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I Once picked my nose ‘til it bleeded. Child Language Acquisition in The Simpsons
How do children learn to speak their native language? The answer to this question might
seem obvious. They just copy their parents, right? Not so fast. Consider, for example, the
following sentence spoken by Simpsons’ TV Anchorman Kent Brockman “And the
elephant that couldn't stop laughing was put to death” (The Frying Game). Did Brockman
learn this sentence as a whole from a parent, or, for that matter, from anyone else?
Clearly not. Rather, he learned from his parents, and other native speakers, both the
individual words and some kind of abstract rules or sentence patterns that allow these
words to be put together to convey particular meanings. Explaining just how children do
this is the goal of language acquisition research.
There are essentially two possible answers. The first (e.g., Chomsky, 1957;
Pinker, 1984) is that children are born with some empty categories (e.g., [NOUN] and
[VERB]) and some basic rules for combining them into sentences (e.g., one possible
sentence type consists solely of a [NOUN] and a [VERB]; e.g., (the) elephant laughed).
On this view, children’s task is simply to fill in these pre-existing categories with words
that they hear, and to find out which particular version of the sentence-construction rule
applies in their language (e.g., is it [NOUN] then [VERB], like in English, or [VERB]
then [NOUN] like in some other languages?).
The second possible answer (e.g., Braine, 1963; Tomasello, 2003) is that children
must build these generalizations from scratch on the basis of the language that they hear.
For example, a child who heard The elephant laughed, The man shouted and The dog
barked might abstract across these strings to build what is known as a slot-and-frame
schema (e.g., The [PERSON/ANIMAL] [ACTION]ed); a pattern that allows entirely new
sentences of the same form to be generated (e.g., The woman danced).
The first approach is known as the nativist approach, because it stresses the
importance of categories and rules that children are born with (a native of a country is
someone who was born there; the nativity is the story of the birth of Jesus). The second
approach is known as the constructivist approach because children instead construct these
categories and rules from the language that they hear. In this chapter, we will compare
and contrast the nativist and constructivist explanations for some of the major phenomena
in language acquisition, on the basis of examples from The Simpsons.
Lisa’s First Word: Word Learning.
In the episode Lisa’s First Word, we discover the first word spoken by each of the
Simpson children: “Aye Carumba” (Bart), “Bart” (Lisa) and “Daddy” Maggie (Daddy is
actually the most common first word, slightly edging out Mummy; Fenson et al, 1994).
But just how do children learn words? There are two basic problems.
The first problem is finding where one word ends and the next begins (a problem
that – in a roundabout way – is the source of Bart’s chalkboard gag “I will not scream for
ice cream” in Lisa Gets an A). Unlike written text, speech
doesnthavegapsinbetweenthewords. So how do children split up the stream into words?
One nativist answer (e.g., Gambell & Yang, 2005) is that they are born with the
knowledge that each word contains no more than one stressed syllable. So, for example,
even the first time we heard his name, we knew that the bartender was called
Moe/Syzslak and not MoeSyzs/Lak (Bold=stressed syllable, /=word boundary), because
the latter would violate this rule by having two stressed syllables, Moe and Syzs, in the
same word. One constructivist answer (e.g., Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996) is that
children keep track of how often one syllable follows another, and assume a word
boundary whenever a very rare combination turns up. So suppose Maggie hears herself
described as a PRI-TY-BAY-BE (pretty baby). She can tell that the correct way to slice
up this stream is PRI-TY/BAY-BE and not PRI/TY-BAY-BE, because the combination
PRI+TY is quite common (and so probably a word) whilst the combination TY+BAY is
extremely rare (and so almost certainly not). The debate between the rival accounts is
ongoing. The first account works well in computer simulations, but is hard to test on real
children. The second works well with children, but only with very artificial made-up
languages.
