Bonus 69: 103 ways for kids to learn languages (Patreon)

Each of the languages of the world is a lens on how adults and older children in various cultures create the conditions for babies to learn languages. Of the 7000-some languages that have been counted by linguists, over half of them have either a grammar or a grammar sketch, but only 103 of them have had at least one paper about them published in one of the four major journals about child language acquisition.

In this bonus episode, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about a project that Gretchen did to read one paper for each of these 103 languages, as recorded in a recent paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia, and tweet a short summary of what each was about under the hashtag #103papers, in an effort to rebalance some attention from English and a handful of other extensively-studied languages. We talk about some of the specific papers that stood out to us from this reading project: on how Nepali parents produce consonants and vowels to their kids, on the impact of language deprivation on kids in Romanian orphanages, on deaf kids who grow up without access to a sign language and end up creating a home sign instead, on kids who grow up bilingual in LSQ (Langue des Signes Québécoise, Quebec Sign Language) and French, on kids acquiring complex verbs in Chintang and Greenlandic, and on two different communities in Papua New Guinea with two different approaches to addressing children: Kaluli where they don't use a special way of addressing kids and Huli where they have a large child-directed repertoire.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

November is our anniversary month and this year we’re celebrating 6 years of Lingthusiasm! We invite you to celebrate with us by sharing a link to a Lingthusiasm episode you enjoyed on social media, telling a friend who's looking for podcast recs, or just sharing your lingthusiasm generally. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and lots of them don’t yet realise that they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month (or eyes, all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts!). If you share Lingthusiasm on social media, tag us so we can reply, and if you share in private, we won’t know but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction - or feel free to tell us about it on social media if you want to be thanked!

We’re also doing a listener survey for the first time! This is your chance to tell us about what you’re enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far, and what else we could be doing in the future - and your chance to suggest topics! And we couldn’t resist the opportunity to add a few linguistic experiments in there as well, which we’ll be sharing the results of next year. We might even write up a paper about the survey one day, so we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey. Take the survey here!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Take our survey here!
• Gretchen's #103papers thread on Twitter
• Lingthusiasm Episode 'Various vocal fold vibes'
• The Nepali Paper
• The LSQ Paper
• The Homesign Paper
• The Huli Paper
• The Chintang Paper
• The Greenlandic Paper
• Child language acquisition in Kaluli
• Lingthusiasm Bonus Episode 'Word from your family: Familects!'
• Lingthusiasm Episode 'Learning parts of words -  Morphemes and the wug test'

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.