, utterance types that require active involvement of the listener in the exchange. There is also profuse repetition that mirrors the routines involved in the daily care of young children or in the children’s own activities, and which has been described as a central feature of pleasurable linguistic interaction (Tannen, 1989). Repetitiveness concerns not only instances like rhymes and reduplication, but also the generalised use of what I would call ‘prompting templates’, whose function is to elicit words or behaviour. Wray (2001) noted that a considerable proportion of everyday language is formulaic, a feature that applies well to parent/child interactions in the family in this study. Examples of common formulaic prompting templates in the data are imperatives like Olha! ‘Look!’, often with several reduplications, and questions like O que e´ isto? ‘What’s this?’. On the discoursal level, uses of motherese appear to serve the purpose of establishing connections between single prompting templates that are relevant for the understanding of how events, or words, hang together. In the following


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example, Mikael is being dressed for the daily event of collecting his sisters from school. The mother uses the template diga la´ (‘say’) to elicit renderings of single words, and uses entaõ (lit. ‘then’, best rendered here as ‘now’) to establish the causality between their meanings, going out and greeting people outside the home: (11.7)

M 1;0 *MUM: %eng: *MIK: %eng: %pho: %mod: %com: *MUM: %eng: [. . .] *MIK: %eng: %pho: *MUM: %eng:

pronto! esta´ vestido para ir a` rua. there! all ready to go out. ir a` rua. out. i·agu‹ iRag‰u ir a` rua translates literally as ‘go to the street’. ir a` rua, isso! diga la´, rua. out, that’s right! say out. mama˜ rua. mummy out. mgm~ g‰u rua. entaõ diga la´, ola´! out. now say, hello!

Motherese is not of course the only kind of speech addressed to children. It is instead part of a broader behavioural pattern, in that when it is used, it hardly ever occurs on its own. It involves a lot of tickling, touching, giggling, particularly with infants, which reinforces its association with pleasurable interaction. The concerted effect of its use, not least the sheer quantity of verbal interaction with the children from the very beginning, is conducive to engaging them in social interaction, including by means of language. Motherese does collapse characteristics of infantile speech and of playful ‘verbal grooming’, as it were, all in one. Whether the grooming in fact results in groomed child speech, or whether it is a simple and inconsequential parental compulsion remains, as said, moot. Whichever the case may be, the uses and purposes of motherese appear to be clear to the children, as do its linguistic features: (11.8) K 1;10 %sit: a few days after Sofia’s birth, touching Sofia’s face. *KAR: cuidado, cuidado! %eng: gently, gently!


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%pho: igdadu # igdadu %mod: kujgdadu %int: the same HL/descending minor third on both tone groups. %com: Karin uses her highest register. (11.9) K 2;8 %sit: *KAR: %eng: %pho: %int: %act: %com:

Sofia (0;10) is crying desperately, Karin tries to make her stop. sa˚! so! offf dragged HF, very loud. Karin tenses her neck and juts her chin out towards Sofia. Karin uses extreme lip rounding, and the lowest range of her register. She appears to try to make herself heard above her sister’s wails.

(11.10) S 2;3 %sit:

Mikael newborn, Sofia strokes his head carefully with one finger. *SOF: yyy. %pho: gtfigtfigtfigtfigtfi %int: HL on each syllable. %com: Sofia uses a tiny voice, so high-pitched that is sometimes loses voicing.

In (11.8) /(11.10), the striking features in the two girls’ speech lie in their use of prosody, showing understanding that motherese involves specific uses of pitch. The meaning of Sofia’s utterance in (11.10) besides lies in its prosodic shape only, in that she uses a filler segmental carrier. These examples also show understanding that motherese draws on extreme characteristics of speech, involving an exaggeration of normal phonation and articulation. There is use of top-high register in (11.8) and (11.10), of bottom-low register in (11.9), and extreme, sustained lip rounding in (11.9). Combined low pitch and high amplitude in (11.9), versus high pitch and low amplitude in (11.10) appears to be assisted by the choice of segmental carriers, in the use of a low-pitched and relatively more sonorous vowel in (11.9) versus a high-pitched and less sonorous vowel in (11.10). For discussion of vowel sonority, see Price (1980) and Selkirk (1984). Other examples of the children’s use of motherese are


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(10.11) and (10.12), both using high register as well as a very soft delivery. Dunn and Kendrick (1982) found that contexts of use illustrated in these examples, especially involving rebuke and play, are particularly conducive to adjustments in child speech directed to younger siblings. All three children continue to make use of motherese in different situations and for different purposes, as do their parents, well into the children’s teens. Most of these reflect standard associations of its use with pleasurable experiences or with attempts at nurturing comfort. This latter use in fact lies at the core of Falk’s (2004) argument that offers motherese as a likely precursor to human language itself. Falk suggests that imparting reassurance through vocal means, specifically through the carrying power of prosodic modulation, became instrumental in offsetting physical distance separating mother and young, well known to cause distress among infant primates, thus allowing mothers to forage when, for evolutionary reasons, their young ceased to be able to cling to them. The children in this study use features of motherese with younger children, with baby and adult animals (cp. similar findings in Mitchell, 2001), with insects and flowers, whether in physical interaction with them or commenting on them. They also use motherese-like speech among themselves, with their parents and with the family’s pets, for example to express sympathy for some ailment, showing that the role of motherese in highlighting the speaker’s empathy with the listener is well established in their repertoire. Incidentally, it is likely that uses of motherese share a number of linguistic and situational features with uses of language in romantic relationships, although I know of no comparative research on this. The recognition of the function of motherese-like speech as a reliable attention-getter appears to endure. The following example illustrates this function in a role reversal, this time from a child to a parent: (11.11) K 2;1 %sit:

*KAR: %eng: %pho: %int: %com:

Mother is playing on the floor with Sofia (0;3). Karin lies down beside the baby, and starts imitating Sofia’s body movements, looking at Mother. ‘‘Da`di’’, mais! ‘‘Da`di’’, more! dagdi # maj same HF in both tone groups. Karin speaks in a tiny voice, and she uses a dragged intonation.

Example (11.11) shows a feature of Karin’s speech that appeared shortly after Sofia’s birth. Karin was by then well beyond the two-word


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stage, and beginning to tackle inflectional morphology, when her speech began showing signs of situation-bound use that was clearly demarcated. Alone with her parents or other people, her speech was as usual. Whenever Sofia was around, she switched to regressive forms of speech, whether grammatically or lexically. Karin’s utterance in (11.11) exemplifies several obsolete features of her own speech. It has one single word per tone group, both with falling tones; she uses the postvocalic [] that had already been replaced by the target [S] in the word mais ‘more’, she uses this word with very vague reference, and she reverts to her earlier pronunciation of her own name, [dagdi], which she otherwise pronounced [gkain]. It should be noted that this situation-bound regression in speech forms is a feature of Karin’s data only, for the two likely reasons that she was an only child for almost two years, and that Sofia’s speech was nowhere as developed at the time of Mikael’s birth as Karin’s was when Sofia was born. Utterances such as (11.11) show adequate pragmatic use of a register, including prosodic, in order to obtain a desired effect. Karin had by then had plenty of time to come to the realisation that the way one speaks is an important factor in the degree of attention that one gets. She put this awareness to good use, in offsetting the perceived threat to her affective territory constituted by the birth of a sibling whose helplessness suddenly demands short of full-time parental attention. Utterances such as these also show that imitation is not unidirectional, in the sense that it is bound to operate upwards, on some perceived hierarchy defined by age or status. It operates across the board instead. Just like parents may imitate children, for different purposes and with differing degrees of awareness, older children imitate younger siblings, or themselves: examples like (11.11) show that Karin clearly remembers what she used to sound like before. The same attention-getting goal through the same uses of language is sought still today: (11.12) K 17 %sit: *KAR: %pho: %mod: %eng: %int: %com:

curling up to Mother. ‘‘que´’’ mimo! kogmifmu gkoRu gmimu want cuddles! HH/dragged HF. Karin speaks in a tiny and very high pitched voice.

In other cases, the children use motherese to mock each other, particularly when they want to make it very clear to the sibling in question their opinion about the child-like features of his or her

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behaviour. In fact, the children make extensive use of this strategy among themselves in these circumstances, having discovered its infallible effect in eliciting ferocious rage from their siblings. Mikael’s lines in example (10.52) are one instance of this use. It is likely that child taunts in general show suprasegmental similarity with uses of motherese although, again, I know of no comparative research on this issue. These later uses of motherese involve dissociation of linguistic uses from their standard meanings, showing awareness that linguistic uses can be so dissociated in a way that remains meaningful, though differently, and also awareness of established social hierarchies that can be so disrupted. As a set of linguistic practices dedicated to specific situations and interlocutors, motherese qualifies as a linguistic register. The typical uses of it in (early) parent-to-child interaction and the metaphorical uses that the children later make of it show its importance as a tool in establishing different kinds of social connection and of assigning different cultural roles to both user and receiver. Motherese is a way of identifying with interlocutors, by replicating characteristics of a type of speech that is deemed suitable to their condition, linguistic or otherwise. It is not exclusively directed to children, nor necessarily very young children, but it involves ‘mothering’ the interlocutor, which pleads for the suitability of ‘motherese’ as a label for it. Another example of its domain of use is given by Masataka (2002), who reports uses of motherese addressed to elderly people. In the children’s later uses, it also emerges as a way of identifying the interlocutor with those to whom this speech is usually addressed, and therefore as an eligible receiver. In all cases, it appears to constitute a powerful appeal to engagement with the user. As in all instances of cultural practices, the meaning is not so much in the physical characteristics of, in this case, a form of speech, but in the use that those who are initiated in these practices make of it.

