Is Correcting Your Kid's Language Helpful? Negative Evidence

When a kid makes a mistake in their language, does it help them fix it to correct the error? How do they deal with linguistic feedback? In this week's episode, we talk about negative evidence and child language acquisition: what it is, when we provide it, and how kids listen to it.
This is Topic #43!
This week's tag language: Teochew!
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: / thelingspace
Twitter: / thelingspace
Facebook: / thelingspace
And at our website, www.thelingspa... !
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at www.thelingspace.com/episode-43/
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Brown, R, & C. Hanlon. (1970) Derivational complexity and order of acquisition in child speech. In JR Hayes (ed.), Cognition and the Development of Language, 11-53. New York: Wiley.
Hirsh-Pasek, K., R. Treiman, & M. Schneiderman. (1984). Brown and Hanlon revisited: Mothers’ sensitivity to ungrammatical forms. Journal of Child Language, 11, 81-88.
Marcus, G.F. (1993). Negative evidence in language acquisition. Cognition, 46, 53-85.
McNeill, D. (1966). Developmental psycholinguistics. In F. Smith & G.A. Miller (Eds.). The genesis of language, 15-84. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Looking forward to next week!

[@XGoken]

The verdict explained at 7:20 was EXACTLY the idea I came up with a few years ago!

[@DeveloPlayLLC]

Yay! You talked about the things I thought you were going to and it was perfect! I am fascinated by this idea that kids are helped not at all by their parents correcting their language use, and that instead, it's through their brains sifting through huge amounts of data that they learn (pretty quickly!) how grammar is structured and how to use it. So cool!

[@thelingspace]

Developmental Enthusiast Thanks for the comment! And yeah, that is one of the coolest things about how acquisition works. Kids don't need to get corrected; they just need more time and more data. And the fact that we're just really not as good at giving corrections as we'd think makes sense, too. Child language acquisition is just a really fun topic. ^_^

[@omp199]

I love my nephews' grammar. They seem to have a particular fondness for the ablaut in verbs like "sing" / "sang" / "sung", and they use the same pattern for all sorts of verbs that don't conventionally follow that pattern. "Bring" / "brought" / "brought" invariably becomes "bring" / "brang" / "brung", and there are more obscure ones, too, that unfortunately I can't remember. Sometimes I have to think for a second to mentally translate what they are saying! My youngest nephew, who is 5, used the word "pack". I can't remember what the sentence was, but it might have been something like, "I pack it up." It took me a while to work out that he meant, "I picked it up"!

[@thelingspace]

omp199 Cool! And yeah, I bet they don't like changing up their approach, right? These sorts of errors are pretty much the cutest. ^_^

[@omp199]

The Ling Space I can't bring myself to even attempt to correct them, because it's just too adorable. :)

[@Jcarr250]

omp199 Is this in the US, it seems to me AmEn tends to be generalizing those features in general. Maybe not for those specific words but it seems to me people prefer to guess the usage of ablaut over other irregular forms, and seem eager to use it.

[@omp199]

Umbrall We're an English family, living in the UK. When you speak of people preferring to guess the usage of ablaut, are you referring to children who are still learning the language, or does this carry over into adult speech in the US?

[@omp199]

The Ling Space Here's a genuine, unprompted conversation that I had with my youngest nephew just yesterday. I am paraphrasing slightly, as I can't remember _exactly_ what we said, but the verb forms are as given: *George:* Pick a ball. Blue or green. *Me:* I think... blue. *George:* Okay. You pack the blue one. *Me:* [amused] Yes, I pack the blue one. *George:* You _picked_ the blue one!!! So, I went along with his usage, but this only led to _him_ correcting _me_!

[@yingyusu3529]

I am big linguistics nerd and I gotta say I love your channel so much! Thanks for doing this! I'm using your videos as supplementary materials for the child language acquisition class I am TAing :)

[@MrSparki94]

When my 2 yo nephew came home from daycare, he had the happy-birthday-song stuck in his head and sung it all the time. However, he mispronounced the "th" like a "z". After showing him what to do with his tongue and teeth to make that sound (not English native) he wholeheartedly started laughing and then proceeded to "imitate" me, which included lots of more giggles and spit.

[@teacherdkennedy]

When I taught high school in rural Mississippi, I gave a pre-test on the whole I and me thing. Most of the kids (correctly) described the way they were using the words, rather than the "correct" (standard English) way of using them. Their explanations ran something like, "You use i at the beginning of a sentence if it is just you doing something and me at the beginning if it is you and someone else." (I went to the store; me and my friend went to the store). I had already learned that there was a grammar to black English or slang or whatever you want to call it, but this really brought it home to me.

[@thelingspace]

+Diana Kennedy Interesting! Yeah, there definitely are rules underlying these things, and it's cool when people have this awareness of how these things work. ^_^ Good to hear from you again, by the way! Glad to see you're back.

[@teacherdkennedy]

+The Ling Space I always save your emails and plan to get to them....and do eventually. Had I but time enough...

[@plerpplerp5599]

Diana Kennedy ..saying "John and I" instead of "John and me" is actually pretentious and was brought about by a 18th century priest, Rowe, who thought English pronouns should behave like Latin ones. Nobody says "It is I" so why should you say "John and I..."?