The second word-learning problem is figuring out what each word means. Say,
for example, that Maggie hears someone Snowball as the cat walks past. How does she
know that Snowball is the name of the cat? It could just as well mean “furry”, “tail”,
“look at that”, and so on (Quine, 1960). One nativist answer (e.g,. Markman & Wachtel,
1988) is that children are born with assumption that new words label whole objects rather
than properties (“furry”), parts (“tail”) and so on. The problem with this answer is that
many words don’t label whole objects at all (e.g., party; the), so this assumption would
actively hinder children much of the time. A constructivist answer (e.g., Tomasello,
2003) is that children understand what speakers are trying to do with their language,
particularly when this language is part of familiar routines. For example, if Marge and
Maggie often play a “naming game” together, Maggie will understand that when Marge
says “Snowball” she is naming the cat rather than saying, for example “look at that”. A
problem for this answer is that children seem to learn some words when they are just a
few months only, and so probably unable to understand speakers’ intentions in this way.
I Once picked my nose ‘til it bleeded: Morphology
In Natural Born Kissers, Sideshow Mel, upon seeing Homer float past, exclaims “Look at
that blimp…He is hanging from a balloon”. But if Mel were to recall the incident later, he
would have to say “He was hanging from a balloon”. Similarly, in The Simpsons Spin-Off
Showcase, “Lisa” sings a song called “I want candy”. But if she were singing about past
candy-cravings, she would have had to sing “I wanted candy”; or, about someone else,
“He wants candy”. The use of either whole words (e.g., is, was) or bits of words (e.g., ed, -s) to indicate tense (e.g., past vs present) or the person that we’re talking about (I
want vs He wants) is called morphology (and the words, or word-bits, morphemes).
When learning systems of morphology, children typically make four characteristic
mistakes. The task of theories of child language acquisition is to explain exactly why they
do so.
The first common mistake is to miss out these morphemes altogether. For
example in the episode Trilogy of Error, when Lisa’s grammar robot, Linguo dies,
Homer cries in alarm “Lingo…dead”. With its dying words, the robot corrects him,
“Linguo is dead”. The most common nativist explanation (e.g., Wexler, 1998; Legate &
Yang, 2007) is that children do this because they think that marking tense is optional.
That is, they think you can include the “is” if you like, but, if you can’t be bothered,
that’s fine. This isn’t as crazy as it might sound. First, there are lots of words that are
optional, for example the “that” in Homer’s description of a dancer in Mayored to the
Mob, “I think (that) I saw him in Rent or Stomp or Clomp, or some piece of crap”.
Second, there are many languages in which speakers don’t mark tense at all. A speaker of
Mandarin Chinese really would say (the equivalent of) “Lingo dead”, and it would be up
to the listener to work out whether he meant is dead, was dead, will be dead etc. The
problem for this account is that it can’t quite explain why these errors are much more
common in some languages than others. The rival constructivist explanation (e.g.,
Freudenthal et al, 2007) is that children hear adults say things like “Is Linguo dead?”,
store these sentences and re-use them, missing off the start of the sentence “Is Linguo
dead”. This explanation works well for most languages, but doesn’t predict why English
children make this error quite as much as they do (around 90% of the time for most 2year-olds).
The second common mistake that children make is using the wrong morpheme.
This mistake is quite hard to see in children learning English, so I’m going to have to
hope that, like Bumblebee Man (who is actually Belgian; see Simpsons Comic #110),
you have learned just a little Spanish. Imagine that a Spanish child wants to say “They
play” (talking about a group of people). The correct thing to say is “Ellos jeugan”, which
has the plural (“they”) ending –an. But what Spanish-learning children often do
(Aguado-Orea, 2004) is to use the singular (“he”) ending –a and say “Ellos jeuga”. As I
said, this mistake is quite hard to spot in English, but the nearest equivalent would be
something like the Italian mobster Louie’s “They’s throwing Robots” (Lingo: “They are
throwing robots”). So why do sometimes children use the wrong morpheme? The nativist
answer is basically to argue that they don’t (ignoring the very occasional slip of the
tongue). This is because the nativist account assumes that children are born already
understanding how systems of morphology work, and so should rarely trip up. And,
indeed, it is true that – overall – these errors are pretty rare. The constructivist response is
to point out that children make these errors quite often with rare forms (like juegan),
which they can’t remember, and so substitute a form that they’re much more familiar
with (like juega) instead.
