The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research

By Clifton Pye

The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, Clifton Pye shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. Both an overview of lessons Pye has gleaned from more than thirty years of studying how children learn Mayan languages as well as a strong case for a novel method of researching crosslinguistic language acquisition more broadly, this book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage for untangling the complexities of first language acquisition.

Pye here applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages—K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol—showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. His holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children’s lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so. More than this, he expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages’ variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, he argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one’s native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226481319

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48128-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-53961-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48131-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226481319.001.0001

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Pye, Clifton, author.

Title: The comparative method of language acquisition research / Clifton Pye.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017016752 | ISBN 9780226481289 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226481319 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Language acquisition. | Mayan languages—Acquisition. | Chol language—Acquisition. | Mam language—Acquisition. | Quiché language—Acquisition. | Psycholinguistics—Comparative method.

Classification: LCC P118 .P94 2017 | DDC 401/.93—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016752

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research

CLIFTON PYE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1. Comparing Languages

1.1. The Monolingual Approach to Crosslinguistic Research

1.2. The Unit of Comparison Problem

1.3. Why Is Crosslinguistic Research Needed?

1.4. The Comparative Method of Crosslinguistic Research

1.5. The Comparative Method and Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition

CHAPTER 2. A History of Crosslinguistic Research on Language Acquisition

2.1. The Period of Single Language Studies

2.2. The Search for Language Universals

2.3. Parameter Theory

2.4. Crosslinguistic Surveys

2.5. The Acquisition of Polysynthesis

2.6. Building a Comprehensive Description of Language Acquisition

CHAPTER 3. The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research

3.1. The Comparative Method of Historical Linguistics

3.2. The Acquisition of Negation in the Germanic Languages

3.3. The Acquisition of Verb Inflection in the Germanic languages

3.4. Conclusion

CHAPTER 4. The Structure of Mayan Languages

4.1. The Synthetic Structure of Mayan Languages

4.2. The Mayan Lexicon

4.3. The Mayan Verb Complex

4.3.1. Mayan Person Marking

4.3.2. Mayan Verb Suffixes

4.4. Stative Predicates

4.5. Mayan Nominalization

4.6. Summary

4.7. Mayan Syntax

4.8. The Mayan Communities

4.9. The Acquisition Database for the Mayan Languages

4.9.1. The K’iche’ Language Samples

4.9.2. The Mam Language Samples

4.9.3. The Ch’ol Language Samples

CHAPTER 5. The Acquisition of the Mayan Lexicon

5.1. Mayan Lexical Categories

5.1.1. Nouns

5.1.2. Relational Nouns

5.1.3. Adjectives

5.1.4. Verbs

5.1.5. Positionals

5.1.6. Particles

5.2. The Production of Lexical Categories in K’iche’

5.3. The Production of Lexical Categories in Mam

5.4. The Production of Lexical Categories in Ch’ol

5.5. Comparing Lexical Production in K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol

5.6. Mayan Pronouns

5.7. The Acquisition of Mayan Pronouns

5.7.1. The Acquisition of Pronouns in Ch’ol

5.7.2. The Acquisition of Pronouns in Mam

5.7.3. The Acquisition of Pronouns in K’iche’

5.8. Summary

CHAPTER 6. The Acquisition of the Mayan Intransitive Verb Complex

6.1. Acquisition of the Intransitive Verb Complex in K’iche’

6.2. Acquisition of the Intransitive Verb Complex in Mam

6.3. Acquisition of the Intransitive Verb Complex in Ch’ol

6.4. Summary

CHAPTER 7. The Acquisition of the Mayan Transitive Verb Complex

7.1. Acquisition of the Transitive Verb Complex in K’iche’

7.2. Acquisition of the Transitive Verb Complex in Mam

7.3. Acquisition of the Transitive Verb Complex in Ch’ol