[@Φωτό-ρ7π]

@@plerpplerp5599 if that's true then that's also fell into the category that Steven pinker explained in his style lecture, sadly the euphemism treadmill is not from that lecture like bruh what the what is powder room

[@frankharr9466]

OH, my mom complained about my language so much. Accent, syntax, mumbling. It was awful sometimes. Not all the time. But when she payed attention, it was tough.

[@ailurophilely]

You explained it great.

[@thelingspace]

ailurophile Glad you liked it! Thanks for the kind words. ^_^

[@TraciTariVlog]

Another great video! Very interesting!!

[@thelingspace]

Tracy Alessandra Glad you liked it! Thanks. ^^

[@enska3]

I'm really glad I found this video. I'm doing a paper on linguistic corrections, and I kept getting confused about all the different terms that articles used for different types of corrections. It seems like researchers categorized "negative evidence" separately from other terms like "recast", and I was getting confused thinking that "recast" was therefore a positive input. But based on this video, I think that they're just using the term "negative evidence" to mean something very specific and that other terms could also be negative in the sense that they give information about something that's ungrammatical.

[@plerpplerp5599]

As a child I absolutely insisted despite constant correction that "he/it/she hadS" was correct until I realised that I was the only one saying that and then complied to what everyone else was saying!😂

[@TerribleStormer]

Great video again guys. So I wanted to ask you something about Universal Grammar regarding this video. I'm no one to argue for or against it, I'm not a real linguist. But as far as I know the main argument on the pro-side is something along the lines of: "There are 2 kinds of information when learning a language. Positive and negative evidence. There is more than enough positive evidence to be found in daily use but babys hardly ever get any negative evidence. In conclusion, there is not enough information for a child to learn all the arbitrary concepts of their language. There has to be some kind of grammar preinstalled in their minds, some kind of Universal Grammar." I get this argument but now I'm being told that negative evidence isn't important anyway. Wouldn't this contradict the Theory of Universal Grammar? In previous videos you told us that you believe in the Theory of Universal Grammar, so I guess you're the best ones to ask. I hope that I could get my point across, not a native English speaker.

[@GregSanders]

Interesting that giving negative feedback doesn't actually help kids much on their language acquisition. That would fit with immersion programs I suppose, focus on giving the kids more data and not necessarily more feedback. Do we know anything about whether the same is true about second language acquisition for adults?

[@thelingspace]

Greg Sanders This is a pretty complicated question. Adults have a much higher ability to use this conscious feedback to inform what they're doing, so on a short term scale, you wouldn't get these conversations where someone just couldn't make themselves do stuff in a particular way (except for pronunciation, where often if you can't hear the difference between two sounds, you can't make the difference, either). But whether adults can internalize that negative feedback and retain it long-term without sufficient exposure is more unclear. In other words, you can learn just about anything, but to store it as language, like stick it in our grammatical system, we may be on the same path as kids are. There's a good amount of research in this area, but we could still use more to nail this down. We'll be talking about this topic more when we do our episode on linguistics and teaching soon. ^_^

[@GregSanders]

Exciting, I look forward to that episode!

[@juanpablovargasgonzalez5482]

Such a good video!

[@thelingspace]

+Juan Pablo Vargas Gonzalez Glad you liked it! Thanks for the kind words. ^_^

[@nz955]

First of all, thanks for all these fantastic videos. I really enjoy watching them. :) I need to ask a question related to a problem that I'm having, though. When I click on some videos on the website's page( www.thelingspace.com/episodes-by-number/ ), it directs me to youtube; therefore, I cannot see the extra materials. But for the ones that are watchable on the lingspace website, I find the extra materials just below the video. How can I have access to the extra materials for the topics like topic 43, 41, 36 etc?

[@KemalGon]

great video. thank for the clarification.

[@felipevasconcelos6736]

What should the adult do of the kid has a higher interaction with other kids and illiterates than with literate adults?

[@mohammedsaleh7829]

You are class!

[@Gamer-fi8rl]

What about positive evidence please

[@RobespierreThePoof]

"Nobody dont like me" "No. Nobody likes you." "Nobody dont like me" "No. Nobody likes you." "Nobody dont like me" "No. Say 'Nobody likes me." "Nobody like you" "No. Nobody likes you." "Nobody dont like me or you" "No. Say nobody likes me" "Okay, Nobody don't likes you, mommy" And this is how you improve the self-esteem of your child, but not their grammar.

[@DeadHeatHipHop]

i love REAL hip hop! ive been making it for about 15 years! i would love if i can inspire some of you with my work!

[@wagnerjunior6524]

I'm still not convinced we should totally quit correcting them, since providing kids with the grammatical correct sentences would help them pile more correct data for their brains to work with.

[@ShekaranJagadeesan]

3:15 not Politically Correct 😅

[@inputimmersion9577]

Language is acquired through experience not correction or explanation. Point barre.

[@ct7482]

Motohol

[@Chubbchubbzza007]

37th

[@johrali]

Arrogant kids!