Childish Creativity

• A child’s linguistic environment determines it’s mother tongue.

• Children are prone to come up with all kinds of words and expressions which they have never heard before because adults do not use them.

• Children's’ attempts to construct, or reconstruct, their mother tongue is a type of cognitive processing or tuning which usually shows that the child has developed to a slightly more advanced linguistic stage of language development .

Daughter: Somebody’s at the door.Mother: There is nobody at the door.Daughter: There is yesbody at the door

(from P. Reich. 1986. Language Development. Prentice-Hall, page 142)

‘Yesterday, we wented to Grandma’s’

Example 1:

Example 2:

•They tend to make overgeneralizations (or mistakenly referred to ‘false’ analogies.

• It could be said that the error is not within the child but the language itself as it fails to adhere to the symmetry of its own grammatical patterning.

• creative construction process - another example of how the relative autonomy of the child’s developing linguistic system is related to the adult version of the language.

Children = well-programmed computers.(creative but make inaccurate guesses about rules and patterns of the language they are acquiring)

Example 3:

• Children’s creative construction reflects their inborn sensitivity to syntactic structures of the acquired language.

• The child’s errors are not mistakes of the ear or slips of the eye but in fact, evidence of how creative children can be in constructing their grammars based on what they have learned and on what they can plausibly assume.

Pattern A: There’s Carlos! [There’s/Here’s + Noun]Pattern B: There he is! [There/Here Pronoun + is]Pattern C: *There Carlos is! [There/Here + Noun + is]

(marked with asterisk * to indicate its ungrammaticality.)

• Children are not only active and creative participants in acquiring their mother tongue; even their ‘errors’ reveal that they are incredibly sensitive to the small and usually unobvious but inherent grammatical characteristics of the language they learn.