7.4. Summary

CHAPTER 8. The Acquisition of Person Marking in the Mayan Verb Complex

8.1. The Acquisition of Ergative Person Markers on Transitive Verbs

8.2. The Acquisition of Ergative Person Markers on Intransitive Verbs

8.3. The Acquisition of Absolutive Person Markers on Intransitive Verbs

8.4. Conclusion

CHAPTER 9. The Acquisition of Mayan Argument Structures

9.1. Argument Structure in K’iche’

9.2. Argument Structure in Mam

9.3. Argument Structure in Ch’ol

9.4. Comparative Argument Structure in K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol

9.5. Children’s Argument Structure in K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol

9.5.1. Children’s Argument Production in K’iche’

9.5.2. Children’s Argument Production in Mam

9.5.3. Children’s Argument Production in Ch’ol

9.5.4. Comparative Argument Structure in Child K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol

9.6. Conclusion

CHAPTER 10. Argument Realization in Mayan Languages

10.1. Argument Realization in K’iche’

10.2. Argument Realization in Mam

10.3. Argument Realization in Ch’ol

10.4. Comparing Argument Realization in K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol

10.5. K’iche’ Children’s Production of Verb Arguments

10.6. Mam Children’s Production of Verb Arguments

10.7. Ch’ol Children’s Production of Verb Arguments

10.8. Comparison of Children’s Argument Realization in K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol

10.9. Analysis or Synthesis

CHAPTER 11. Conclusion

11.1. Broader Implications

11.2. Theoretical Implications

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

References

Index

Preface

Modern research on language acquisition was profoundly shaped by Chomsky’s revolutionary proposal that children must have access to something like a language acquisition device or, in present terms, Universal Grammar. Tacit knowledge of the abstract structure of human language would equip children with the linguistic foundation they need to break the code of the adult language that was spoken all around them. This theoretical perspective implies that, no matter what the language, children would initially demonstrate a common grammar at some level. This perspective biases the researcher to seek out universals in child language and ignore the differences. Differences according to this perspective are the result of superficial features of the languages, the acquisition process, and individual differences between children. Differences are uninformative in the quest to identify universals of language acquisition.

I began my academic career searching for such universals. I was fortunate at the time to be a student of Terrence Kaufman, a leading investigator of Mayan languages. He introduced me to the Mayan language family and tolerated my interest in the potential implications the Mayan languages have for theories of language acquisition. I began my research career by investigating whether Roger Brown’s claims for the order of morpheme acquisition held for the Mayan language K’iche’ (Pye 1979).

Brown (1973) claimed that children acquiring English begin producing inflections after first learning to put words together into primitive sentences. He referred to children’s initial two word utterances as telegraphic speech because they were similar to telegrams, which were still being sent in those days. Telegraphic speech tends to omit functional morphemes such as determiners, tense inflections, and auxiliary verbs, which were also missing in the children’s speech. Brown discovered that children acquiring English would begin producing functional morphemes in similar orders beginning with the progressive suffix -ing and the prepositions in and on, and slowly adding determiners, the copula be, and the auxiliary verbs.

I set off to Guatemala in 1977 to investigate whether children acquiring the Mayan language K’iche’ would demonstrate the same telegraphic features that Brown had discovered in the language of American children. The initial problem I encountered was learning how to reconcile the differences between the functional morphemes in English and K’iche’. The regular English plural suffix -s is used on all count nouns in a plural context (e.g., ‘two cows’). K’iche’ has two regular plural morphemes that are independent words rather than inflections. The plural morpheme taq is used with all count nouns, while the plural morpheme ee is used with animate nouns. The K’iche’ plural morphemes can be used in combination with each other or omitted entirely. Plural marking on nouns is optional in K’iche’ because the verbs also inflect for number agreement with subjects and objects.