Cultural Idiomacy As noted above, the representations of similar events or similar behaviours are different across different cultures. Children in general appear to be quite sensitive to behavioural signals around them, so much so that they will deliberately use all the wrong ones to throw tantrums and generally challenge established authority. The children in this study show a similar sensitivity, including to explicit comments from peers or elders concerning what is behaviourally allowed in each culture. Cultural behaviour, however, is seldom explicitly identified and described to children, particularly very young children. That is, cultural traits are passed on by practice rather than overt teaching.


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Unravelling cultural roles Observation appears indeed to be the prime strategy used by the children to comply with requirements concerning behaviour. One example of the children’s overt statement of their awareness of this strategy is given in (9.13). Observation is also, incidentally, an invaluable ally to call their parents to task whenever the parents’ behaviour falls short of their own behavioural decrees. Imitation then follows, by the children’s adoption of favoured role-models, with parallel distancing from those that are less appealing to their own personalities. In the management of family relationships, parents and relatives naturally replicated patterns of their own cultural backgrounds. Particularly in the case of the parents, these drew on their own childhood experiences, that include, for both parents, interaction with siblings of the opposite sex. In some cases, the expected follow-up from the children failed to materialise. One example concerns the parents’ choice of toys for the children. Whereas cars and (male) action figures predictably delighted Mikael, none of the girls ever engaged with dolls. Their mother certainly did as a child, but her attempts at in turn providing each of the girls with the same pleasure were met with indifference. However, all three children clearly understood that a doll is a toy ‘for girls’. Karin and Sofia took particular pleasure in taunting Mikael about his action figures, mocking him for ‘playing with dolls’. Mikael refused to accept the label ‘doll’ for his toys, naming his action figures by proper name or simply referring to them by means of general labels like ‘warrior’ or ‘policeman’. He would, in turn, taunt his sisters for not being real girls because they did not know how to play with dolls. In these and other cultural patterns that the children progressively made theirs, sex-related differences were one issue that took centre-stage. Another was the issue of age. From their early environment, the children had it as clear, for example, that dads are the ones who are at home in the evenings and on weekends whereas mums stay at home, as they had it that adults are the ones who stay up late to watch TV whereas children go to bed early. The children’s role-playing activities reproduced the patterns absorbed at home and, later, at school, often in stylised versions that preserve the essentials of their observations and conclusions. Besides giving a reliable source of information about the children’s own gathered information, role-playing also allowed them to practice interesting roles in a nonthreatening manner. Just like they played parents, teachers and shop assistants regardless of their own age, they could play males and females regardless of their own sex, with no one taunting no one. Sometimes, they felt the need to confirm whether and why particular roles are taken on by particular people, as in these examples from Karin:


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(11.13) K 4;0 %sit:

discussing Mother’s teaching at the Swedish School. *KAR: porque e´ que os papa´s naõ saõ professores? %eng: why aren’t daddies teachers?

(11.14) K 4;1 *KAR: ma´mi, tu e´s mama˜ porque tu e´s portuguesa? %eng: mummy, are you a mummy because you’re Portuguese? (11.15)

K 4;1 *KAR: %eng:

quando eu for grande eu vou ficar mama˜? when I’m big will I grow to be mummy?

At this age, Karin had already had plenty of evidence that there are male teachers, or mums and dads of different nationalities, and that girls become like mums when they grow up. Her questions may therefore appear redundant, or even silly. However, as with the acquisition of language itself, adult observers cannot presume to assess child logic with adult-geared gauges. Perhaps the ‘evidence’ that I refer to here is no evidence for what Karin is trying to find out, perhaps it is insufficient evidence, or contradictory, in her view. Or perhaps she is basing her questions on some other evidence. The point is that the children would not ask if they were not looking for answers. Whatever their grounds are, the reasoning that shows through interrogations of this kind indicates attempts at finding a model that satisfies the children’s observations, by isolating the factors, like nationality or sex, that may be responsible for particular behaviours, and probing for which combinations of factors produce which roles. The issue of available models in bilingual families is not without its setbacks. I should mention one quite unexpected side effect of the one parent/one language policy that, I suspect, must recur in other bilingual families living in countries whose language(s) do not support the two home languages but that, to my knowledge, has not been addressed in the literature. The parents’ respective cultural traits are apparent, of course, in their linguistic behaviour too. Because the father is the only parent speaking Swedish to the children, and similarly for the mother speaking Portuguese, the children naturally start off by adopting the parent’s linguistic habits in each language, for example accent and choice of vocabulary. The snag is that the parents belong to different sexes, and therefore do not speak sex-neutral Swedish and Portuguese. They speak male and female varieties of their languages, respectively. The effects of


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this input on the children of the opposite sex went unnoticed in the family, until one close Portuguese friend that the family was visiting on their yearly trip to Europe, Ze´ Manel, pointed out that Mikael, then aged just before 3, spoke ‘like a sissy’. Like his sisters, Mikael did use many diminutives, hedged statements and rising tones typical of his mother’s speech. He was also just on the transition to sorting out Portuguese grammatical gender, but still used a few feminine adjectival forms to refer to himself (cp. examples (7.50), (7.51) and their discussion in Chapter 7). Karin and Sofia, on the other hand, made liberal use of expletives and assertive intonation patterns in their Swedish. Until this episode, neither parent had noticed their own linguistic habits in their children’s speech: the children were speaking the languages, and that was what mattered. When queried, afterwards, other Portuguese speakers agreed that Mikael’s speech was ‘girlish’. Their other comments were to the effect that the way he used the language was not wholly unsuitable to a young child of either sex and that he would ‘get over it’ in time, or that they thought that the parents must be aware of Mikael’s way of expressing himself in Portuguese and so the matter was no one else’s business. Swedish speakers were more sceptical, finding the girls’ speech naturally like their father’s, but they had no comments about its inappropriateness in females. Some food for thought from this episode is that either the mother’s Portuguese is more female than the father’s Swedish is male, or that it is more serious for a male to sound like a female in Portugal than for a female to sound like a male in Sweden, or that Swedish is generally a more sex-neutral language than Portuguese. These are matters that may deserve investigation in their own right, given the cultural implications that they certainly carry. Because the issue of Mikael’s speech could not, naturally, be solved by either parent, Ze´ Manel, who is himself the father of two boys (teenagers at the time), immediately proceeded to repair the damage with the help of his sons. In this and subsequent contacts with this family, Mikael was not allowed to stay ‘with the womenfolk’, so that he could be nurtured in decent male Portuguese instead. Biculturalism and cultural modes Culture, as we saw, forms a system of shared meanings that results from common practices. Originally, these practices are an effect of appropriate conduct (you should act as you are required to), and later become the cause of identity (you are what you act like). The practice of differential behaviour in the children’s different cultural environments, and the consistency of these in each, reinforce the sense of commonality that is the hallmark of a cultural heritage. That is, a culture is identified by its signals: the Swedes behave in one way, the Portuguese in another.


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Speakers of each of the languages are accordingly identified as sharing the cultural background that the children progressively establish as going with each. Conversely, on the basis of single observations, the behaviour of single speakers risks being generalised as cultural behaviour, a thought process that the children appear to share with the generality of their fellow human beings. One case in point concerns the children’s own father, as in the following example. (11.16) S 5;0 %sit:

Father comes into the house from the garden. Karin and Sofia watch him dragging his grass-filled shoes on his feet as if they were slippers. Karin asks Mother why he does so. *SOF: ele e´ sueco, Karin, os suecos fazem assim. %eng: he’s Swedish, Karin, the Swedes do like this. %com: Sofia’s utterance is whispered.

Several idiosyncrasies in the father’s behaviour were explained away among the children in similar ways that appeared to satisfy them. The reason why the father’s behaviour was the one that aroused the children’s curiosity seems clear. Interacting with their mother in the household by default, and speaking her language among themselves for the same reason, Portuguese culture at first became their default cultural norm too. Any deviation from it and from regular patterns in their father’s behaviour that the children could observe from the restricted time he spent at home must therefore be culture-bound. The conclusion is not without logic, although resting on false premises that lack fair information. The children’s reasoning, though flawed, gives some insight into their strategies for making sense of the unexpected. Episodes such as this also show that the realisation that the difference between the two cultures is just that, a difference, took some time to fall into place. Children, monolingual and bilingual alike, may and do receive different signals from different people about the same behaviour. One parent may frown at the game of wild chase in the newly dusted livingroom that one grandparent finds hilarious. The episode concerning Mikael’s speech recounted at the end of the previous section is another example. Children, monolingual and bilingual alike, learn to deal with these signals according to who sanctions them in these different ways. Just like the children in this study realise that, say, lying and offering to share a toy or a bag of sweets constitute disapproved and approved behaviour, respectively, by the whole extended family, they realise that there are different ways to, say, participate in a conversation, that are naturally associated with each of their two languages. Polite Swedish