The third common mistake that children make is over-applying morphological
rules to words that are actually exceptions to the rule. For example, one particularly wellstudied rule is that English verbs form their past-tense by adding –ed (e.g., play/played;
walk/walked etc.). Some verbs are exceptions to the rule (e.g., bleed/bled), but children
often go ahead and apply the rule anyway, resulting in utterances such as Ralph
Wiggum’s “I once picked my nose ‘til it bleeded” (The Dad who Knew Too Little). The
nativist answer is that children are born with a default-rule (“add the thing that – in your
language – is the regular marker”) that steps in whenever children can’t remember the
correct irregular form (e.g., Pinker, 1999). A problem this account is that it can’t explain
why, when applying the –ed rule is the correct thing to do, children are better at doing it
with some verbs than others (e.g., Marchman, 1997; Ambridge, 2010). The constructivist
answer is that children are misled by analogy similar-sounding verbs (e.g., “If it’s
need/needed, it must be bleed/bleeded”). The problem for this account is that, although it
generally fails rather well, computer models that learn to produce past-tense forms by
analogy with similar-sounding verbs never reach the very low (basically 0%) error rates
shown by adults and older children (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011).
In Burns’ Heir, Bart tries to persuade Mr Burns to make him his heir by reciting a
speech (written for him by Homer) that contains the claim “Me sick”. This sentence gives
us two errors for the price of one: (a) missing out the “is” (the first type of error we met
in this section) and (b) – the fourth and final type of error that we will examine here –
using the wrong form of a personal pronoun, in this case “Me” instead of “I”. Children
make these errors quite often, saying “Me” when they mean “I” (e.g., “Me do it!”), “Her”
when they mean “She” (e.g., “Her eat it”) and – more rarely – “Him” when they mean
“He” (e.g., “Him is happy”). The nativist answer (e.g., Wexler, 1998) is that every
language has a “default” form of each personal pronoun; the form that you use when
there’s nothing else in the sentence to guide you (for example, you would say “Me too!”,
not “I too!”). The motivation for this explanation is that the concept of a default form is
again something that children are argued to be born with. The constructivist answer (e.g.,
Freudenthal et al, 2007; Kirjavainen et al, 2009) is that, just like for the first type of error
in this section, children are storing sentences that they have heard from adults and
missing off the first word (e.g., Let me do it à Me do it). A problem for these accounts is
that children seem to make the errors more often than would be predicted by either. This
suggests that, whatever else may or may not be going on, children are simply mixing up
the two words in each pair. They know that both Me and I refer somehow to themselves
and that She and Her refer somehow to females, but don’t understand why you must
sometimes use one alternative, and sometimes the other (Rispoli, 1994; Ambridge &
Pine, 2006).
He card reads good: Basic Word Order
We have already encountered the scene in Burns’ Heir, where Bart tries to
persuade Mr. Burns to make him his heir by reading an error-filled speech written for him
by Homer. Oblivious to the numerous errors in the speech, Homer proudly says to Marge
“He card reads good”. In order to focus on the issue we’re interested in here, we’ll
overlook the debate over whether Homer should have said “well” instead of “good”
(“good” is probably fine in colloquial American English), and pretend that he said
“cards” instead of “card” (this does seem like an error, just not the one we’re interested in
here). So, what we’re left with is this:
What Homer (nearly) said:
What Homer should have said:
He cards reads good
He reads cards good
Why is the first wrong and the second right? The answer is that English follows
[SUBJECT] [VERB] [OBJECT] word order. What this means, oversimplifying quite a
bit, is that the person who does the action (the [SUBJECT]) comes first, then the action
(the [VERB]), then the thing that has the action done to it (the [OBJECT])
SUBJECT VERB OBJECT
He
reads
cards
(good)
Homer’s mistake involves using – instead of the correct [SUBJECT] [VERB] [OBJECT]
word order – the order [SUBJECT] [OBJECT] [VERB].
SUBJECT OBJECT VERB
He
cards
reads
(good)
But here’s a thing: Some languages do use this SUBJECT OBJECT VERB (SOV) word
order. In Turkish, for example, (the equivalent of) He cards reads would be right, and He
reads cards wrong. So how do English-speaking children learn that their language uses
SVO word order, whilst Turkish children learn that their language uses SOV?