These differences hint at a proposal by Quine (1968) that differences in number marking between languages signal profound differences in the underlying concepts. There is simply no basis for comparing plural concepts in K’iche’ and English because the semantic structures of the two languages are so radically different. Such differences lead to very different acquisition routes in the two languages and defeat the search for superficial universals in children’s language.

I quickly discovered how different language acquisition could be in a Mayan language when the first recordings showed that although K’iche’ children simplify their productions, they do not omit all functional morphemes. One example is the children’s production of the K’iche’ existential verb k’oolik. This verb translates into English as the verb be in the sense of being in a location and have in the sense of having a dog. The verb contains the root morpheme -k’oo, the positional suffix -l, and the intransitive verb suffix -ik. Brown predicted that K’iche’ children would produce the verb root and omit the suffixes, whereas K’iche’ children did just the opposite. They produced the suffixes and omitted the positional root. The K’iche’ children demonstrated early mastery of the various suffixes on intransitive and transitive verbs and thus showed that structural differences between K’iche’ and English had a direct bearing on the form of children’s utterances (Pye 1983). This example showed that theoretical predictions based on the study of English did not hold for acquisition of other languages. New data from other languages continue to prove this point.

I began a second phase of my career when I undertook a collaboration with Penny Brown, Lourdes de León, and Barbara Pfeiler to investigate whether the speech of children acquiring the Mayan languages Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Yucatec, and K’iche’ had any linguistic features in common. At first glance, these languages have many structural similarities. Verbs in all four languages are marked for aspect and agreement with subject and object. The verbs in all four languages also have suffixes like those that I had found in the early speech of K’iche’ children. Although we initially expected the comparison to be easy, we soon discovered that these four Mayan languages had innovated different uses for their cognate morphemes. We faced the same problem that I had initially encountered when I had tried to compare plurals in English and K’iche’.

While the problem of comparison was similar, it was slightly more tractable when restricted to comparison between genetically related languages. The differences made it possible to explore the effects that these differences had on the children’s productions in great detail. For example, the absolutive subject marker is a prefix in K’iche’ and a suffix in Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yucatec. The absolutive markers have similar forms in the four languages, apart from a difference in number marking. K’iche’ has six distinct absolutive markers: three for singular persons and three for plural persons. Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yucatec combine the singular markers with a separate plural morpheme so that children acquiring these languages hear the same person marker used in both singular and plural contexts. We found that children acquiring Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yucatec produce the absolutive suffixes much earlier than K’iche’ children do (Brown et al. 2013).

This collaboration led to two developments in my research. I began to develop a framework for crosslinguistic research, the comparative method, and I started to apply this framework to a series of investigations across different Mayan languages. With support from the National Science Foundation, I began a project with Pedro Mateo Pedro that documented how children acquire the Mayan languages Ch’ol, Q’anjob’al, and Mam. Pedro is a native speaker of Q’anjob’al and arrived at the University of Kansas just in time to help me undertake this project. He was instrumental in helping me recruit and train native speakers of the three languages to record and transcribe children’s speech in three Mayan communities. He has now published his findings on the acquisition of Q’anjob’al (Mateo Pedro 2015).

My experience on this project provided a better understanding of the full scope of language acquisition research. Rather than collecting acquisition data in order to test some linguistic theory of the day, I came to view language acquisition research in the context of language loss. The accelerating loss of indigenous languages around the world requires investigators to redirect their attention to documenting the acquisition of the world’s endangered languages and the unique challenges the structures of these languages pose for children. The field of language acquisition research has largely neglected children acquiring endangered languages and our knowledge of the human potential for language acquisition is correspondingly deficient.

Documenting the acquisition of an endangered language requires that attention be paid to documenting the full scope of children’s linguistic accomplishments. The investigator of an endangered language must assume that there will never be another opportunity for further research on the language. This situation requires the documentation of children’s language at all levels from their first sounds to their abilities to engage in discourse. All of these features connect in a holistic fashion that makes it impossible to study how children acquire plural markers without also understanding the various ways that a language uses plural markers across different domains of discourse. Recording how children interact with their caretakers in daily activities is the best way to understand how adults and children deploy the resources of underdocumented languages. The investigator has a responsibility to the local community as well as the scientific community to produce a record of children’s language development that is as informative as possible.