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interlocutors make use of silence in conversations, as a way of expressing communion with the speaker’s message. In terms of communicative competence, silence is not the absence of speech, it is the presence of a physical event that has linguistic relevance in the appropriate situation. To fall silent relevantly is thus part of a Swedish identity (for an analysis of silence as a factor of identity formation, see Liu, 2002). Polite Portuguese interlocutors must interrupt the speaker with comments and queries about the topic of the conversation, in order to convey interest and engagement in the message. Interlocutor silence is as rude in a Portuguese conversation, signalling indifference, as interruptions are in a Swedish one, signalling impertinence. The children showed no difficulty in integrating different codes of conduct such as these into their social behaviour, something that their parents had noticeable trouble accommodating to in the culture that was foreign to them. Like in the use of language, perhaps one can also behave ‘with a foreign accent’. Idiomatic body language completes the children’s cultural nativeness. What may, phonetically, sound like the same utterance acquires quite different meanings for interlocutors who speak different languages, if that utterance co-occurs with culture-specific body language. For example, Karin’s utterance ‘m’ [m], spoken on a high-rise, was discussed in example (7.9) as a likely instance of a wh-question, associated with pointing and otherwise interrogative-bound body language. At the same age (1;2), she had acquired the Swedish use of [m], also with a high-rising tone, but accompanied by a brief nod, to signal assent. One later instance of her use of this Swedish discourse marker is given in (5.32). Luthy (1983) provides an engaging account of the cultural and language-bound nature of nonlexical utterances of this kind, with particular emphasis on the intonation patterns associated with them. Body language, in turn, does not always find equivalent interpretation across cultures. The same gesture, or posture, may be allowed, forbidden or rude depending on cultural sanction. Public stretching and yawning, for example at the dinner table after a meal, goes unnoticed in Sweden as part of a routine that acknowledges satisfaction, but can be considered quite vulgar in Portugal. The use of profuse and wide hand and body movements while speaking is unremarkable among the Portuguese, but comes across as embarrassing flourish for Swedish interlocutors. These different cultural traits fell naturally in place in the children’s overall behaviour from the beginning of their social lives. For each parent, the strangeness of cultural habits such as these in their first encounters with them naturally waned, in time, not least because they became an inherent part of the children’s cultural practices. It is in fact not more strange to see one’s own children behaving in a foreign manner than to hear them speak a foreign language. In addition, the family adopted as family practices the

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celebration of different festivities that belong in each of the parent’s cultures, like the Swedish Midsommar ‘midsummer’ and the Portuguese Santos Populares ‘popular saints’, both pagan festivities (despite the name of the Portuguese one) associated with eating special kinds of food, partying and dancing, as well as different ways of celebrating the same festivity, e.g. Christmas. Being bicultural thus means that one must be able to switch between cultures, as one does between languages. This also means that both cultures must be activated at all times. The section on ‘Language dominance?’ in Chapter 10 discussed Grosjean’s (2001) insight that bilinguals operate in different language modes, depending on interlocutor and situation. Judging from these children’s data, the same can be said to hold for the cultures of bilinguals. The children’s differential conduct towards other speakers of each of their languages in fact shows that they operate with distinct cultural modes. Like their languages, these can also be called to the foreground or screened off to the background of an exchange, whenever communicative appropriateness so requires. The children’s fluent navigation of their cultures shows in their dismissive description of their own behavioural about-faces as ‘part of using each language properly’. This appropriateness finds acknowledgement as representative of each cultural community by other members of it. Being the first bilingually raised children in both extended families, Swedish and Portuguese relatives alike find similarities and differences in the children’s behaviour, compared to their own expected cultural standards. Their views are expressed, including to the children, in factual comments like ‘you’re more Portuguese than your siblings’ (to Sofia from her Portuguese great-aunt) or ‘you’re being so Swedish it’s unbelievable’ (to Karin from one of her Swedish aunts).

Identity ‘Being Portuguese’ and ‘being Swedish’ is something that the children take as the make-up of their identity. They find their biculturalism comfortable, for practical reasons like the ability that it affords them to blend in inconspicuously during visits to each of their countries, and for the feeling of belonging there, as members of a larger community that acknowledges them as such. It is this sense of belonging that, in all likelihood, explains the children’s assertion of where ‘home’ is. Home is in Sweden and Portugal, despite the short overall length of their stays in the two countries throughout their lives. Returning to a common setting, or wanting to return to it, appears to be a powerful indicator of integration. One quotation included in McConchie’s (2003: 72) survey of traditional cultural practices puts in a nutshell the one feature that makes a cultural community acknowledge someone as their own: ‘We


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always knew the people were okay because they would come home’. Likewise, the children realise the importance of keeping in touch with the countries that first shaped their cultural background, and with which they identify as insiders. There seems to be no conflict with the fact that the children adopted a third language among themselves. This is a peer language, not one of the root languages through which their socialisation patterns were first nurtured. Using English engages them in a different identity circle, one that is not ‘home’. Identity and cultural camouflage Keesing (1981: 19) establishes two central kinds of ‘psychoattachment systems’, defined as ‘predispositions [. . .] to form social bonds with other individuals in the life cycle’, among human beings and other primates. The ‘primary bond’ is the ‘mother /infant’ bond, whose role in nurturing a first glimpse into the culture where the infant is born was addressed in the second section of this chapter. The second is peer bonding, the ‘capacity of juveniles to form close, symmetrical relations / apparently activated largely through play’. Unlike the mother /infant bond where a hierarchical relationship of dependency is pre-established, peer bonds are, as Keesing notes, symmetrical. For young children, this bond is the first that has them as equals in a relationship with other human beings. In the case of siblings, equal status is particularly true of relationships outside of the family. Siblings do not see themselves as equals, except, perhaps, in their parents’ view (see discussion of this issue in ‘The sibling effect’ in Chapter 3). Among themselves, there is an inherent pecking order imposed by factors like birth order or sex whose effects may disappear, if at all, only in adulthood. This is probably why peer relationships take different forms among siblings and among friends. Forming peer bonds involves a will to blend in. Among siblings, the will may be there, although dampened in various degrees, given that the conditions for bonding are preconstrained by siblinghood itself. Bonding with friends affords an opportunity to shed these constraints. The youngest sibling, for example, can be the oldest child in a group of friends, and thereby experience for the first time, among those friends, privileges that are otherwise granted to first-borns. Blending in is one condition of peer acceptance. The individual must be, or become, like the group. It probably helps that the children are good imitators, of behaviours as well as accents. The other condition is the preservation of one’s identity, which is necessary for healthy functioning of an individual in a group, and which contributes to differentiate particular groups from one another. Each group is ‘special’ because the individuals in it make it so. Peer bonding in fact involves striking a

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delicate balance between the will to blend in and the will to remain oneself. There is an interesting parallel to be drawn here with Obler’s (1989: 152) observation about the conflicting nature of these two wills in foreign-language learners, particularly in what concerns accent: ‘one must be willing to sound like someone from another culture, but one must be willing to give up the protection that being foreign confers, since native speakers may make allowances [. . .] when the speaker is obviously not a native speaker and thus the person is protected from sounding foolish’. This observation echoes the children’s views about excusing their behaviour on the grounds of culture and/or nationality, addressed below (its strategic value may also, incidentally, help explain the endurance of foreign accents in a second language, discussed in the second section of Chapter 9). Establishing a common culture among their friends seems to be not so much a matter of shedding individual traits that might be conspicuous in the group, as of pushing them to the background. The children’s compliance with different identities comes complete with new names: they have three proper names each, one for each language and pronounced accordingly. According to their own reports, they also go by several different nicknames that uniquely identify them within each of their groups. Young children, monolingual and bilingual alike, are of course familiar with different names and forms of address for the same person. They are likely to hear their father, say, addressed and referred to by labels as different as ‘daddy, dad, darling, Robert, Bob, sweetheart, sir, Mr Jones, son, uncle Bob, old chap’, all of which the father acknowledges as legitimate identities that he assumes depending on interlocutor by responding to them as the rightful addressee. In the same way, the same child can, and does, form several peer relationships, each with their own requirements about individual characterisation and contribution. Given that the common culture so established also involves the adoption of new traits, those that characterise the group itself and that therefore must be displayed by each member, these traits must be put on hold when interacting with a different group, much in the same way that applies to a bilingual’s cultural modes, discussed in the ‘Biculturalism and cultural modes’ section in this chapter. The smooth chameleonic-like blending in with the requirements of different environments summarises the ongoing balancing act of languages and cultures that Kanno (2003) suggests as defining the identity of bilingual individuals. Although each of a bilingual’s languages may be a bonding factor with which the children were well acquainted from their earliest social interactions, their peer bonding does not seem to be sought on the basis of their own languages or cultural backgrounds, nor of their bilingualism. It has more to do with features of personality like, for example,


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common interests. The children’s respective circles of friends count both monolingual and multilingual peers, in various language combinations. This is why English became, for this purpose as elsewhere around the world, the lingua franca. A lingua franca comes with no specific cultural traits associated with it, and English thus became associated with peer culture instead. The children’s third language is not the vehicle of a national culture, like Portuguese and Swedish are, but a tool for constructing culture beyond the ones available to them through their home languages. The awareness that this culture depends on its participants in order to endure is what explains Sofia’s discomfiture with her sister’s current use of Swedish to her (see ‘Defining language territories’ in Chapter 10). The appeal inherent in a peer culture that emerged as English-bound is likely to have played a decisive role in the children’s adoption of English among themselves too, as discussed in Chapter 10. Identity and cultural shelter Given the children’s understanding and practice of their ‘national cultures’, it is interesting to note their first reactions to their understanding of the word ‘nation’. They found the notion of ‘independent enclosure’ associated with this word quite baffling, particularly as applied to each of their countries, not because of some form of split allegiance, but because of their dual allegiance. Whereas they had no problem understanding, for example, why each of their parents had to queue (at the time) in the different lines assigned to nationals and foreigners at passport control in each country, they found it beyond their comprehension that they themselves had to present their own passports whenever travelling from Portugal to Sweden or vice versa , on the grounds that they were ‘going home’ in both cases. In contrast, the children found the notion of ‘nationality’ quite transparent and quite handy. They knew that they have double citizenship, and they sometimes varied their acknowledgement of each, or of both, to mark or unmark territory in a convenient way. For example, when in Portugal, Mikael would insist that he was the only Portuguese sibling because he was born there, and was therefore entitled to certain privileges like watching TV instead of helping out with the dishes after dinner. The two girls would claim likewise in Sweden. Another example of a claim involving territorial allegiance is: (11.17) K 2;11 %sit: assisting with the laundry, handing clothes-pegs to her Portuguese grandmother. *KAR: toma la´, portuguesa.


