Native English speakers never have difficulty learning which prepositions to use. On the other hand I often hear even quite fluent second-languagers stumble over things like “Independent from, er… independent of.” (As in, X is independent of Y.) Is this just because children are better at learning language than adults? That probably explains a lot. But as I have speculated before I think there are some aspects of the difference between adults and children that don’t require an appeal to brain differences.
Adults are building on stuff they already know, children are learning for the first time. Adults know what a preposition is and that “from” and “of” are both prepositions. They know grammar and they think in terms of grammatical structure. So they search through the prepositions they know that would play the right grammatical role.
Children don’t think about language, they just copy what they hear. They don’t hear “independent from” so they never consider saying that. Of course adults learning English don’t hear “independent from” either. The fact that they still make the mistake means that they don’t learn purely by imitation like children. They make use of the rules they already know.
And yes, I am just making this up. Claire?
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May 6, 2010 at 11:27 pm
wheninrome15
It is a fact of life that reciting a memorized mathematical result is simply faster than being able to rederive it, even though the latter indicates deeper understanding. Of course, there is a place for each. It is extremely handy to have one’s times tables memorized…
Unlike math, language doesn’t even fully come with the option of rederivation. There is an approximate logic to it, but it will not always help to tell “from” and “of” apart. Perhaps it would be approximately correct to say that the difference between the reasoning and the memorization is the difference between the high school spanish class and an immersion program.
May 7, 2010 at 2:38 am
Andrew
I think it’s a bit simpler: adults have interference from their first language. They want to say “I’m interested in” thus “Ich mich interessiere in…” when actually it’s “Ich mich interessiere für…”
May 7, 2010 at 8:13 am
Anonymous
I am trying to learn italian and my main issue seems to be figuring out gender. What you describe is very specific to english speakers and 2nd language english speakers as opposed to 1st language english 2nd language italian, french , german.
May 7, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Claire
Linguistics must have made it as a field when its practitioners get baited by economists 🙂
It depends on one’s theory of grammar how much abstract structural grammatical knowledge we assume kids have. There’s a big literature on modeling category learnability. It’s also something of an ideological question now too (one of the splits between formal Chomskian linguistics and other flavors of linguistics, formal and otherwise, is based on what opinion one has about this question.) It’s pretty clear that kids aren’t just copying sound strings though. For example, kids get word boundaries, but the cues for where words start and end in speech are very subtle, and usually not realised at the boundary itself.
My own made-up explanations for this is similar to yours, but appeals to a slightly different knowledge — there are (at least) two ways learners can go wrong. Second language learners get interference from the collocations of their first language, and they analogize (overgeneralize) rules from other collocations. Preposition use in English is a good place to find this sort of overgeneralization because it’s not only somewhat arbitrary, speakers also vary for some (but not all) prepositional uses. For example, “different from”, “different to” and “different than” are all found and are all more or less acceptable to different groups of English speakers, but “similar” can only take “to”, not “from” or “than”, and “other” takes “than”, not “from” or “to”.
The first is similar to what Andrew was arguing: if the verb “help” takes the dative case in my first language I’m more likely to assume that it takes the dative in the second language too, unless I have knowledge to the contrary. (I don’t know to what extent errors fall into direct morphological mapping vs form-semantic mapping; e.g. if Language X marks animate objects with the genitive and inanimate ones with the accusative, and Language Y marks them all with the accusative, will L-X speakers who are L2 speakers of Language Y use their genitive/accusative distinction in Language Y?)
The second pattern — overgeneralization of categories, is also found in child first language acquisition. For example, when English kids acquire past forms, they typically go through a stage of putting “-ed” on everything. Then they acquire some of the minor categories, and over-apply them too (e.g. bring ~ brung by analogy with sing ~ sung). Sometimes these stick into adulthood (dive ~ dove is actually one of these historical overgeneralizations).
May 7, 2010 at 2:12 pm
jeff
thank you 🙂
March 3, 2011 at 8:50 am
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[…] Claire Bait « Cheap TalkNative English speakers never have difficulty learning which prepositions to use. On the other hand I often hear even quite fluent second-languagers stumble over things like “Independent from, er… independent of.” (As in, X is independent of Y.) Is this just … And yes, I am just making this up. Claire? […]