The comparative method of language acquisition research that I describe in this book grew from the data that we recorded from Ch’ol, Q’anjob’al, and Mam, as well as from a later investigation of the acquisition of Teenek (Wastek) made by Barbara Pfeiler. These investigations showed how data from additional languages helped complete a picture of Mayan language development that I had begun with research on K’iche’. The Ch’ol, Q’anjob’al, and Mam data filled in the gap between K’iche’ and Yucatec that we had explored earlier. With the additional data, we were in a better position to see how the historical changes between the languages resulted in structures that Mayan children interpret in different ways. Teenek is the most distinctive Mayan language, but with the help of our previous studies, we were able to fit the Teenek data into the larger pattern of Mayan language acquisition.

Writing a book on Mayan language acquisition has provided a new way to apply the comparative method to language acquisition research. My colleagues and I have published a series of articles using the comparative method, but we have always been constrained by the need to confine our investigations to the allotted space in each publication. These space limitations have prevented us from providing a detailed account of Mayan grammar as well as detailing the interconnections between the acquisitions of different levels of the grammars.

In this book I have the opportunity to demonstrate the comparative method and explain its rationale. However, in addition I am able to buttress this discussion with a sketch of Mayan grammar that explains how the individual pieces fit into a complete language. Another section provides a brief history of the research on Mayan language acquisition. The Mayan acquisition studies that I present in the remaining chapters grew out of these preceding studies but differ from these studies in that the analyses that I undertake in each chapter build on the analyses presented in the previous chapters. My hope is that by the end of the book readers will have a better idea of how the individual investigations combine to document the acquisition of a complete language.

I have tried to put myself in the place of readers not familiar with the structure of Mayan languages. I have minimized the grammatical discussions by focusing on the acquisition of three Mayan languages: K’iche’, Mam, and Ch’ol. These three languages belong to three different branches of the Mayan language family and demonstrate the startling ways in which historically related languages can put the same morphemes to distinct uses. While I refer to acquisition data from other Mayan languages from time to time, my hope is that readers will acquire an understanding of how the similarities and differences between the three target languages shape children’s acquisition of the languages on a number of different levels.

I have also kept the analyses in this book at a fairly general level by omitting a number of details about the individual languages when I felt that these details would obscure the larger picture. Interested readers can consult the grammars of K’iche’ (Larsen 1988, Mondloch 1978), Mam (England 1983), and Ch’ol (Vazquéz Álvarez 2011) for details. I also omitted discussion of the theoretical implications of the Mayan results because this discussion would obscure the larger picture of Mayan language acquisition. I have addressed theoretical implications in a number of my publications (e.g., Pye 1990, 2007b; Pye and Pfeiler 2017).

Mayan Orthography

I use the practical orthography developed by the Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín (Kaufman 1976) for the Mayan examples in this book except that I use <’> rather than <7> for the glottal stop. The other orthographic symbols have their standard International Phonetic Alphabet values except: <b’> = /, <tz> = /ts/, <tz’> = /ts’/, <tx> = /tʂ/, <tx’> = /tʂ’/, <ch> = /, <ch’> = ’/, <j> = /x/, <y> = /j/, <nh> = /ŋ/, <ñ> = /, and <ä> = /i/. <x> = / in K’iche’, Ch’ol, and most Mayan languages, but <x> = /ʂ/ in Mam and Q’anjob’al; <xh> = / in Mam and Q’anjob’al.