The nativist answer (e.g., Gibson & Wexler, 1994) is that children are born with a
kind of mental switch called a parameter. This switch has two settings: OV (the Englishtype setting) and VO (the Turkish-type setting). Children have to listen to the language
around them in order to figure out which setting to flick the switch to. Once they’ve done
that, the rules of sentence construction that children also born with kick in, and they’re
away (actually, they also have to flick another switch with settings of SV and VS, but
we’ll ignore that since very few languages have the VS setting). The problem with this
account is the idea that children can figure out whether to set the switch to SV or VS by
listening to the language around them. If words came with labels on them saying
“VERB” and “OBJECT” this would be easy. As soon as an English child heard – for
example – close[VERB] the door[OBJECT] – she could flick her switch to the VO
setting. But obviously, words don’t come with these labels (for one attempt to solve this
problem, and a critical response, see Pinker, 1989, and Ambridge, Pine & Lieven, in
press, respectively).
The constructivist alternative (e.g,. Tomasello, 2003) is that children aren’t born
with these rules or parameters at all and, instead, build generalizations on the basis of the
language that they hear. For example, suppose that a child hears and stores the strings I’m
eating it, I’m hitting it and I’m kicking it and abstracts across these to form an I’m
[ACTION]ing it slot-and-frame schema. Suppose further that the same child hears and
stores the strings Mummy kissed Daddy, Daddy Kissed Mummy and Mummy kissed the
baby and abstracts across these to form a [KISSER] kissed [KISSEE] slot-and-frame
schema. The final stage requires children to notice some similarity between these two
schemas. For example the relationship between I and [eating/hitting/kicking] - a kind of
doer-action relationship – is kind of parallel to the relationship between a KISSER and
kiss. The idea is that this similarity allows children to align and analogize across the two
structures to form a more general [DO-ER] [ACTION] [DONE-TO] pattern that is
basically equivalent to a [SUBJECT] [VERB] [OBJECT] rule. The problem for this
account is that nobody has yet conducted a study which demonstrates that children are
able to perform this abstract leap of reasoning (except for domains other than languagelearning; see Gentner & Medina, 1998).
This is not to say that there is no experimental evidence for or against either
account more broadly. In fact, there is loads (e.g., see Ambridge & Lieven, 2011; 209242 for over 30 pages of it). Obviously, it is not possible to summarize all of these
findings here, but what it boils down to is the following: Evidence for the constructivist
approach comes from findings that most of children’s earliest utterances – both in
experiments and more naturalistic settings - look as if they could have been generated
using low-level slot and frame schemas (e.g., I’m [ACTION]ing it) (see Tomasello, 2000;
Ambridge & Lieven, in press, for reviews). Evidence from the nativist approach comes
from findings that even very young children (i.e., 1-2 years) appear to know something
general about SVO word order (Gertner, Fisher & Eisengart, 2006; Noble, Rowland &
Pine, 2011). For example, if they hear a sentence such as The duck is glorping the bunny
and are asked to point to the matching video from a choice of two, most correctly choose
a video where a duck is doing something to a bunny, rather than one where a bunny is
doing something to a duck (note that “glorping” is an invented word for an invented
action, in order to prevent children using their knowledge of familiar verbs to solve the
task).
And the elephant that couldn't stop laughing was put to death: More advanced
sentences
Theories of child language acquisition must be able to explain not only the bread-andbutter phenomena of single words and simple sentences, but also more complex sentence
types such as passives and questions.
We have already met one passive sentence “And the elephant that couldn’t stop
laughing was put to death”. How did Kent Brockman learn to produce sentences of this
type (as we have already seen, he certainly did not learn them directly from his parents).
The nativist answer starts with the observation that for each passive sentence, there is an
equivalent active sentence (in order to focus on the issue at hand, it will help if we
simplify the sentence a bit, including – sorry – replacing the euphemism “put to death”
with the much more straightforward “killed”).
