Two small packages of information

In all languages it seems to be meaningful to ask, “What was the last word you said?” In languages like Mohawk, the answer may seem more like an English sentence or part of a sentence. But there is still a notion of a word, even though the definition of a word may seem bigger than an English word.

Although all languages have complexities, the complexities should be judged, not from the perspective native speakers of some other language, but from the perspective of the child learning that language in the natural way, from parents, older siblings, adult relatives, and other adults in the child’s environment.  What may seem like an extreme complexity from a non-native speaker’s perspective may be nothing of the sort from a child’s. How does the child form an idea of what constitutes the smallest possible package of information?

By most modern, ‘Minimalist’, theories, information is ‘sent’ to two ‘interfaces’ in small ‘packages’. One interface is a pronunciation system often known as the ‘phonetic’ or ‘articulatory / perceptual’. The other interface is concerned with the vastly complex notion of meaning. This system of packaging two sorts of information is known as ‘Spell out’. The packages are much smaller than whole sentences.

The variable complexities may be in any area of the language. Some of these may be important to senses of identity, as by the story in the Bible about being able to say shibboleth – or not – with fatal consequences for those unable to pass in that particular case.

Other aspects of language, what are known as ‘universals’, do not appear to vary from one language to another. One of these is the packaging of information by ‘Spell out’. In way may be a related way, at least one of the main structural categories of human language, namely what are known as ‘nouns’,  appears to be universal across languages. In all languages there are words for mother, father, child. Similarly all languages have sounds or ‘phonemes’ and, ways of forming them and putting them together.

Whatever sort of language a child is learning, he or she has to work out whether or not tone or intonation is used to distinguish words or properties of the grammar for whether there are significant variations of stress as in little and tummy. This has to happen at the very beginning of learning the first words. If the child gets this wrong, the input will seem chaotically disorganised. If the child wrongly assumes that words have tones that vary from one word to the next, the same word will seem to have an unlimited number of tones – with the effect that word learning will be greatly slowed or come to a complete stop – maybe after the first word.

So speech and language development is partly a matter of knowing which aspects of the input to disregard – for the purpose of sorting out the grammatical structures of English, largely, though not completely, disregarding tone.

If a child sounds babyish or can’t be understood, it may be that he or she is just failing to recognise one or more aspects of the structure, and wrongly collapsing things together, perhaps recognising words and one aspect of the sound structure within them, but nothing else. Such speech can be profoundly unintelligible.

All of the factors here fall within the scope of what is known as ‘learnability‘.

More generally, it seems that some children are somehow aware of the extraordinary complexity of speech and language, and just reluctant to talk. This is not so much delay or disorder as much as caution. But at a certain point, some encouragement may be appropriate. Obviously, it is hard to tell where caution  stops and disability or misrepresentation starts. While it is plainly worth recognising the difference, there is a point at which any general failure of pronunciation needs to be addressed, very much depending on what is not being pronounced.