David Crystal Charity Lecture: Child Language Revisited

Feb 28, 2020

I was happy to attend the David Crystal Charity Lecture: Child Language Revisited, which took place in St. George's church, University of Sheffield. I have to admit that I had not read much of David Crystal's work before; nevertheless, it was a great lecture. I'd therefore like to share the takeaways from the event.

Being a computer scientist, I have been surrounded by numbers for years. In fact, I tend to understand notions easier through statistics, numbers, equations, etc. So even though I can guess that adults know a lot of words, it is more impressive to listen that the vocabulary of an adult consists of approximately 75,000-100,000 words. However, other sources [1][2] claim that adults' vocabulary has a size of 20,000-35,000 and 40,000-60,000 words respectively. Not so impressive maybe. But I guess it largely depends not only on whether inflections and compounds are taken into account, but also on what is the language in question, as, for example, some languages are more or less inflected than others. It is also worth noting that the second source referred to an interesting distinction between active and passive vocabulary. Anyway, it seems that there are different ways to measure the average size of people's vocabulary.

By searching in YouTube, one can find several videos of David Crystal talking about English being (taught as) a 'global' language [3][4][5]. I will not analyse this here; the videos can provide enough more details I think. In his lecture, David Crystal said that in order to be a global citizen, one should:

1. Master their mother language (and possibly speak more than one languages).
2. Be digitally literate.
3. Speak English.

He further explained that English does not exist only in the countries in which it is the official language; it exists everywhere is being spoked, used, even if it is not the native language. Different countries also have different varieties of English, not only in terms of grammar, vocabulary and sounds, but also in cultural terms. For instance, idioms can differ significantly across different countries, to the extent that they can be entirely unknown to some of them.

Then, he moved to language development in children. According to Crystal, language production and comprehension were traditionally studied through listening and speaking; reading and writing were later included. Children first get in touch with language by listening to it; then they start speaking it; then they become able of reading and writing in their language. 9-month old children develop a rhythm, and particularly a rhythm that is close to their language (e.g. English and French have different rhythms). 3-year old children make heavy use of conjuction -'and' in particular. Between 3-4 years, children start using irregular forms. And then, when they are 4,5-5 years old, according to some academics, they suddenly stop making mistakes. Brilliant! Wait, no... The fact that no mistake can be noted, does not imply that children have mastered their mother tongue. Actually, we focus on what is being produced, so children can effectively use structures they have been familiar with, but this by no means is related to perfect comprehension. Earlier, Crystal had said that language acquisition has two sides: production and comprehension, with comprehension having been 'neglected' compared to how extensively production has been studied.

Production seems to be easy to study, especially when the focus is put only on the child. In order to study comprehension, it is also important to pay attention to the caregiver too (i.e. how does the caregiver speak to the child). We all know that we tend to speak to children using babytalk. This kind of speaking has some specific features:

1. It involves no lip rounding; lips are kind of 'flattened'.
2. It has a lot of pitch range variation.
3. It includes a lot of repetition.

I think we all agree that these features are clearly absent (and probably considered abnormal) in everyday talk. But why do we use babytalk? According to developmental psychologists, it important to speak to a baby in a way the baby likes, recognises, can pick up and can respond, so as to begin the bonding with it and achieve a mutual recognition of love. We can also get a greater response from the baby if we use o choreography of vision, language and touch. Crystal then made an interesting point about dictionaries defining language as a means of communication and of transmission of ideas, completely missing not only the identity function of language, but also language play (e.g. use of language for fun, like in jokes, crossword puzzles and board games like Scrabble). Finally, he said that 6-year old children usually have not grasped the passive construction yet, while 7-8-year old children tend to write in the way they speak (e.g. they make heavy use of 'and').

It was a nice opportunity to learn more about language. I hope I have managed to transfer at least some bits of the experience!