Girls, boys, and verb forms
The 12/22/06 issue of
Science
has a brief report (in Constance Holden's "Random Samples", p. 1845)
about research on the learning of verb forms by children, research
suggesting that "boys and girls employ slightly different strategies in
language-learning". Obviously a topic of interest here at
Language Log Plaza. The description in
Science was surprisingly hard for
me to follow, and I'm a morphologist (among other things), so I
wondered whether non-linguist readers could figure things out. As
it turns out, the abstract of the article in question -- Joshua K.
Hartshorne and Michael T. Ullman, "Why girls say 'holded' more than
boys",
Developmental Psychology
9.1.21-32 (January 2006) -- is significantly clearer than the
Science account.
My confidence in the
Science
account was shaken when I noticed that it said the research was
reported in the November issue of
Developmental
Science, though it turns out that the paper appeared in last
January's issue (and was available on-line in December 2005), so it's
not exactly late-breaking news.
In any case, the
Science
report (titled "He Said, She Said") explains:
As tots learn new words, they tend to
"overregularize" verbs--that is, apply the past tense "-ed" even to
irregular ones, saying "holded" instead of "held," for example.
To see whether the sexes differ, Michael Ullman and colleagues [in
psychology at Georgetown] analyzed transcripts of utterances by 25
children--10 girls and 15 boys--between the ages of 2 and 5.
Because girls learn words faster and are more verbally fluent than
boys, Ullman's team suspected that the girls would be better at
irregular verbs. But they found that the girls overregularized
more than three times as often as did the boys.
Fine so far. But the reference to overregularization (an entirely
standard piece of terminology, by the way) is likely to suggest to
readers that
RULES are central to the phenomenon.
That is, at this point the reader is probably thinking that in
producing verb forms, girls apply rules much more than boys do; boys,
presumably, produce forms they've memorized. A reader who goes
down this path will be mightily puzzled by what comes next:
By comparing how the tots handled words
that sound similar, the researchers claim they could distinguish
whether the children were using associative strategies or following
rules in deciding verb endings. When boys overregularize, they
are more likely to use rule-governed, or "procedural," memory...
But girls are more likely to go with associations--because the past
tense of blink is blinked, sink would become "sinked."
Whoa! How to interpret this? It sounds backwards. And
where did the associative strategies come from?
What we needed up front is something about how overregularization could
happen in two different ways: by using an internalized rule (in
"procedural memory") to compose a form "from scratch"; or by
analogizing from forms in memory ("declarative memory") on the basis of
similarities -- in particular, similarities in pronunciation -- between
lexical items. This would connect the Georgetown research to
controversies in psycholinguistics about the roles of these two types
of memory in the production of language. And it would help in
avoiding misunderstanding.
The
Hartshorne
and Muller paper argues that girls use the analogizing strategy
more than boys. Here's the abstract:
Women are better than men at verbal
memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on
declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which
posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory,
while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural
memory, predicts a female superiority in aspects of lexical memory.
Other neurocognitive models of language have not made this prediction.
Here we examine the prediction in past-tense over-regularizations (e.g.
holded) produced by children.
We expected that girls would remember irregular past-tense forms (held) better than boys, and thus
would over-regularize less. To our surprise, girls over-regularized far
more than boys. We investigated potential explanations for this sex
difference. Analyses showed that in girls but not boys,
over-regularization rates correlated with measures of the number of
similar-sounding regulars (folded,
molded). This sex difference
in phonological neighborhood effects is taken to suggest that girls
tend to produce over-regularizations in associative lexical memory,
generalizing over stored neighboring regulars, while boys are more
likely to depend upon rule-governed affixation (hold+-ed). The finding is consistent with
the hypothesis that, likely due to their superior lexical abilities,
females tend to retrieve from memory complex forms (walked) that men generally compose
with the grammatical system (walk+-ed). The results suggest that sex
may be an important factor in the acquisition and computation of
language.
The paper is a preliminary opening-up of research in this area.
As Steve Pinker notes in his comments on it in
Science, the number of subjects is
small, and as the authors note in their conclusion, there is probably
considerable individual variation within the groups studied.
Science also cites Pinker's
cautious characterization of the research as showing that "males and
females sometimes use 'different mixtures of underlying processes' to
arrive at the same results" (note "sometimes" and "different mixtures"
-- "slightly different mixtures" earlier in the
Science article). Everybody
has avoided seeing starkly drawn male-female differences in this
research. Let's hope the mainstream media and pop science writers
do as well.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 1, 2007 06:05 PM