On 9 Feb 2011 at 19:13, don allen wrote: > Hi Joan- > > You recently wrote in part, "Children learn language from their > parents--to imply otherwise is simply wrong. " If this is > universally the case then how do you explain Rich-Harris's example of > deaf parents who have children who can hear?
There seems to be some confusion here. Harris' discussion of language in _The Nurture Assumption_ concerns second-language learning. While I don't think she would accept Joan's assertion that children explicitly learn language from their parents (i.e. are taught to speak a language by them), she does note that "children of immigrant parents...learn things at home--most conspicuously a language" (p. 64). But then she points out what happens when that immigrant child steps outside the home, and learns a new language, independent of his parents. Her famous example is the case of Joseph, who moved from Poland to Missouri at age seven, and learned within a few years to speak entirely unaccented English (Winitz et al, 1995). Meanwhile, there can be little doubt his parents, if they learned English at all, learned only to speak English with heavy accents and limited facility. Yet what Joseph learned was flawless American English, not the laboured version he heard from his parents. He could only have learned this from his peers, school, and perhaps television. Harris discusses various lines of evidence relating to the apparently effortless acquisition of a language by children without the need for parental instruction, and the case of hearing children of deaf parents is an important one. If you are brought up by deaf parents, the language input you receive is highly limited both in quantity and quality, yet many of these children nevertheless acquire normal language. It seems that exposure to either no language or abnormal language in the home plus a small amount of correct language outside it, and some passive exposure to television, is sufficient. That's pretty amazing considering how complex a behaviour language is. No wonder Steven Pinker calls it a "language instinct". BTW, a primary source of evidence relating to hearing children of deaf parents is Schiff (1976). The title and abstract of this paper place emphasis on the communication problems observed among some of these children, and is consequently misleading. When I crunched the numbers she provides, I came up with a figure that 70% of the hearing children for whom she had good data and who did not have physical reasons for language delay had no language problems, despite rearing in a severely language-impoverished environment. She also found that "the amount of time spent with hearing adults or children did not seem to be related to speech and language difficulty". It seems that only some minimum level of exposure to language is required. She is more explicit about this in a later review (Schiff-Myers, (1988), where she concludes "Many hearing children of deaf parents do develop speech and language normally if their family life is otherwise normal and they have some exposure to normal hearing speakers (approximately 5-10 hours per week seems to be sufficient)." (p. 61). Schiff, N., and Ventry, I. (1976). Communication problems in hearing children of deaf parents. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, Vol.41, 348-358. Schiff-Myers, N. (1988). Hearing children of deaf parents. In: Bishop, D. Language Development in Exceptional Circumstances. Winitz, H. et al (1995). The development of English speech patterns of a 7-year-old Polish-speaking child. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 117-143. Stephen -------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada e-mail: sblack at ubishops.ca --------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=8673 or send a blank email to leave-8673-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
