T. Beyer and CL Hudson Kam

Fairly interesting, and their conclusion fits in with my probabilistic high horse and I like that. Beyer and Hudson Kam (the latter is the prof I TA for currently) were trying to gather information on acquisition of third-person present-tense -s in African American English and Standard American English-speaking kids--because AAE allows constructions such as "he go" with no -s, they expected to find that black kids lagged behind in distinguishing this feature in an experimental setting. Instead, they found that the white kids didn't do it either (or the younger group, 6-year-olds, didn't), or not at more than chance levels. This even though these kids were producing -s, using it productively, and even correcting grown-ups when they used it wrong. This finding did not hold for past-tense -ed, nor did it hold for sentences in which the words "today" and "yesterday" were used alongside -s to indicate tense. This is the authors' springboard for an interesting discussion placing -s acquisition not in the context of the acquisition of a grammar (SAE v. AAE) or the development of the brain ("they get -s when they can handle -s"), but of learning and stimulus, "cue strength", which is an attempt to develop and break down the old notion of salience into more exact features: frequency (obvs, the more you hear something the faster you learn to identify it), reliability (-s can mean a lot of things--progressives, e.g., or plurals, whereas -ed is more reliable in that it is always a past marker), and validity (when -s is on its own it has high validity because it is the only present marker, but in real life it is usually accompanied by another marker like "today" that is much easier to grasp), but then a lot of more nebulous and less testable things like how much more knowledge the kids might display outside of the experimental setting with its laminated pictures that have to be laboriously conditioned to, or how much attention the kids are paying, or how much of a shit they give. It's heartening to see researchers with a good eye to what might explain their results besides "kids are producing this feature perfectly without understanding what it is or what it means", which has a certain amount of explanatory oomph in it too for younger children in the sense that they'll just start mimicking shit and fly by the seat of their pants and analyze it later when they get all old and boring, but kind of feels ultimately less satisfying than a position that 1) recognizes that the lab is a mere imitation of life and 2) gives kids some credit. First Language 29.… (más)