…human infants naturally find themselves in situations in which an individual… gazes at an ongoing stream of activity … and utters a string of words (perhaps “Look at that adorable puppy! He’s running away! Let’s go find its mommy”).
– Early Word Learning
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!– The Jabberwocky
If X does not know your name, X will remember and address you (in the mind) by what is most salient about you. In some instances, this can be described as a form of fundamental attribution error. You of course are more than a most salient quality or any one quality for that matter. It turns out that this heuristic is present in our minds from infancy.
We were born with a propensity to generalise. To a toddler, all cars may be taxis. Cars and taxis are in every way the same thing except for a very abstract, possibly arguable but nonetheless accepted notion of ownership. They share all the same physical qualities.
Qualities are denoted by adjectives – descriptive words such as white and names are denoted by nouns proper or otherwise.
A noun is a lexical form of “an object concept”. There are several types of nouns such as collective, proper, count, abstract and concrete. While a count noun – teas, may refer to a category of objects, a proper noun is one “whose function is to pick out a distinct individual” within a category – Earl Grey (Waxman & Lidz, 2006).
It was found that infants tend to name an object they encounter for the first time with a novel adjective introduced in relation to that object. Researchers showed a llama to children up to three and introduced them to the adjective white. Every time this experiment was conducted, children in that age group could not distinguish the count noun – llama with its property (colour) white. They thought the domestic animal was called white. It was concluded that to learn adjectives, infants first needed a repertoire of nouns.
Students will encounter novel words in texts and are not unlikely to encounter them in exams, even if they are voracious readers. It is a reasonable assumption that the wider a student’s vocabulary, the less likely she is to be stumped during an exam. Flowing from this assumption is the effort to make available an assortment of books on good vocabulary which are age appropriate.
Leaving aside the question of efficiency, this invites also the question of if working on a never-ending series of vocabulary MCQs would actually be effective as preparation for the 10 MCQs in the English Language Use paper. Even if it so happens that none of the words in the books are tested, exposure to vocabulary cannot be a bad thing, or so the reasoning to justify the time spent, might go.
In an MCQ, novel words could appear in the question and/or the given options. Students would have to either look at the answer key for the correct answer or consult a dictionary. If this was an effective approach, all one has to do is memorise the dictionary or as much of it as possible. Dictionaries are not dissimilar from vocabulary books in that both couch words in some context.
There is a way to enhance comprehension ability which is more aligned with our natural psychology and so would be more cost efficient and effective. The answer comes out of the mouths of babes as it were.
To understand vocabulary acquisition, researchers have turned to infants. It used to be believed that mothers or whoever else is teaching has to point to an object while uttering its name, for learning to take place. However, Waxman and Lidz (2006) point out that “many words, even in infant-directed speech, do not refer to an object or to anything else that we can point to … e.g., You really need a nap.”
They show through reference to an extensive literature review that vocabulary acquisition happens in a dynamic manner which entails, “mapping” between a concept and a “linguistic unit” such as a noun, verb or adjective. In essence, they demonstrate that children learning new language would use syntax – the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses) (Merriam-Webster) to make sense of novel words.
The way in which words are put together is determined by rules of grammar. In other words, grammar affects vocabulary learning. In fact, Waxman and Lidz (2006) say, “there is by now a wealth of evidence identifying the crucial role of syntax in helping children identify the meanings of novel verbs”.
Grammar does not only help to identify vocabulary. It also defines vocabulary. The same word can mean different things depending where in a sentence it occurs. For example, jogged in The students jogged has a very different meaning from The students jogged his memory. The verb “jogged” is transitive in the first case and intransitive in the second.
It is therefore curious why there are different books for grammar and vocabulary since, the influence goes both ways – grammar affects meaning and meaning also affects grammar. As Waxman and Lidz (2006) put it, “Distinct grammatical forms highlight distinct kinds of meaning; but at the same time, linguistic structure is in many ways derived from the meaning of the words involved”.
One experiment which investigated how syntax changed children’s understanding of verbs shows this clearly. Verbs are typically used to denote events – opened and can be classified as transitive (verbs which affect an object) – opened a door and intransitive (which do not require an object) – walked.
Here, “a woman was being twirled in a swivel chair by another woman, by the stratagem of pulling on a long ribbon attached to the former woman’s waist”. Children were then asked which of these women were “pilking around” and who was pilking the other around.
When the question was phrased in the first way, children “picked the woman doing the twirling” and when it was phrased in the second way, they picked the woman who was twirling the other around. This showed that children inferred the meaning of pilking through induction from grammatical clues.
Induction is based on expectations and probability. Inductive reasoning is to make “broad generalizations based on specific observations” where we “make many observations, discern a pattern, make a generalization, and infer an explanation or a theory” (Bradford, 2017). Put another way, induction is an attempt to “infer information about unobserved events or objects from those” (Shea, 2017) which have in the past, been observed.
Induction is a very important skill especially when dealing with new territory. As Shea in Three Ways of Getting it Wrong: Induction in Wonderland says, “induction is the basis of all scientific knowledge. Induction also provides our sole basis for understanding language”.
Another example of induction in language learning cited by Waxman and Lidz (2006) is when “we discover a property (e.g., bites if you pull its tail) that is true of one individual (e.g., Fido), we can infer that this property is also true of other members of the same object category (e.g., dogs)”. These researchers described such induction as “especially powerful when it comes to acquiring knowledge about nonobvious properties of objects”.
Shea (2017) however warns that despite the handiness of induction, it is full of risks because, “there are no guarantees”.
Consider the famous poem, Jabberwocky which appeared in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There. In this poem, Carroll uses several words which have no agreed meaning. The first stanza is as follows:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
Since these words are incomprehensible in the strict sense, they could mean anything or something very specific. For example, a child could interpret Twas brillig, as It was bright and slithy toves as slippery coves.
The word brillig appears after Twas which is very likely to be It was. It is therefore likely to be an adjective. Therefore, given that the poem has nature as its setting, bright as in bright daylight may be a very reasonable attribution to brillig.
The slithy toves form part of a noun phrase – Determiner + Adjective + Noun and so slippery (adjective) and coves (count noun) are reasonable assumptions.
If the poet did not say otherwise, the child may not have been wrong.
In this instance, it appeared like the poet was himself undecided. In the novel in which Jabberwocky appears, he has a character, Humpty Dumpty explain to Alice the meanings of some of these words. In his written and verbal commentaries in other places, he offers different meanings from Humpty Dumpty.
Some interpretations considered authoritative suggest the actual meaning of the first stanza is as follows (alice-in-wonderland.net):
It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill side; all unhappy were the parrots, and the grave turtles squeaked out.
As will be appreciable, induction could lead to a large gulf between what is apparent and what is real. Students therefore have to become sharper in their skills of induction.
According to linguists and developmental psychologists, “providing the same name for a set of distinct individual objects highlights their commonalities and supports the formation of object categories, but does not support individuation” and that providing unique names for each individual allows even infants as young as 10 to 12 months old to distinguish between say, cars and taxis (Waxman & Lidz, 2006).
Unless one has a prodigious memory and remembers everything, it might not be feasible to remember every unique name.
The way to get past this mental barrier (of memory) is to bear in mind that while categories are useful, there are very unique individuals within each category. While a word may fit a particular position in a sentence because of its class, it may not make any sense to place it there because of its unique semantic content (meaning) – Colourless green ideas sleep furiously (Chomsky, 1957). Also, any word can transform its class through what is known as affix – colour and colourful.
When faced with a novel creature in the woods, knowing its name will be useful. One can then decide whether to gaze or to run.
The Brain Dojo