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%eng: *GMP: %eng: *KAR: %eng: %com:

there you are, Portuguese. o´ menina! naõ se fala assim a` vo´vo´! young lady! that’s no way to speak to your granny! Karin e´ sueca pirata! Karin is pirate Swede! the word pirata ‘pirate’ is used by the grandmother as a synonym for ‘naughty’.

In her second line in (11.17), Karin attempts to spare herself a tellingoff by invoking the variable of her Swedish background, with whose traits the grandmother may hopefully be unfamiliar. In another example, a language is associated with a pseudo-cultural trait in order to stand by unacceptable behaviour: (11.18) S 5;0 %sit:

*SOF: %eng: %act: *SOF: %eng: %act: %com:

at dinner time, Sofia is having a bout of bad temper, including deliberate misbehaviour. Father tells her to remove her elbows from the table. nej! jag a¨ter sa˚, pa˚ svenska. jag vill vara svenska! no! I eat like this, in Swedish. I want to be Swedish! Sofia removes her elbows from the table. pa˚ portugisiska a¨ter man sa˚! in Portuguese you eat like this! Sofia replaces her elbows on the table and stares at Father in defiance. elbows on a dinner table are as bad-mannered in Portugal as in Sweden.

These episodes overtly show the children using their national identities as a shield. The use of this strategy is apparently undisturbed by their awareness of the parents’ knowledge of what is or is not acceptable in each culture, as in (11.18). The message appears to be that because of nationality, they cannot be held accountable for any behaviour that may strike other nationals as improper. Covertly, this strategy gives insight into the children’s awareness that different cultures do things in different ways, and that different nationals therefore expect different behaviours. In likely contrast to monolingual and monocultural individuals, who may tend to remain blind to their own practices and therefore take them as indisputable behavioural norms, regular blending into socially appropriate norms of bilingual settings appears to reinforce understanding of the arbitrary nature of these norms. The children appear equally aware that seeking shelter behind cultural quirks is an effective disclaimer. It can sometimes pay off to be an outsider, and


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excuse oneself behind a ‘difference’ that was culturally imposed and cannot therefore be helped. On the reverse of the coin, the children also seem to realise that they can be identified by their nationality and held accountable because of it, in the sense that the behaviour of other Swedes and other Portuguese rubs off on them. One example is the deep humiliation shown by Mikael whenever Portugal was defeated at sporting events, particularly football. He invariably declared that he would refuse to be Portuguese at school for the next few days: he would be only Swedish until his friends finally dropped the matter. Just like the children can switch language to achieve particular purposes, they can do the same with their cultures. The children were later confronted with these episodes, and asked to comment on them. With the practical mind of children, they agreed that there are at least two advantages in being multicultural, both of them of a face-saving kind. One, individual, is that in case of social goofs on their part, there is always the way out of claiming that the goof is not a goof but a sanctioned behaviour in another of their cultures, whose behavioural habits they cannot but follow because they have been raised accordingly. The other, national, is that when the goof concerns their countries, and the children are challenged about it as representatives of each, the disclaimer changes to their lack of accountability as ‘nationals’: they are not true, fully fledged representatives of either country, because of their mixed national background. The children see no fundamental inconsistency in these apparently contradictory claims about the strength of the imprint of their countries upon themselves. Episodes of this kind concern Sweden and Portugal, and their respective nationals. They never concerned Britain, or other Englishspeaking countries, because English is a shared means of communication with no English-bound common cultural heritage attached to it. That is, the children are perceived by their peers as simple users of the English language. This matches the children’s own perception of themselves. Despite their sporadic contact with their two countries throughout their lives, they report that they are, and feel, Portuguese and Swedish, whose cultural traits are the ones that need manipulating in order to blend in and to find shelter behind. The reason must then lie in their association of their root identity with their two home languages, the ones through which they were rocked to sleep, told off for unacceptable behaviour or comforted when distraught. A famous aphorism by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, himself a bilingual who published in both Portuguese and English, aptly characterises the intimate bond between language and identity: ‘A minha lıńgua e´ a minha pa´tria ’, ‘My language is my motherland’. Home, the place where you find familiar things that you helped display in familiar ways, is where your language is, whether you are raised monolingual or multilingual.

Chapter 12

Overview Children learn language(s) because they have to. There is nothing glamorous or remarkable about this, because all children do it in the same way for the same reasons. All that is required for the implementation of language learning is a typical species-specific anatomical and mental make-up coupled with a typical species-specific social environment. Children themselves do not appear to treat language and their own progressive command over it in any special way. Language is young for children, as young as they themselves are. Put another way, a child is ‘a foreigner learning the language’ (Stevenson, 1893: 119). Children accordingly do with language(s) what they do with everything else around them, they approach them with the same open-minded and involved curiosity that a new toy, say, or a new sibling arouses in them. The quest is as much about what language does as about what can be done with it. What becomes apparent from these children’s data is that they take their languages for what they are: tools. They are tools for learning about the world, for communicating and discussing those findings, and for learning about the workings of the tools themselves. None of these purposes makes sense without the others. There is no point in making a finding about the world except to discuss it with someone else, and there is no way one can talk to others about things if there are no things to talk about or the means to talk about them is lacking. Learning to master these tools efficiently, like learning in general, results from the push /pull effect of two factors, namely, abiding by rules and breaking those rules. Learning to use a language adequately is largely learning to conform: either you follow the conventions that were there before you started being able to use that language, or you will not be able to get through to other users of it. One way to find out the rules of the language game is to ask. Human beings are, in Sampson’s (1997: 121) words, ‘creatures who have to discover knowledge rather than inheriting it’. The way to discovery is of course mediated by language. On the other hand, if conventions are not challenged, there is no way to find out whether they are conventions, nor why, if so, they should be followed. That is, it is by breaking rules that rules are discovered. Breaking the rules is what makes the language work for the user, by showing the uses that must be followed and those that must be avoided so that communication can proceed smoothly. The process of rule discovery thus involves probing and testing for feedback that sanctions certain uses and rejects others. It also involves, 300

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where and when relevant, the quest for the reasons that sanction certain uses but not others. This study set out to investigate two research questions, repeated here from the second section of Chapter 2 for ease of reference: (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 following sections discuss answers to these questions in the light of the data presented along the different chapters in this book, together with a summary of findings that may further guide our own learning about language learning.

Appropriating Language: Acquisitional Strategies Probing and testing for meaningful uses of language proceeds through acquisitional strategies that are apparent from the children in this study. Equally apparent from the children’s data is that the same strategies apply in similarly effective ways within one single language as across languages. This observation briefly answers this study’s first research question, whose implications are detailed below. The use of developing language by developing users naturally involves limited resources, which must be adapted to progressively more demanding communicative needs. This means that language use may of course result in unexpected miscommunication. From the very outset of their attempts at communicating, the children engage in systematic exploration of their linguistic resources, and appear to interpret failed results for what they are, as results in their own right. Sheer failure to communicate, including getting a different response from the predicted outcome of a communicative attempt, may in fact afford intriguing feedback not only into what went wrong in the communicative attempt but, thereby, into what it is that makes communication otherwise work. In order to pinpoint the glitch, the children resort to isolating different dimensions of language at different times, so as to probe for their relevance in well formed communicative events. In the process, the children also find that the use of language to probe into itself further shapes and fine-tunes it. The cumulative exploration of what exactly is there to be used, and of how best it can serve specific communicative goals, can be captured as three broad types of acquisitional strategies that operate either singly or simultaneously, as follows.

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Make do with what is available This strategy concerns the well known observation that if you need something, then you will find ways of getting it, and getting at it. The children make exhaustive use of whatever linguistic resources are there for them at any stage in their development, because their goal is to communicate. Lack of resources in the linguistic tool, or lack of proficiency in its use, is no excuse for silence, that is, for not resorting to the tool itself. Rather, if there is in fact a lack, one that adult observers may assume as such, the children do not seem aware of it. The children show their resourcefulness instead: not only do they have resources available to them, they also know where to look for them, whether within one language (Chapters 7, 8) or across their languages (Chapters 5, 10). Soon after birth, voice modulations gain value, and therefore meaning, as much as body and face language do too, for what they are: effective tools at getting things done for the child (Chapters 5, 6). Used together in particular ways, they may signal querying, a form of interaction that is soon found to guarantee adults’ response and, often, extended attention. Querying strategies are of course the quintessential source of information-gathering, among young children as well as adults. The children in this study use them extensively, with the means at their disposal, ranging from querying tones with nonlexical carriers, to the use of one single, allpurpose, target question-form in their languages, through to sophisticated adult-like constructions, whether to enquire about the world, about language itself or about features of each of their languages (Chapters 5, 8, 11). Once the basics of language are mastered, for example a core of prosodic patterns or a core of vocabulary, they can be used for any communicative need, whether on their own or supported where needed by ancillary devices like body language. They can also be combined in different ways that probe for the adequate way of putting them together, one that satisfies both child user and adult listener. Different combinations, and differential results of these combinations provide the children with insight that there are alternative means of expressing themselves. In linguistic practice, this strategy translates in finding ways to mean the most, with limited resources. If the purpose of having language is to communicate, then what matters is to communicate. It matters less to use standard devices of the language in question than to use that particular language, or verbal language altogether. This strategy draws on the basic human instinct of adaptation, which, ultimately, is a condition for survival. To adapt is in fact synonymous with making do with whatever is available around us. Adaptive behaviour accordingly targets what is there, not what may be lacking. If my favourite brand of coffee is unavailable where I now live, chances

