comment-Baby-Talk.htm
COMMENT
from Dr. H. Mark Hubey, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, N.J., via the Language list
Subject: Re: Mama and Pappa and Reruns
To: Patrick C. Ryan
Date: Wednesday, March 10, 1999 4:24 PM
One of the problems with the comparative method, which I listed on one of my previous posts is the fact that a particular set of words which satisfy phonetic resemblance to a set of the type
{ana, ama, anna, amma, atta . . .} is not used in the comparisons.
The reason for this is that these words are said to be 'infant talk', or 'baby talk'. This point of view is further justified by a kind of a back-compatibility argument of finding such words in many languages.
Of course, the fact that words satisfying such phonetic resemblance criteria occur in so many languages is the strongest evidence yet for various "lumper" theories. I should mention that similar "lumper" vs. "splitter" arguments also rage in paleontology, especially the paleontology of hominids.
I want to present very strong evidence that this argument (that infant talk creates phonetic resemblances across language families and that these words should not be used in comparisons) has no merit other than to work against lumper programs and to make the splitter's work look much better than it really is. I will only post snippets from this article: "Baby Talk", US News & World Report,
15 June, 1998. I know that USN&WR is a news weekly and not a scientific journal. That makes the anti-lumper baby-talk arguments even more useless; after all, if this knowledge has now spread to the masses, what purpose does it serve to continue in linguistics?
=============================excerpts===============================
p.50
"Within a few months of birth, children have already begun memorizing words without knowing their meaning. The question that has absorbed — and sometimes divided — linguists is whether children need a special language faculty to do this or instead can infer the abstract rules
of grammar from the sentences they hear, using the same mental skills that allow them to recognize faces or master arithmetic.
. . .
An infant's brain, it turns out, is capable of taking in enormous amounts of information and finding the regular patterns contained within it.
. . .
Infants can perceive the entire range of phonemes, according to Janet Werker and Richard Tees, psychologists.
. . .
Yet children begin to note word boundaries by the time they are 8 months old, even they though they have no concept of what most words mean."
p. 52
"[Saffran and Aslin] reported that babies can remember words by listening for patterns of syllables that occur together with statistical regularity."
. . .
In the past, psychologists never imagined that young infants had the mental capacity to make these sorts of inferences.
p. 53
"Findings like Newport's are suggesting to some researchers that perhaps children can use statistical regularities to extract not only individual words from what they hear but also the rules for cobbling words together into sentences."
===========================end excerpts==============================
What this means is that infants learn the so-called "baby-talk" words which are not allowed in comparisons of languages long before they begin to talk. This means that the baby-talk arguments have it backwards. Infants learn to babble what they hear from parents. So if
infants are babbling "dadda", "dad", "daddi", "mommi", etc. they are not making them up but most likely have already heard them often and are trying to imitate their parents.
There are mailing lists in which people are still repeating the same old falsehoods.
H. Mark Hubey has a website which some readers may enjoy visiting.
the latest revision of this document can be found at
HTTP://WWW.GEOCITIES.COM/Athens/Forum/2803/comment-Baby-Talk.htm
Patrick C. Ryan * 9115 West 34th Street - Little Rock, AR 72204-4441 * (501)227-9947
PROTO-LANGUAGE@email.msn.com