{"id":146,"date":"2006-08-29T10:59:52","date_gmt":"2006-08-29T09:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/29\/babbling-babies\/"},"modified":"2006-08-29T10:59:52","modified_gmt":"2006-08-29T09:59:52","slug":"babbling-babies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=146","title":{"rendered":"Babbling babies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was an interesting\u00a0piece in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/article\/0,,20909-2331459.html\">The Times<\/a> yesterday about a new book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0743237560\/omniglot-20\"><em>The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages\u00a0of the World<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Charles\u00a0Yang of the University of Pennsylvania,\u00a0in which he argues that babies are born with templates for the\u00a0grammatical structures of all languages in their brains, but gradually forget them as they become familiar with the structure of their mother tongue.<\/p>\n<p>Professor Yang, who&#8217;s theories are based on Noam Chomsky&#8217;s notion of universal grammar,\u00a0suggests that when babies babble, they are trying out the various templates until they find one that &#8216;works&#8217;, i.e. that earns them encouragement and praise from their parents and others. So the\u00a0strange word order or constructions young children use, might be correct in other languages. For example, the sentence &#8216;I want ball&#8217; is ungrammatical in English but perfectly grammatical in Russian, Chinese and other languages which do not have articles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was an interesting\u00a0piece in The Times yesterday about a new book, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages\u00a0of the World\u00a0by Charles\u00a0Yang of the University of Pennsylvania,\u00a0in which he argues that babies are born with templates for the\u00a0grammatical structures of all languages in their brains, but gradually forget them as they become [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-language-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}