Thursday, March 16, 2017

The Ling Space: How Do Babies Build Sentences? The Stages of Child Syntax



(The Ling Space)

This episode came out back on March 2nd, but I'm behind in my reviews.

As always, I don't have a lot of intelligent commentary.  Other than to say it was really interesting.

First language acquisition has been touched on in some way in most of the books I've read about Linguistics.  
For example Lightbown and Spada, who I've just got done reading, have a whole chapter devoted to how babies learn languages.  Lightbown and Spada also talk about way babies and toddlers go through stages when they learn languages.
But even after all the books I've read on the subject, I had never heard of the Continuity Hypothesis (which The Ling Space talks about in this week's episode) and I found it really interesting.

Questions
I'm happy to say that I had no trouble following this episode.  I got through the whole thing without being confused once!
The only question I did have is more of an external question, and it has to do with the examination technique described in the video.  When the baby is asked to distinguish between "Sarah is pushing Mickey" and "Mickey is pushing Sarah", doesn't this pre-suppose that the baby knows the difference between masculine and feminine names?  Do babies know this?

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