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are that I will either query my way to a similarly satisfactory brand of coffee, or perhaps switch to local choices of tea, not that I will abstain or move out of the country for this reason. In either case, I will secure my habitual daily intake of stimulants, which is what I want. By the same token, lack of linguistic resources does not impair, nor inhibit communication altogether, whether these resources are lacking because they have yet to be learned, or because they are for some reason momentarily unavailable. If the right word is not there, it can be replaced by another that approximates its meaning or sound (Chapter 8); if a word does not fit an intended intonational pattern, a filler will do as well (Chapter 6). If you do not yet know how to express yourself in your new language, use any device that you know, or can safely guess, belongs to that language (Chapters 5, 9). In bilingual acquisition, this strategy also involves using the resources of both languages, in cases where useful devices are available in one language but not in another. For example, if one word is found too difficult to pronounce in one language, the children use an equivalent from the other language (Chapter 2). The same strategy is used to signal a particular language, to talk about language (Chapter 5), or to communicate efficiently in a fluently vague manner, within and across known as well as new languages (Chapters 5, 8, 9). As far as can be gathered from these children’s data, the adaptive strategy emerges as a kind of super-strategy, facilitating language acquisition through the same core role that it plays in the appropriation of any other essentials to human endeavour. Interestingly, this is also the strategy that appears to be largely unexplored, if not altogether lacking, among second-language school teaching and learning practices, in all likelihood due to methodological focus on rote learning of language templates and associated focus away from experimenting with the available resources of a new linguistic tool at each stage in its development (Chapter 9). It is adaptation that pinpoints intriguing new possibilities worth exploring, and that stands for the continued use of language as instrument of that exploration, contemplated in two additional strategies apparent from these children’s data. One thing at a time The children’s approach to language is systematic. Single features of language, pertaining to different analytical levels like phonology or lexicon, take turns in becoming the object of intensive and extensive practice and/or querying. The exploration of prosody comes first, for both of the children’s primary languages (Chapter 5). Once a reasonable grip is attained on core prosodic features of each language, the remainder of each language begins to fall naturally into place (Chapter 6). The babbling of particular dimensions of prosody, like pitch or amplitude

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(Chapter 6), is similar to the morphological practice of the single contrasts of verbal present versus past tense, or masculine versus feminine gender (Chapter 7), and similar to the repeated questioning of what may justify the use of the same word for what clearly are different referents (Chapter 8). The same is true of the children’s approach to features of their different languages, whether in attempts to organise people and linguistic uses according to language (Chapter 5), or in their investigation of what makes a language unique (Chapters 9, 10). In all cases, the children isolate one intriguing feature, and dedicate undivided attention to it for longer or shorter periods of time, until they satisfy themselves that they have found the key to its appropriate use. The feature thus acquired is now ready to be used, in turn, to approach other features of language. Not only that, further exploration of that particular feature can be put on hold while others are being explored through it. The variables with which the child progressively becomes comfortable, for example, a straightforward CV syllable shape, must be kept constant so that full-time attention can now shift to the practice of different uses of pitch. The reduplicated babbling stage is characterised by a very limited segmental repertoire and phonotactics in order to assist the exuberance of intonational variation that also characterises this stage (Chapter 6). Having sorted out the characteristic prosodic features of each of their first languages, the fillers in the children’s first utterances in each language are replaced with words and word sequences of each language (Chapter 5). Having sorted out suprasegmental well-formedness within one language, the children proceed to fitting previously filled-in tone groups with first, word sequences, and later, words sequences that are themselves fitted with grammatical markers like gender or tense (Chapters 6, 7). Or, emerging interest in the sound of languages for its own sake, through the children’s recitation of memorised rhymes or through play with, and manipulation of, linguistic sound (Chapter 9) results in word meanings taking second stage and the occurrence of related slips in their speech (Chapter 8). To learn how to use something, use it The purpose of any tool is in its use. Children know that the way to hone their skills, whether at playing new games, learning to walk or learning to speak, is through consistent and engaged practice. Using also means probing, trying out and manipulating. Children will attempt to run from the first moment they find themselves able to stand upright unaided. Likewise, children will attempt to produce several words together from the day they find out that producing words gets things done for them. In the one case, they are likely to fall down at once, in the other they are likely to produce apparently unintelligible fillers in their

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utterances (Chapter 6). The point is that the way to find out how a new ability can be put to good use, and where its limits may lie, is to experiment with it. Children cannot otherwise know where those limits are, nor indeed whether there are limits at all. This strategy explains the obdurate monotony of much child speech, particularly early speech, where endless repetition of nearly identical utterances, and sometimes deliberately wrong utterances, serves the purposes of practising particular linguistic features under scrutiny, whether prosodic fluency, grammatical agreement or syntactic constituency (Chapters 6, 7, 8). The minimal variations apparent in these utterances further check for feedback from (often unwilling!) listeners, on the children’s realisation that no feedback about language uses and language play signals acceptability. The same strategy is used in the children’s eager engagement in endless multilingual language games, which elicit or confirm uses in different languages (Chapter 5). Many child mixes can also be explained through this strategy. The parallel probing of different languages results from another effect of the strategy, namely, overextension / or linguistic generalisation. Generalisation groups distinct observations into the same (presumed) category, and probes for proper matches within the category so hypothesised. Generalisation from particular observations, in language as elsewhere, is the single most useful process presiding over the organisation of human cognition. In these children’s data, instances of overextension accordingly range from intonational uses (Chapter 6), through to morphological, syntactic and lexical features of one language (Chapters 7, 8). These features are duly probed for meaningfulness across the children’s languages too. For example, the use of similar segmental material with different suprasegmental treatment signals different languages, or the extension of a safely acquired accent in one language to words of another language serves to mark those words as belonging to that language (Chapters 2, 5). If one device is found useful in one language, perhaps its use can be generalised to another language in the same way. There is only one way to find out, and that is to try. The same strategy stands for the probing, or deliberate misuse, of associations between particular languages with particular social and cultural practices (Chapters 10, 11). The three strategies show how the children in this study become fluent language users. They may apply differently, to different objects of investigation, at different stages for each particular child, but they emerge as robust acquisitional strategies for all three children across the board. The strategies apply to monolingual as well as multilingual child approaches to language use, supporting the view that language acquisition proceeds in similar ways for monolingual and multilingual children. The children use them for exploration of language-specific devices of Portuguese, as detailed in the discussion of data in Part 2 of this book,

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and for demarcation of which devices go with which language, including in early attempts at making it clear for the listener which of the languages they are using (Chapter 5). Replacive strategies, for example, that are effective in one language (Chapter 8) show the monolingual use of the same ‘Buffet Effect’ that was discussed in connection with bilingual uses of language among the children (Chapter 2). The import and export of ways of expressing oneself, or of topics for discussion, from and to the school and the home environments where they originally belong (Chapter 9) are no different from bilingual mixes, linguistic or cultural, that equally import and export features that originally belong in one language or culture to another (Chapters 2, 10, 11). In sum, the strategies explain how the children tackle monolingual fluency in each of their three languages, as well as how they make use of their trilingualism in order to communicate efficiently with other users of their languages. The conclusion must then be that the number of languages that children engage with makes no difference to the acquisitional process itself. The difference between monolingual and multilingual acquisition lies not in acquisitional strategies that children devise, but in the use of one language versus more than one to investigate and ultimately achieve linguistic competence.

The Role of Acquisitional Strategies in Child Development The acquisitional strategies apparent from the present data give interesting insight into the children’s organisation and planning of their learning tasks, and into how awareness of ‘things that matter’ in language has its effects on children. Their combined outcomes explain commonsense observations, gleaned from informal parental reports and published research alike, about typical features of child speech like extensive repetition, overextension or the reduced segmental variety of reduplicated babbling, and support a view of language acquisition as adaptive, systematic and grounded in everyday practice. The strategies further explain why language acquisition is a back-and-forth process, which often surfaces in the shape of regressive or disrupted forms of speech. The reason for the production of a wrong word, or of a nonexistent form of a word, may lie in that the child is busy concentrating on sorting out something else, say, the inflectional morphology of one language (Chapter 7), or the vocabulary of two languages (Chapters 5, 8). The children’s acquisitional strategies show no fundamental difference from strategies used by adults to tackle new challenges, linguistic or otherwise. Everyday human endeavours engage children and adults alike in novel ways of thinking, of socialising and, therefore, of using language. The answer to the second research question proposed for this

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study is then that acquisitional strategies serve to appropriate linguistic tools in order to make sense of our surroundings and ourselves. The strategies are not the domain of child endeavours, linguistic or otherwise, but apply instead across the broader task of making our world ours , to use and thrive in. We all focus on what intrigues us or on what we think needs solving until we sort the matter out, and we all attempt to solve problems, minor or major, with alternative resources that we find available to us at the time. If we cannot find a hammer around the house, the heel of a shoe or a stone from the garden will do as well. As parents, we may for example choose to tackle a bout of aggressive tantrums by making use of our stern authority as hierarchical superiors, or by highlighting our understanding of its causes with gentle demonstrations of empathy. If a word is not available, we replace it by paraphrases or synonyms, or by fillers like ‘thingamajig’. In addition, in order to learn to use something of whose indispensability we became persuaded, we use it. This is how and why adults of all ages learn to operate novel objects that for some reason are deemed to come to play a significant role in everyday life, like video players, computers or cell phones, and whose idiosyncrasies and technical intricacy remind, in many respects, of those of language. Just like among children, adult attempts at generalisation across different languages or gadgets may also lead to glitches, as the result of uttering a wrong word or clicking the wrong button. Learning to fluently press keys and switches singly or together in particular sequences, in order to get an expected result, comes through regular and engaged practice, in no fundamentally different way from learning to chain certain words or sounds together, instead of others, in order to convey an expected meaning. That children do it overtly with their language(s) by speaking them loud and clear even in lone play, and adults may prefer to tackle the workings of their gadgets in conspicuous silence has to do with expected child and adult behavioural norms, respectively, not with the nature of the learning process. For adults and children alike, these strategies reflect as many ways of adapting to the environment, and of managing linguistic and interactional resources competently, for as many gadgets or languages as required. The strategies further shed light into what researchers can expect from child data. An experimental or recording session that is designed to elicit words that name objects, for example, may fail its intended purpose if the child, at the time, happens to be more interested in finding out which other ways of naming those objects are acceptable, or which other characteristics of those objects are worth having words for, besides the object name itself. Productive uses of prosody are one case in point, in that the children in this study resort to prosody in many of their exploratory strategies. As recurrently pointed out along this book, the