CHAPTER ONE

Comparing Languages

1.1   The Monolingual Approach to Crosslinguistic Research

The modern era of language acquisition research began with the recognition that human language ability has more in common with human locomotion than with the ability to write (Chomsky 1965). Normally developing children learn to walk and talk without special instruction and in a wide variety of cultural contexts. Children only learn to write after years of training, and even then many children struggle to match written characters with the language that they speak. The difference between the tacit learning evident in learning to walk and speak and the conscious effort necessary to learn to write is evidence that oral or signed language is an ability that is built into the human genome. Children have been acquiring language without special instruction for at least two hundred thousand years.

Despite the evidence that children are able to acquire any human language, language acquisition research has failed to develop a systematic method for comparing language acquisition in different languages. In her summary article on crosslinguistic research Ruth Berman (2014: 33) notes an explicit and generally applicable articulation of what is universal and what particular in first language acquisition . . . would greatly advance the field of child language research as a whole. Crosslinguistic research on language acquisition resembles a giant jigsaw puzzle in that we know more than ever before about the acquisition of individual languages, but we lack the means to assemble all of these pieces into a coherent picture of the acquisition process as it unfolds in diverse human languages.

Since the first baby biographies of Darwin (1877) and Taine (1876), acquisition research remains focused on the acquisition of single languages. The monolingual focus of language acquisition research is reflected in the methods, descriptions, and theoretical orientation of the field. Researchers are trained to investigate how children acquire a single language rather than comparing how children acquire different languages. We know more than ever before how children acquire individual languages, but we lack an explicit procedure for comparing results across different languages. Language acquisition research lacks a framework for systematic crosslinguistic investigation that would fit results from individual languages into a comprehensive picture of children’s language abilities. Understanding how children acquire specific languages does not address the more general problem of understanding children’s ability to acquire all languages.

Textbooks on language acquisition reflect this single language approach. With few exceptions, textbooks take students through the basic descriptions of language development in English (Slobin 2014). Students learn that babies can perceive all of the sounds in the world’s languages, but they only learn how children acquire phonemes in one language. Ambridge and Lieven acknowledge this limitation in their textbook and attribute this situation to the fact that most of the theory development and empirical research has been conducted in countries where these languages [cp. European] are spoken (2011:139). The textbooks written by David Ingram (1989) and Barbara Lust (2006) have sections that discuss the acquisition of other languages, but these discussions only show how different results can be in other languages rather than build a comprehensive understanding of children’s ability to acquire all languages.

My claim that we lack a method of crosslinguistic research may appear to be extreme in the face of the growing number of crosslinguistic studies on language acquisition, some of which I have contributed to myself. Multiplying studies of individual languages does not address the problem of comparing results in different languages. One indication of the single-language orientation of crosslinguistic research is that the term crosslinguistic is even applied to research on a single language when its focus is not English. Research on the acquisition of Turkish is presumed to be crosslinguistic, while research on English is not. This usage reflects an assumption in the field that research on the acquisition of English provides a standard for crosslinguistic comparison, and that English presents a typical set of acquisition problems. While we certainly know more about the acquisition of English than about the acquisition of any other language, there are many reasons why English is a spectacularly poor choice for a standard of acquisition research. For example, English has an odd vowel system, little morphology, and a rigid word order. No rational linguist would choose English as a model of human language.

Crosslinguistic research on language acquisition typically focuses on the study of individual languages. Most of the chapters in the five-volume series The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition edited by Dan Slobin describe the acquisition of individual languages. Two summary chapters by Slobin (1985, 1997) attempt to draw common threads from all of these studies, but the chapter by Melissa Bowerman (1985) reminds readers that exceptions to broad generalizations are easy to find. Another example comes from a series of studies directed by Wolfgang Dressler (cf. Bittner, Dressler, and Kilani-Schoch 2003). These studies examine the impact of typology on the development of different linguistic categories such as inflection in a variety of languages (almost entirely European). Both of these research programs provide a wealth of findings on the acquisition of individual languages, and yet neither project addresses the general problem of comparing children’s ability to acquire languages with different grammatical structures.