Active: The vet killed the elephant
Passive: The elephant was killed
The child starts out with the phrase “killed the elephant” and generates the passive
sentence by “moving” the thing that has the action done to it (the elephant) to the start of
the sentence (and inserting was)
The elephant (was) killed the elephant
This is a nativist account because the idea is that the child is born already knowing this
movement rule. All she has to do is discover whether or not movement happens in her
language – it doesn’t in some – much like setting word-order parameters (see above).
Evidence for this account comes from studies showing that even very young children are
good at producing passives in some circumstances (e.g., Bencini & Valian, 2008). The
constructivist alternative is that children again schematize across sentences that they hear
(e.g., It got hit by it; It got killed by it; It got broken by it) to form slot-and-frame
schemas that they can use for their own productions (e.g., It got [ACTION]ed by it). The
evidence for this view is that children show best performance when asked to produce
passives for which these schemas can be used (Savage et al, 2003).
Questions come in two different flavours. Yes/no questions are questions that
expect a Yes or No answer; for example Agent Scully’s question to Homer in The
Springfield Files: “We’re going to ask you a few simple yes or no questions. Do you
understand?” (Homer answers “Yes”, which causes the lie detector to explode). Whquestions use a wh-word (who, what, why, where, when or – an honorary wh-word – how
[much/many etc.]). For example, in Homie The Clown, Krusty asks his devoted audience
the wh-questions “Who do you love?” (“Krusty”), “How much do you love me?” (“With
all our hearts”) and “What would you do if I went off the air?” (“We’d kill ourselves”).
According to nativist accounts, questions – like passives – are also generated
using innate movement rules; for example “Who do you love” from “You (do) love
who?”
Who do you do love who?
Again, the evidence for this account is that children – overall – make relatively few errors
in their naturalistic speech (e.g, Stromswold, 1990), though questions with do are a bit of
an exception, often showing higher error rates. The constructivist alterative is – yet again
– that children build up slot-and-frame schemas (e.g., What are you [ACTION]?) by
schematizing across suitable frames that they hear (e.g., What are you
eating/reading/doing? etc.). Again, the evidence for this account is that children show
their best performance when they can potentially use one of these question schemas (e.g.,
Rowland, 2007; Ambridge & Rowland, 2009), and sometimes make errors when they
cannot. Many children struggle with negative questions and ask – for example – Why can
I can’t have some? (instead of Why can’t I have some?), presumably because negative
questions – and hence the opportunity to form a suitable slot-and-frame pattern – are rare
in the input.
Summary
This brief review has contrasted nativist and constructivist accounts of children’s
language development across four central domains, using examples drawn from The
Simpsons: Word-learning (Lisa’ First Word), morphology (I once picked my nose til it
bleeded), basic word order (He Card Reads Good) and more advanced sentences (And the
elephant who couldn’t stop laughing was put to death). What ties these domains together
is that, in every case, the nativist account starts from the assumption that children are
born with something that helps simplify the learning task - whether (a) assumptions about
how words work (b) a default-rule in morphology (c) word order parameters or (d)
movement rules – whereas the constructivist account does not, instead arguing that – in
every case – children build up slot-and-frame schemas from the language that they hear.
Nativist theorists take low overall error rates and children’s generally impressive
(and fast) language learning as evidence for the view that we must all be born with some
knowledge that gives us a head start. Constructivist theorists take unevenness – i.e.,
higher rates of correct performance when children can potentially use a slot-and-frame
schema than when they cannot – as evidence for their view. Obviously attempting to
evaluate these two views in their entirety is well beyond the scope of a short introductory
chapter (for one attempt to do so, see Ambridge & Lieven, 2011), but it is my hope that
this chapter has at least encouraged some readers to explore further this (to me)
fascinating debate.
We began this chapter with a question: “How do children learn to speak their
native language?” and dismissed – with the help of an example from TV’s Kent
Brockman – the idea that children might simply memorize all the sentences that they will
ever need. Instead, we saw that what children must actually do is to use the language that
they hear to abstract rules or sentence patterns that they can they use to produce entirely
new sentences. In other words, and to borrow another classic Homerism (from ‘Round
Springfield), children are like jazz musicians “They just make it up as they go along”.
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