LB315-319祖君

文章摘要

Lenneberg (1967) 315~319

It is exactly the opposite of what we might expect from at least one theoretical point of view. If the development of speech were the consequence of the child’s hearing, his own utterances, and noticing the similarities between his own and his parent’s sounds, and if the pleasure in speaking derived from his ability to reproduce, for example, his mother’s sounds, then his first “aim” should be to replicate as a accurately as possible the mature sounds he hears. The mental defect should be no obstacle here, or perhaps even an advantage much the way talking birds say sentences without the benefit of a human mentality.

The poor articulation of the mongoloid child may actually be related to a lack of motivation. Usually these children can articulate better than they do, but apparently exact acoustic rendering of utterance is not important to them. The children in our mongoloid sample words in which the most common phonemes of English were embedded in vocalic or consonantal surroundings for consonants and vowels respectively. The child was asked to repeat one word at a time. The performance of a selected sample of children (N = 25) on this articulation test was compared with their articulation of spontaneously produced words and phrases. The analysis was performed by two linguistics.* In all cases studied, performance on the test was considerably better than during spontaneous speech, thus demonstrating that the child is organically capable of accurate articulation.

An expedient way for testing understanding is to have subjects repeat sentences. Most of us have attempted at one time or another to repeat something in a totally foreign language. In the absence of understanding, even the reproduction of a single word may be difficult, whereas short sentences are an impossibility.

Consider the following transcribed attempts at sentence reception. This is a twelve-year-old mongoloid girl whose language development is comparable to that of a normal two-and-a-half year old.

*Jacqueline Wei Mintz and Peter Rosenbaum. Throughout the observation period the child wore a condenser microphone in a bib around his chest. Recording equipment was of high fidelity. The examination room was sound proofed.

The first nine sentences seem to have been essentially understood, but in all sentences except three the repeated sentence is slightly different from the model sentence. The alterations in several instances are not grammatical English, so that the child could not have heard them before. This patient is still deficient in some of the more refined rules of English, but the basic sentence type is present. The “do-constructions” are understood but the rules do not function well enough yet to enable this patient to apply them to sentence. Consequently, sentences (6), (8), and (9) are changed back into grammatically simpler but incorrect forms. Sentence (7) is the only attempt, only partially successful, to use the “dose-not-form.” The passive construction in sentences (10) to (14) is not well understood, although question (13) is answered correctly. However, all attempts at reception of the sentences are failures.

In sentences (10) and (12) reception is attempted by apparently taking recourse to a different strategy. Instead of trying to understand the meaning of the sentence and to reproduce the sentence the sentence is ignored entirely and repetition is attempted as in a rote memory task. When we are asked to repeat a string of random digits, we are only able to repeat the last ones, and the number of digits remembered is a function of memory span. When grammatical connections between words is not understood, the subject behaves as if a string of randomly concatenated words had been presented. This blind repetition may be called parroting.

In our study of language-understanding among the mongoloid, we were interested to know at what stage of development a child would take recourse to parroting. A child was said to be simply parroting if he only repeated of picking out some functionally important words such as the subject-noun and the verb. We classified the responses of a selected group of children (N = 25) into: (1) correct repetitions of the original sentence; (2) sentences that are grammatically correct but different from the original; (3) recognizable sentences that are grammatically incorrect; (4) two-word phrases that are not parroting; and (5) parroting. This subsample of our patients was divided into five groups according to their grammatical ability. Figure 7.11 shows the result. Parroting dose not seem to be the way to begin language. This was also clearly brought out in a recent study by Ervin (1964). Parroting is resorted to when the grammar of the original sentence is simply not understood. It is comparable to a panic-response elicited by the pressure of the examiner to get the subject to “try his best.”

FIG.7.11 Distribution of “parroting responses” with respect to stages of development in 25 mongoloid children.

TABLE 7.8 Transformational Relations between Conjunctions and their Underlying Sentences

*It has recently shown that this type of sentence may be accounted for in simpler ways which further strengthens the point of structural differences between the two examples.

摘要：

這篇文章主要是在探討語言覆誦在語言發展裡的重要性，如果孩子的語言發展是她的聽力、語調與對父母語言的注意，那麼他複製語言的能力在語言的發展上是很重要的。

Mongoloid的孩子較弱的發音關係到刺激的缺乏，他們可以發音發的更好，但顯然地，精準的聲學發音對他們而言不是那麼的重要。在測驗中對孩子的選擇性樣本測試發現，測驗的表現和他們自發性的字句是可以比較的，而此為將兩種語言進行分析。在其他個案的研究中，測驗的表現比自發性說話來的好，因此這證明了孩子有準確發音的組織能力。

我們大多企圖用外與覆誦，但在缺乏相關知識下，即使複製一個單字也是很困難的，更不用說是一句話了。在企圖覆誦句子的部份，一個12歲的mongoloid女孩的語言發展相當於一個正常的2歲半孩子。從語言發展的原始階段研究中，從一些句子得知，mongoloid的孩子已有基本的認知了，只是在一些例子的改變中，發現他們的句子較不符合英文文法，所以表示個案仍缺乏更精確的英文文法規則，但基本的形式已表現出來了，然而，試圖複製句子的部分仍是失敗的。當他們試圖利用不同的策略時，他們並非試著了解句子的意義且重複句子的要點，完全忽略和試圖反覆的記憶句子。若不能理解文法的連結，而只是盲目的重複,，這樣的行為稱作”鸚鵡式仿說”。

在研究mongoloid的語言認知中，我們又將其仿說的方式分成：(1)正確的重複原始句子(2)句子文法正確，但與原始句子不同(3)句子的文法錯誤(4)在雙詞片語部分沒有仿說(5)鸚鵡式仿說。

機械性的重複語言並非學習語言的方法，這只是用在當一個原始句子的文法並不全然理解的情況，可以相較於誘導測試者做到他的最好的理由。