I was worried at first. Islamic fundamentalism at one of Luna’s innocent-looking playgroups? (I suspected the one in the local Church Hall…) Sharia Law in Worthing by 2025?

Of course, I needn’t have. It was just Luna’s mangled pronunciation of ‘Camper Van’, although I haven’t worked out exactly why. Other slips, which I blogged about before Christmas, are more predictable. There’s still recognizable vocalic and consonantal harmony in the odd word. And ‘Milk’ is still /mʊk/ – the dark [l] causes the front vowel to move back – which provides an amusing version of Bob the Builder, which, in another of Luna’s religious moments, becomes Bob the /bʊdə/ (Buddha). We even have our own lyrics to the theme song:

“Bob the Buddha, Can he fix it? The greatest achievement is selflessness…”

But, of course, her linguistic skills are moving on in leaps and bounds. As far as I can tell, she understands pretty much everything we tell her, and her speech is vastly more developed than it was a mere four months ago. I’m observing it entirely unscientifically, but if I’d say the average length of Luna’s utterances (Mean Length of Utterance is a scientific term used to get a rough idea of children’s syntactic ability) is between 2 and 3 words. ‘Luna happy’ is thankfully, and to my eternal joy, something she says often (though is it, I wonder, because of the kind of stuff she’s discovered at the Church Hall playgroup?). ‘Doors (outdoors) windy’ is another. Three word utterances she’s come up are ‘Mummy play farm?’, ‘Danma (Grandma) come here!’ and ‘Peppa kissing George’.

Notice a couple of things. Firstly, Luna already got some means of communicating, and therefore must have some underlying knowledge of, different moods or illocutionary force indicators. She uses very pronounced question intonation in the interrogative example, and appears to already have English imperative and declarative word order. Secondly, notice the absence of auxiliary verbs, which indicate the absence of functional categories in Luna’s syntax. When I put her Wellies on at the weekend, Luna said ‘Daddy! Luna feet hiding!’ Again, no auxiliary, and no genitive ‘s’. What do they teach them at playgroup?

Don’t answer that…

Actually, this morning she crossed some kind of boundary and actually produced a five-word sentence. It was 5.45 am and she rolled over the bed to my partner (Luna had only moments before greeted me with a playful Karate chop to the larynx) and said ‘Read Luna book in bed?’

It’s no exaggeration to say that her vocabulary is expanding hugely, and very quickly. The ease with which children acquire word meanings is something that amazes me constantly, and if you fancy a good read over the Easter hols, I point you in the direction of Paul Bloom’s masterly ‘How Children Learn the Meanings of Words’. A beautiful book.

And me? I’m spending Easter in the Taliban.

I am currently sat at home next to my mum (a primary school teacher-year 3 currently), who is marking a mountain of P.S.H.E books. Yes, our evenings are very exciting.

The exercise being marked shows a row of six pictures down the left hand edge of the sheet, showing different facial emotions. Next to each of the pictures are 2 empty boxes. In the first of the boxes, the child had to write a reason to be ‘said emotion’, for example, ‘I think this person is opening a present’ and in the second box, the child had to state what the ‘said emotion’ was, for example, ‘surprised’. That probably isn’t very well explained, but it’s not massively important.

Anyway, a few books in, mum got confused about what a child had written, and asked for my advice. Next to an angry facial expression, a child had written ‘angry-because he looks like he’s going to panchter’. At first, ‘panchter’ baffled us both, but I soon realised that it probably meant ‘punch her’. Both mum and I were interested by this. The way this child says/hears others say ‘punch her’ has seemingly affected the way they spell it. Not only do they hear ‘punch’ as ‘panch’, but it shows that they don’t hear two separate words. This isn’t the only example we have seen over the past few months. Interestingly, mum has said such a thing is becoming an increasingly common occurrence in children’s work, year on year.