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prosodic characteristics of child speech, particularly very young children’s speech, have so far largely failed to engage the attention that I believe they deserve. The tools for prosodic analysis of data accordingly lag behind too, feeding back into the limited interest that child prosody arouses. That is, certain aspects of children’s productions, and the insight that researchers may gain through them into children’s overall probing for communicative relevance, are disregarded because we do not know how to talk about them. But lack of analytical tools does not of course mean that the object of analysis is negligible. The data for the present study certainly show that these children find prosody a crucial means of tackling linguistic competence, whether within one language or across their languages. Child probing into language may also result in uses that are new for adult users, and that adult users end up finding acceptable. Children are by definition disruptors, or the prime movers of innovation, whichever way we choose to look at what children do until, they too, learn to conform and to reproduce behaviour, linguistic or otherwise. In an engrossing discussion about the nature of language, Tattersall (2001: 47) first argues that ‘language is not reinvented in every generation but is rather re-expressed’. He then goes on to suggest that we may owe the use of language itself to child intervention, stating that ‘it is not implausible that a rudimentary precursor to language as it is familiar today initially arose in a group of children, in the context of play’ (p. 48). He bases this suggestion on observed behavioural patterns among higher primates that are initiated by juveniles and transmitted from them to their elders. Adult uses of language that are based on child-initiated linguistic practices are found, for example, in motherese. The passing of linguistic habits from child to parent is also found elsewhere in the data for the present study. It was by means of child probing into the means of expression afforded by different languages that several of the children’s mixes into their Portuguese, for example, became sanctioned in the family’s use of this language. The same is true of cultural practices: characteristic traits from each of the children’s cultures are similarly mixed into what eventually became the family’s overall cultural practices, as discussed in Chapter 11. The smooth adoption of different linguistic and cultural practices that is found among the children shows the elasticity of these practices, concerning both their two first languages and their adopted language (Chapters 9, 11). The same is true of the equally unproblematic blending of languages and cultures among the family, because of the children (Chapters 10, 11). Probing for the inherent elasticity of language and other cultural practices associated with it is in fact the reason why so much language change is related to bilingualism, and to child language. Language change is not a deliberate goal that language users set

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themselves but rather, as Keller (1994) argues, a by-product of everyday use by individual users. It is then up to other users to accept or reject the perceived changes as part of a common patrimony, on the understanding that change is what keeps a language usable, adapted to the culture that it serves, and therefore alive. The limit lies in what the users need language to do for them, and children are well aware of this.

Three is a Crowd? Multilingual uses of language, by their nature, are not tongue-bound. They transcend language-specific idiosyncrasies that are obviously impossible to detect as such from a monolingual perspective. Adapting to his language Kipling’s (1891/1949) interrogation about his own country, we could also wonder ‘And what should they know of English who only English know?’ Chapter 2 discussed the paradox of attempting to characterise language, and multilingual uses of it, by means of features found in single languages, or of analytical frameworks devised for single languages. The structure of language need not coincide with the structure of particular languages, just like music is not coextensive with the renditions of it by particular instruments. It is precisely the translinguistic nature of multilingualism that stands for its recognition as affording prime insight into the workings of language itself. As Gupta (1994: 52) reports, it has been suggested that ‘contact varieties show more features of universal grammar than languages which have followed normal transmission for generations’. The point is echoed in MyersScotton’s (2002) recent monograph, where bilingual data are taken as reflecting the structure of the language faculty itself. On the other hand, the primacy of child language in providing ‘crucial evidence for the existence and nature of basic ‘‘operating principles’’ of language development’ (Dale et al ., 1993) has since long been established. The conclusion must then be that child multilingualism is the prime territory of a science that seeks insight into human language. This is why the answer to the question in the title of this book, ‘Three is a crowd?’, is an emphatic negative. Three languages, or four, or as many as necessary, are no more a crowd than one single language is. Multilingualism does not involve an addition of languages, to the one language often assumed as core for monolinguals and bilinguals alike. The present data vouch instead for a view of multilingualism as involving the application of general acquisitional strategies to different languages, the same strategies that apply at any age to any object deemed worthy of investigation. Tracy (2002), in an analysis of child German, accordingly makes the challenging point that all children start out navigating their way through language by means of multilingual-like acquisitional strategies. The children in this study indeed show that they

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negotiate their probing of Portuguese through the same strategies that they use in their probing of their bilingualism and later, trilingualism. Given that each language is dealt with from within strategies that apply to any language, questions that address crowding of linguistic or cognitive space, in actual human communication or in human brains, stand out as meaningless, if not downright detrimental. Far too many parents let themselves be persuaded of the myth that a language takes up ‘space’ in the brain, that either encroaches on the space dedicated to other languages or, worse, that engages neural activity that can thereby no longer be used for other purposes and may therefore ultimately impair overall child development. School authorities are not immune to uninformed beliefs of this kind either, as described in Chapter 9. The associated myth that proof of this undesirable state of affairs lies in language mixes, or in other assumed ‘misbehaviour’, is equally rife, and goes equally unchallenged. From the data in this study, reasoning along these lines makes as much sense as claiming that a pianist should refrain from learning to play the saxophone, or else risk losing the ability to do math. Bilinguals learn to manage their languages in the same way that children in multichild families learn to manage their siblings. Learning to manage what is there to be managed does not deplete language users of their linguistic competence, as little as being a sibling depletes individuals of their individuality. The present data further show that mixes, far from providing evidence of disfluency that might be attributed to a crowded mind, show instead lucid grip on the pragmatic requirements of communication in a multilingual environment. This is why I believe that more insight can be gained into language and its acquisition from studies of what different multilinguals do with their different languages than from any comparison between multilinguals and monolinguals. Studies of the latter kind in fact restrict themselves to observing features of one single language across users, despite claiming to target the study of ‘multilingualism’. As stated in the introductory chapter, this book is about children learning language, not about (the) languages. The interest of this study may lie in that it approaches child multilingualism from the perspective of child multilingualism itself. From the data presented throughout the book, it is clear that learning to deal with language takes time, effort and dedication. It is equally clear that acquiring more than one language makes no difference to the learning endeavour. Throughout, the children are in command of their own language learning. The question, then, is not so much whether several languages tax children’s breakthrough into language. The question is rather, as Humpty Dumpty would put it, which is to be master.

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Index Authors Bybee, J.L., 51, 97, 181

Abrahamsson, N., 219, 269 Acredolo, L.P. , 24, 61 Adams, C., 100 Albano, E.C., 92, 127 Alioto, A., 220 Allott, R., 139 Altarriba, J., 26, 270 American National Corpus, 145 Andrade, E.d., 57, 127, 207 Appel, R., 19 Arnberg, L., 23 Arnold, G.F., 50 Auer, P., 266

Carabine, B., 191 Caramazza, A., 208 Carter, D.M., 140 Castro, M.C.S.A., 280 Cenoz, J., 97 Channell, J., 199 Cintra, L.F.L., 49 Clark, E.V., 51, 176, 184, 185 Clark, H.H., 139 Clyne, M., 95, 235, 259, 271 Cook, V., 256 Costa, A., 208 Couto, H.H.d., 176 Cowan, N., 146 Cowley, S.J., 181 Crain-Thoreson, C., 280 Croft, W., 121 Cruttenden, A., 47, 50, 105, 119, 222 Cruz-Ferreira, M., 3, 24, 28, 42, 49, 52, 57, 92, 101, 105, 119, 127, 138, 207, 220, 227, 256, 259, 282 Crystal, D., 28, 50, 63, 97, 100 Cunha, C., 49 Cutler, A., 22, 140, 203, 206, 270

Baker, C., 269 Balog, H.L., 63 Barbosa, P.A., 92, 127 Barlow, M., 51, 181 Barrett, M., 186 Barron-Hauwaert, S., 235 Barton, M.E., 35, 37, 280 Bates, E., 142 Beckman, M.E., 120 Berghout Austin, A.M., 280 Beveridge, W.I.B., 46 Bhatia, T.K., 17 Bijeljac-Babic, R., 97 Birdsong, D., 218 Bishop, D.V.M., 16, 61 Bloom, P., 140 Bloomfield, L., 13, 28, 269 Boersma, P., 218 Boesch, C., 278 Bolinger, D.L., 50, 105 Bongaerts, T., 219 Bortfeld, H., 146 Bosch, L., 97 Boysson-Bardies, B.d., 39, 56, 62, 105, 123, 124 Braeger, T.J., 280 Brainard, M.S., 100 Braunwald, S.R., 46 Breland, H.M., 35 Brislin, R.W., 46 Brown, A. , 19 Brown, R., 46, 141, 142 Bruyninckx, M., 105

Dahl, T., 7 Dale, P.S., 46, 48, 309 Dalton-Puffer, C., 139 Dankovicová, J., 119 Darwin, C., 46 Dauer, R.M., 96 Davidson, R.G., 280 Dawkins, R., 278 De Houwer, A., 21, 44, 47 De Jong, E.J., 237 De Schutter, G., 33 de Waal, F.B.M., 278 DeCasper, A.J., 62 Dehaene-Lambertz, G., 96 Deneš, P.B., 102 Deuchar, M., 47 Di Cristo, A., 104, 105 Diniz, M.A.S., 283 Donaldson, M., 6 Döpke, S., 235, 236, 237

