Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1996

More than Just Babble The Patterns of Language in Young Cantonese-Speaking Children More than Just Babble 17 Children's Language Ability Gr ea t e r t h a n E x p e c t ed Newborn infants with a few days' exposure to their mother tongue can distinguish it from other languages they have not been exposed to. The babbling of 10-month-olds reflects the phonetic characteristics of their native language . By 3, they w i l l have developed a basic grasp of the rules of their language and a c qu i r ed a n impressive vocabulary. These are facts that many adults may find hard to believe. People usually think that toddlers k n ow hardly anything about their language, and that it wou l d take years of coaching by parents and teachers b e f o r e c h i l d r e n b e c ome c omp e t e n t speakers. Research in the past 30 years has shown that, contrary to widespread belief, ve r y y o u n g c h i l d r e n have far greater l i ngu i s t ic k n o w l e d g e t han p r e v i o u s l y imagined. I n - d e p t h studies o f the language abilities of young children wer e inspired by t he r e v o l u t i o n a r y ideas o f l i n g u i s t- ph i l o s ophe r No am Choms k y f r om the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who advocates that children are born with a ric h innate linguistic knowledge that cannot be learned from experience . This school o f thought sees the language of young children as c omp l ex and systematic rather than rudimentary and unstructured. A Can t one s e C h i l d Language Corpus A group of seven researchers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Ko n g Po l y t echn ic University, and the University of Hon g Kong w o n a grant of HK$700,000 f r om the Research Grants Council o f Hong Kong in 1991 to study the early grammar of Cantonese-speaking children. Leader o f the group Dr. Thomas