Experimental research on language acquisition is especially prone to a single-language orientation. This orientation does not stop investigators from drawing universal conclusions from the study of one language. Soja, Carey, and Spelke’s study of children’s use of count and mass nouns (1991) is a classic example of the single-language approach to experimental investigation. Soja et al. presented two-year-old children acquiring English with novel objects that had the characteristics of individuated objects or masses and asked the children to extend a novel label to another instance of the objects and masses. They found that their subjects distinguished between objects and masses in a statistically significant fashion and concluded young children have an innate knowledge of the difference between mass and count nouns.

Imai and Gentner (1997) replicated Soja et al.’s study with groups of children and adults acquiring English and Japanese. Japanese does not distinguish between mass and count nouns in the English manner. Instead, Japanese treats virtually all nonhuman nouns as mass terms, and then requires numeral classifiers to count individual objects. Imai and Gentner replicated Soja et al.’s results for their subjects acquiring English, but they found significant differences between the Japanese and English children and adults. Their study showed that the children’s count/mass distinction was learned rather than the product of an innate ontology, but they did not discuss the results relative to count/mass distinctions in all languages.

Jakubowicz (1996) presents another example of the single-language approach to crosslinguistic investigation. She outlines several acquisition studies that focus on the distinction among strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and clitics. She references a linguistic literature on pronouns that established this distinction among person markers in the Germanic and Romance languages (e.g., Corver and Delfitto 1993; Haegeman 1998; Kayne 1975). In this, like other monolingually oriented investigations, Jakubowicz generalizes a distinction from work on a few European languages to all languages without checking to see whether the generalization is valid. A more comprehensive survey of person markers in the world’s languages reveals a continuum from strong pronouns to pronominal affixes and even zero marking (Siewierska 2011).

Jakubowicz outlines an experimental test of whether children produce strong forms before weak forms in French and German. Jakubowicz claims that German uses strong pronouns as subjects and weak pronouns as objects and that French uses weak pronouns as subjects and pronominal clitics as objects. She omits any discussion of person marking realized by the verb agreement suffixes in French and German, which artificially limits the hypothesis to pronouns and clitics rather than recognizing the full spectrum of person marking forms. According to the hypothesis that Jakubowicz tests, children should produce pronominal clitics before pronominal affixes. The extension to pronominal affixes strengthens the original hypothesis by recognizing the full spectrum of person forms in the languages.

Jakubowicz reported that both French and German children aged 2;2 to 2;6 produced more strong pronouns than weak pronouns. She acknowledged that this result is confounded by the use of strong forms as subjects in both languages and suggests that further research would resolve whether children acquire strong pronominal subjects earlier than weak pronominal subjects. She neglected to test whether German children produce more strong subject pronouns than the French children produce weak subject pronouns. This prediction also follows from the logic of Jakubowicz’s hypothesis, but it requires a between-language comparison rather than a within-language comparison. The same comparison could be made for the weak object pronouns in German and the object clitics in French. French and German children would be expected to produce subject agreement on verbs at the same rate and less frequently than their production of either the subject or object forms.

This last observation underlines the monolingual nature of Jakubowicz’s approach to crosslinguistic research. Her experiment assumes linguistic categories such as weak pronouns and clitics that are not informed by a survey of the world’s languages. She does not acknowledge the possibility that her results reflect the shared history of French and German rather than a more general feature of all languages. She neglects the agreement affixes that French and German also use to mark person because her theoretical framework imposes an artificial distinction between pronominal clitics and pronominal agreement. Finally, she maintains a within-language design even though her hypothesis allows a between-language test. She does not discuss the difficulty of testing the hypothesis in non-European languages.

The parametric approach to language study represents the best known attempt to develop a framework for crosslinguistic research. The parametric approach was proposed by Chomsky as a way to account for differences between languages. He thought that differences between languages would fall into neat categories such as languages with verb-initial