330

Three is a Crowd? Index

Index Doupe, A.J., 100 Dowker, A., 191 Dromi, E., 27, 150 Dunn, J., 37, 286 Eisenberg, Z., 145, 160 Elam, G.A., 120 Elbers, L., 202 Enfield, N.J., 201, 252 Engstrand, O., 49 Escudero, P.R., 218 Esling, J.H., 105 Fahnestock, J., 7 Falk, D., 286 Faria, I.H., 160, 283 Fay, D.A., 203, 206 Feldman, A., 124 Feldman, H.M., 142 Fenson, L., 141, 142 Ferber, R., 202 Ferguson, C.A., 281 Fernald, A., 280, 281, 283 Fernández, E.M., 270 Fifer, W.P., 62 Fishman, J.A., 13, 17, 233, 278 Foley, J.A., 9 Fox Tree, J.E., 139 Frege, G., 174 Freitas, M.J., 52, 97, 218 Friederici, A.D., 219 Frota, S., 105, 283 Fry, D.B., 102 Gage, F.H., 220 Gårding, E., 49 Gardner, R., 224 Gaskins, S., 7, 279 Gauker, C., 139 Genesee, F., 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 97, 235, 270 Gentner, D., 149 Gershkoff-Stowe, L., 208 Gillis, S., 33 Gleason, J.B., 280 Golinkoff, R.M., 27, 185, 220 Goodwyn, S.W. , 24, 61 Goodz, N.S., 18, 29, 97, 235, 280 Gopnik, A., 279 Grabois, H., 256 Grace, G.W., 104 Grammont, M., 233 Grimshaw, G.M., 218 Grosjean, F., 17, 21, 22, 24, 29, 64, 209, 271, 294 Gumperz, J.J., 18 Gupta, A.F., 269, 309 Hall, K., 150

331 Halliday, M.A.K., 48, 50, 55, 60, 61, 96, 97, 119, 184, 236 Hamers, J., 15, 16 Hamilton, A., 142, 145 Handbook of the IPA, 49 Harding, E., 20 Harley, B., 256 Hartmann, C.C., 140 Haugen, E., 249, 256 Hauser, M.D., 278 Hedelin, P., 49 Heredia, R., 270 Hernandez, A.E., 22 Hirst, D., 49, 104, 105 Hockett, C.A., 154 Hoff, E., 17, 87 Hoff-Ginsberg, E., 37 Hoffman, E., 26 Hoffmann, C., 13, 265, 270, 271 Holloway, M., 221 Honikman, B., 105 Houston, D., 96 Hunston, S., 181 Huttenlocher, J., 150, 280 Hyltenstam, K., 219, 269 Hyman, L.M., 127 Hymes, D.H., 18 Ingram, D., 141 Ioup, G., 138 Jaeger, J.J., 106, 202, 204 Johnson, C.E., 22 Jucker, A.H., 199 Jusczyk, P.W., 97, 140, 146 Kajikawa, S., 153 Kanno, Y., 296 Kaplan, E.L., 63, 97 Keesing, R.M., 35, 232, 278, 279, 295 Keller, R., 309 Kemmer, S., 51, 181 Kempermann, G., 220 Kendrick, C., 286 Kent, R.D., 24, 27, 135 Kessler, C., 18, 181 Khattab, G., 97 Kipling, R., 309 Kjellin, O., 100, 220 Koenig, P.L., 140 Kohnert, K.J., 270 Konishi, M., 278 Kouega, J.-P., 27 Krasinski, E., 97 Krueger, W.M., 37 Kruppe, B., 225 Kuhn, T.S., 6, 221 LaBelle, C. , 97, 270

332 Labov, W., 33, 43, 235 Lambert, W.E., 15, 16 Lamprecht, R.R., 97 Lanvers, U., 265, 270 Lass, R., 6 Laver, J., 58, 104 Le Page, R.B., 27 Leather, J., 181 Lebeaux, D., 23 Lecanuet, J.-P., 62, 283 Lenneberg, E., 218, 221 Leopold, W.F., 22, 24, 46 Lewis, C.I., 182 Lewis, M.M., 96 Li, C.N., 63, 97 Lindholm, K.J., 22, 47, 64 Linguist List, 17, 69, 127, 201, 236 Liu, J., 293 Lleó, C., 123 Low, E.L., 19 Lucy, J.A., 7, 279 Lukens, H.T., 27, 142 Lukin, A., 224 Lust, B., 51 Luthy, M.J., 293 Mackey, W.F., 18, 237 MacWhinney, B., 49, 53, 57 Major, R.C., 105 Malakoff, M., 240 Malmstrom, P.M., 246 Mandel, D.R., 146 Maneva, B., 22 Manolopoulou-Sergi, E., 223 Markman, E.M., 185 Masataka, N., 288 Mateus, M.H.M., 49, 57, 127, 207 McArthur, T., 27 McConchie, P., 294 McDaniel, D., 16 McQueen, J.M., 140 Mehler, J., 96, 104 Meisel, J. M., 23 Mendes da Luz, M.A., 161 Menn, L., 48, 124 Merriman, W.E., 149 Mervis, C.B., 141 Miolo, G., 24, 27, 135 Mishina-Mori, S., 22 Mitchell, R.W., 286 Modiano, M., 28 Mogford, K., 16 Moon, C., 62 Motter, A.E., 208 Muysken, P., 14, 15, 16, 19, 21 Myers-Scotton, C., 19, 20, 26, 266, 269, 309 Napoli, D.J., 6 Navarro, A.M., 24

Three is a Crowd? Nazzi, T., 96 Neufeld, G.G., 220 Neville, H.J., 219 Newman, P., 47 Newport, E.L., 280 Nicoladis, E., 23, 256, 270 Noguchi, M.G., 236 Norris, D.G., 140 Obler, L.K., 296 O’Connor, J.D., 50 Oller, D.K., 16, 46, 55, 56, 101, 135 Oshima-Takane, Y., 35, 37 Padilla, A.M., 22, 47, 64 Pallier, C., 218 Paradis, J., 22, 97 Park, T.Z., 23 Parkvall, M., 179 Pearson, B.Z., 24 Pease, D.M., 191 Pegg, J.E., 280 Peters, A.M., 48 Petitto, L.A., 27 Pfaff, C.W., 19 Pike, K.L., 117 Pinson, E.N., 102 Poplack, S., 26 Postal, P.M., 221 Poulin-Dubois, D., 97 Price, P.J., 285 Purnell, E., 141 Quay, S., 26, 44, 47, 64, 237, 249 Quirk, R., 49 Ramos Pereira, D.M.M., 283 Ramus, F., 104 Ratliff, M., 47 Rebelo, D., 283 Redlinger, W., 23 Riley, P., 20 Ritchie, W.C., 17 Ritt, N., 139 Roach, P., 97 Robbins, M., 35 Romaine, S., 15, 17, 18, 19, 25, 182, 235, 255, 270 Sampson, G., 7, 9, 219, 221, 300 Saussure, F.d., 6, 16 Schnitzer, M.L., 97 Schumann, J.H., 223 Scliar-Cabral, L., 124, 145 Sebastián-Gallés, N., 97 Secco, G., 145 See, H.L.C., 236 Selkirk, E.O., 285 Shatz, M., 37

Index Silva, M.N., 246 Skutnabb-Kangas, T., 18, 269 Slobin, D.I., 47, 222 Smiley, P.A., 150 Smith, D.J., 203 Snow, C.E., 17, 280 Snow, D., 63 Spradlin, K.T., 174 Spurrett, D., 181 Staats, A.W., 222 Stahl, D., 44 Stemberger, J.P., 202, 203 Stern, C., 46 Stern, W., 46 Stevenson, A., 8, 27, 300 Stix, G., 220 Swain, M.K., 18, 21 Tabouret-Keller, A., 27 Taeschner, T., 22, 23, 167 Tannen, D., 283 Tattersall, I., 308 Teixeira, E.R., 145 Teleman, U., 49 Temperley, M.S., 51 Thompson, L., 9 Thompson, S.A., 63, 97 Tomasello, M., 35, 37, 44, 141, 149, 181, 278, 280 Tracy, R., 309 Trask, R.L., 221 Trehub, S.E., 99 Tremblay, S., 103

333 Tronick, E.Z., 62 Valian, V., 145, 160 van Dam, J., 181 van Petten, C., 140 Vázquez-Cuesta, P., 161 Veneziano, E., 123 Vigário, M., 52, 105, 283 Vihman, M.M., 23, 47, 202 Villalva, A., 175 Volterra, V., 22, 23 Vygotsky, L.S., 152 Wachtel, G.F., 185 Wagner, J., 224 Watson, I., 15, 18, 23, 269 Weinreich, U., 13, 22, 269 Weist, R.M., 225 Wellen, C.J., 37 Wells, J., 49 Welsh, C.A. , 47 Whiten, A., 278 Whitworth, N., 97 Wijnen, F., 202, 203 Williams, G., 224 Wilson, I.L., 22 Wood, N.L., 146 Woods, A., 48 Woollett, A., 37 Wray, A., 283 Yajun, J., 27 Yamamoto, M., 227, 234, 236, 269

Subjects accent/pronunciation, 64, 71ff., 88ff., 105, 219ff., 259, 271 accommodation – cultural, 244, 293 – linguistic, 266 see also conformity to language use acquisitional strategies, see strategies adaptive behaviour, 302ff., 278ff. see also accommodation affixation, 157 age-bound behaviour, 36ff., 289 see also birth order agreement, 154, 157ff. ambiguity, 78, 160, 165, 181 articulatory proficiency, 24ff., 61, 64, 103ff. articulatory settings, 104 association, see word association attitudes – towards language, 88ff., 91ff., 212 – towards multilingualism, 224ff.

babbling, 56, 59, 97, 100, 101ff. see also connected-speech routines babbling block, 101 biculturalism, 278, 291ff., 294 bilingualism, 10, 13-19 – ‘balanced’ vs. ‘imbalanced’ bilingualism, 23, 235, 268-270 – bilingual mixes, see mixes – bilingual modes, 16, 21, 209, 271 – language differentiation, 23-28, 63ff. – ‘one system’ vs. ‘two systems’, 22-27, 64 – passive __, 60 – primary __, 13 birth order, 36-37, 295 body language, 60ff., 78, 106, 126, 152, 215ff., 249, 293, 302 book reading, 182-184 borrowings, 20, 72, 173, 237-239, 257-258 see also mixes brain plasticity, 220-221, 310 breathing, 119, 137

Three is a Crowd?