As we all know, language is constantly changing and evolving, diverging from the ‘standard’. This can sometimes be problematic, when young children haven’t fully grasped the basics. My mum (as an example), finds it challenging to teach children phonics and spelling when they are used to hearing/speaking a non-standard form at home. Using the example above, we would recognise the standard spelling as ‘punch’. The child recognises the word as ‘panch’. If the child’s parents/guardian pronounces ‘punch’ in this way, it suddenly becomes very difficult as a teacher to tell them that it is in fact wrong to write ‘panch’, if that’s what they hear from the people they aspire to. In extreme cases, if a child hears their parent or guardian speak with a strong dialect or accent, then teaching them the standard almost becomes like teaching them a foreign language.

I found this quite an interesting subject, and it could (or may already be) an interesting study.

As Raf pointed out in his post, the kind of mistakes young children make in their speech are systematic and rule-based. There’s always an explanation. Equally interestingly, these mistakes are often about much more than simply not being to recognise a particular sound.

In an experiment now so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page (search for ‘Fis phenomenon’), Jean Berko and Robert Brown demonstrated that children’s speech perception is a long way ahead of their speech production. Consider the following dialogue, which takes place between an father and his child, both looking at toy plastic fish:

Child: There’s a fis in there.

Father: You mean there’s a fish in there.

Child: Yes, a fis.

Father: There’s a fis in there?

Child: No, there’s a FIS in there.

Even more startling evidence of the mismatch between perception and production can be seen in a wonderful study by my old colleague (and teacher) at UCL, Neil Smith. Neil studied the acquisition process in his son, Amahl. At a particular time in his development, Amahl would point at a puddle and say ‘puggle’. Perhaps, Neil puzzled, Amahl simply couldn’t pronounce the word ‘puddle’. Imagine his astonishment when, a few days later (and still calling puddles ‘puggles’) Amahl pointed at a puzzle in his room and said…

‘Puddle’!

My grandson, now 16 months, says ‘kahhhar’  (two syllables) when he sees a car.  The ‘hhh’ is a voiceless velar fricative, like the sound in German ‘Ach’ or ‘Achtung’.  Why does he pronounce it like this?  I think it’s because the English consonant sounds /p/, /t// and /k/ are aspirated at the beginning of a word.  Adult English speakers are not consciously aware of it, but to my grandson, the rasping sound between the /k/ and the vowel in ‘car’ is loud and he’s trying to imitate it.

It reminds me of when I spent a term in a French school as a teenager, and the locals used to mock my poor pronunciation: when I said ‘aucune idée’ (no idea), they would mimic it as ‘aukhhhhune’ with a long rasping sound.  French doesn’t aspirate consonant sounds, so they heard a throaty noise between the consonant and the vowel — just like my grandson.

To hear the difference, set Google translate (translate.google.com) to French and listen to the pronunciation of ‘Cannes’ a few times using the microphone icon.  Then set it to English and do the same for ‘can’.

I was wondering what to write our first blog about and the answer came running into my bedroom shouting ‘Mama Nina door, Mama Nina door!’: Luna (Nina), my  2-year-old daughter was going out with her Mum.

A child’s acquisition of language is an astonishing thing to behold. From her earliest expressive sounds, Luna has progressed, as all children do, through a pretty ordered set of stages to where she is at the moment. Verbs are beginning to appear, and she is starting to string sentences together. Yesterday evening she picked up her toy shopping basket, adopted a very serious facial expression, and said ‘Sop!’ (shop): ‘Nina buy woin (wine)’. I told her she’d probably need some ID.

The cute mistakes children make in pronunciation are interestingly predictable. Luna can’t make any consonant clusters (‘sp’, ‘tr’ etc.), she has a marked preference for beginning words with consonants and her speech still exhibits both consonantal and vocalic harmony. This is the process whereby a word-initial consonant or vowel influences consonants and vowels later in the word. For example, she calls her best friend Ethan, ‘Deedee’. She’s got the first vowel, but the second harmonises with it. The consonant ‘th’, incidentally, is typically late-acquired in English children. She replaces it with ‘d’ (an early-acquired one) and the second consonant harmonises with that too. Her eldest sister – Xanthe – she calls ‘Nana’, and her middle sister – Zoe – is ‘Roro’. Again, both consonantal and vocalic harmony.

I’d like to think that language acquisition is as interesting for Linguistics students as it is for parents, so, if you don’t mind, I’ll blog occasionally about Luna.

Peace.