334 Buffet Effect (in multilingual acquisition), 28, 306 see also mixes categorisation, 150, 181ff. CDI (Communicative Development Inventories), 141-145 codeswitches, 19, 198, 249ff., 263-266 see also mixes cognitive development, 29, 60, 75, 118-119, 305, 310 communicative competence, 18, 27, 293 Communicative Development Inventories, see CDI compositionality, 174 compounding, 174-179 conformity to language use, 9, 182ff., 197, 300 see also rule-breaking connected speech, 53, 72, 98, 119ff., 136-140 connected-speech routines, 63ff. see also babbling constituency, 139ff. ‘critical period hypothesis’, 218-222 cross-linguistic uses of language, 69, 104-105, 123, 142, 143-145 see also universals of language cultural modes, 288, 291-299 culture, 278, 280 data – analysis, 43-52, 56, 61 – collection, 40-43, 47 – transcription, 55-59 deafness, 38-39, 73 default language, 42, 234ff., 244ff., 256, 259 default vowel, 57, 127, 135 diary notes, 40ff., 46, 202 disfluency, 19ff., 237 see also pathology dual lingualism, 14, 23 educators, 17, 226-228, 310 elasticity – phonetic, 122, 201ff., 308 – semantic, 184ff., 192, 201, 308 see also overextension expat-speech, 20 see also borrowings fall/falling tone, 50, 58, 105ff., 109ff. fillers, 67ff., 75, 113, 122-138, 143, 207, 303-304, 307 first words, 142ff.,149ff., 181, 184 fluency – cultural, 278, 294 – linguistic, 19-20, 104, 119ff., 136ff., 265ff. foreign accent, 105, 138, 222ff., 296 see also accent

foreign language learning, 100, 104-105, 181, 217-224, 296, 303 foreigner-talk, 140 formulaic speech, 42, 45, 211-212, 283 fossilisation, 74, 220, 246 games, see play gender, 157, 164ff. – default __, 168-174 – and sex, see sexed referents gesture, see body language grammar, 10, 28 head – intonational, 50, 59 – syntactic, 124, 156ff., 174ff. hedged speech, 80, 253, 291 holophrase, 141 see also first words homonyms, 144, 185, 190-191 homophones, 64 hyponyms, 192 identity, 279ff., 291ff., 299 ideology, see science idiosyncrasy (developmental), 38-39 imitation, 37, 278, 287 inflection, 154-164 intonation, 4, 78, 100ff.,152, 207, 215ff., 271, 283 – intonational meanings, 105ff. – intonational transcription, see data transcription IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), see data transcription L2 learning, see foreign language learning language – as tool, 4, 219, 297, 300ff. – awareness, 23ff., 60ff., 82 – change, 308ff. – ‘dominance’, 268-277 – vs. languages, 6, 10, 22 – policy, see OPOL – territories, 62, 80-81, 240ff., 258-261, 268 – variation/variety, 18, 27, 48 language acquisition, 9, 22, 28, 181, 219-220, 304ff. – vs. language learning, 28, 219-224 see also foreign language learning language use – culture-bound, 238-239 – task-bound, 239-241

Index – topic-bound, 238, 245, 250, 258, 267 lexical equivalents, see translation lexical organisation, 203ff., 208 lingua franca, 31, 210, 216, 297 lingualism, 10, 13ff., 16-17 malapropisms, 201-207 Mean Length of Utterance, see MLU metalinguistic ability, 60-61, 75, 166 metaphor, 117ff., 191, 288 see also semantic shift, word meanings mixes – cultural, 293ff. – linguistic, 19-29, 78, 162, 173, 208, 214, 235ff., 249-252, 270-271, 305, 308, 310 – mixed input, 235ff. MLU, 141-145 model of child forms, 7ff., 38, 50ff., 97ff., 123, 141, 168, 290 monolingualism, 13-16 mother tongue, see native proficiency motherese, 98, 151, 179, 191, 220, 280-288, 308 motivation, 222-223 multilingualism, 11, 309ff. multiword utterances, 119ff., 136ff., 155-157 music, 99-100, 133, 239, 283 see also rhythm naming, 141, 182ff. see also word nation, 297ff. national culture, 297ff. see also culture nationality, 290, 296ff. native proficiency, 13, 91, 105, 269, 219ff., 226, 269 neutral vowel, see default vowel norm – cultural, 291ff., 298 – in science, 5, 14, 17, 19 – linguistic, 9, 91, 228 nuclear analysis of intonation, 50, 57, 105 nucleus, 50, 59, 122, 132, 135ff. number, 164ff. nursery rhymes, 99ff., 127, 239 Observer’s Paradox, 43 one-dimensional exploration of language, 102,136, 303ff. one-person one-language policy, see OPOL ‘one-system’, see bilingualism

335 one-word stage, 63, 66, 72, 106, 121, 139, 141ff. onomatopoeia, 143, 151, 154 OPOL (one-person one-language policy), 30-31, 75, 85, 214, 233-237, 290 overextension, 25-26, 42, 64, 114, 126, 138, 143, 158, 169-170, 185-191, 305 see also semantic shift paraphrase, 197-201, 307 parents, 17, 20, 182ff., 233, 236ff., 310 pathology, 16-17, 227 see also disfluency peers – peer interaction, 35, 295ff., 229ff., 231-232, 244ff., 268, 295ff. – peer language, 3, 38, 212, 232, 244-246, 249-251, 259, 267-268, 271, 295 person, 158ff. personality, 35-40, 150, 281, 298-297 phrase, 154-155, 174 – phrasal intonation, 120, 156-157 placeholders, 127, 199-201, 307 see also fillers play, 36, 84, 148, 159, 176, 232, 295 polysemy, 190 pragmatic use of language, 18, 25, 78, 237, 245, 265-267, 287, 310 ‘prelinguistic’/’preverbal’ productions, 27 prenuclear patterns, 59, 132, 137 prompting templates (in motherese), 283ff. pronunciation, see accent proper names, 146, 176, 238, 296 prosody, 27, 35, 43, 62ff., 96-100, 102-104, 123ff., 131ff., 140, 156, 167, 207, 220, 256, 283-285, 302ff., 318 reduplication, 100, 177-179, 283, 304 regressive speech, 136ff., 287 repetitiveness, 283, 305 see also formulaic speech rhythm, 97, 99ff., 106, 123, 127, 133, 137, 207, 220, 283 see also prosody, music rise/rising tone, 50, 58, 105ff., 112ff. role models, 244, 289ff. role-play, 210ff., 289 see also play rule-breaking, 28-29, 300 schooling, 31-33, 45, 211ff., 226 – language of __, 212, 232, 240, 249ff., 267 science, 5-8, 22, 24, 26-27, 46, 219-222, 234, 309 – science vs. ideology, 14, 222 semantic networks, see lexical organisation semantic shift, 143, 186ff. see also metaphor, elasticity

336 semi-lingualism, see disfluency sentences, 140, 154ff. – sentence intonation, 104, 119, 122 sex-bound behaviour, 36ff., 280-281, 289-291, 295 sexed referents, 167, 173 see also gender siblinghood, 35ff., 246, 295 singing, see music social interaction, 29, 279ff. – child-child interaction, see peers – parent-child interaction, 34-37 standard, see norm stereotyped language, see formulaic speech strategies, 1-8, 15, 25, 29, 61ff., 186ff., 301ff. syllable/CV syllable, 52, 57-59, 99, 102, 122-124, 127-128, 132, 135, 304 symbolic behaviour, 279ff. synonyms, 66, 151, 185, 192, 197-201, 307 target of child forms, see model of child forms tense, 158ff. tonality, 50, 119-122 tone, 50, 105ff., 120 tone group, 50, 119, 139 tonicity, 50 translation, 85-86, 242, 257-258, 261-262

Three is a Crowd? translation equivalents, 23-26, 47, 64-66, 69-71, 75, 78-86, 257-258 trilingualism, 10-11, 259, 271, 306, 310 ‘two-systems’, see bilingualism two-word stage, 104, 106, 115, 119, 136, 139, 147, 153, 154-157, 192 Ugly Sisters Syndrome (in science), 19 underextension, 186 universals of language, 5, 7, 309 vague reference words, 67-69, 199-201, 252-253 see also fillers vocabulary – active, 149ff. – passive, 145ff. vocal tract maturation, see articulatory proficiency voice quality, 105, 283 see also articulatory settings word – child __, 8, 103, 124, 132, 140ff., 175, 182ff. see also vocabulary – as linguistic unit, 10, 139-144, 182ff. – association, 188-191, 201ff., 208-209 – classes, 149-153 – forms, see elasticity – meanings, 154-155, 184-191 see also elasticity, semantic shift

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