Interview with Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D. Co-author of: HOW BABIES TALK: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life
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Golinkoff: I grew up in New York and I went to Brooklyn College and graduated in 1968 with my bachelor's.
SP/Beck: Where did you do your graduate work?
Golinkoff: Cornell University. I finished my doctorate in 1973.
SP/Beck: What was your dissertation on?
Golinkoff: Semantic Development in Babies. And then I did a post-doctoral fellowship at The Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. And that's kind of where I picked up the instructional psych side. And then I've been at the University of Delaware since 1974, I'm a lifer.
SP/Beck: Being a lifer is unusual these days, but it sounds kinda nice. Have you authored other books, or was this your first?
Golinkoff: I've written a few books with my colleague Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She's a professor at Temple University. We've written a number of academic books that most people don't want to read! They're primarily for developmental psycholinguists who want to understand how it is that kids learn language. We focus much more on language development than on speech.
SP/Beck: I guess How Babies Talk (ISBN #0-452-28173-3) has been out there a few years now, and I picked it up quite a while ago. It really made me re-think some basic, core issues about language. What was the inspiration for writing the book?
Golinkoff: The book was written for parents as well as professionals. Kathy and I have been working on language acquisition and related issues for longer than I care to admit! We are continually amazed at babies and young children's capabilities and wanted to share our excitement with the lay public as well as professionals who don't get a chance to review every journal about what kids know very early about language.
SP/Beck: One of the things I really liked when I read the book was the statement you made early on.... Communicating through language was the crowning achievement of the human species. Dogs can't do it. Whales can't do it. Even our evolutionary cousins the great apes can't do it. Language enabled us to embrace an idea.
Golinkoff: I still think that that's absolutely the case. I consulted on the Kanzi Project in Georgia. Kanzi is an amazing pygmy chimpanzee and he understands oral language. His mother was trained with a computer system where she would press something and the word would be pronounced and the object would show up. Kanzi was a baby, just hanging out with her. And they were shocked to discover that he could understand oral language. But there's absolutely no comparison between what he knows and what a two-year-old child knows about language.
SP/Beck: What was the most amazing thing you saw the chimps do?
Golinkoff: I watched a female pygmy chimp whose name was Panbanisha. She was on my shoulder and I said, Give me your hands. I reached up and she took my hands, and I thought, Naw - she didn't really understand that. It's because I put my hands up. So then I was walking along with my colleague and I said, Kathy, watch this. I kept my hands at my side and I said, Give me your hands Panban. And she reached down to grab my hands -- I felt like I was making contact with another world! She seemed to understand.
SP/Beck: That almost argues against the statement you made in your book, that language is the product of a human mind?
Golinkoff: I think it's true that language is a product of the human mind. Although with training, some primates can learn some vocabulary, what they do bears no comparison to the knowledge that a two-year-old human child has.
SP/Beck: Maybe the key is that humans strive for language, whereas the chimps may have been able to learn a little of it, they didn't create or strive for it. In the book you noted that language in humans is a function; much like breathing and eating, it's got to be there.
Golinkoff: That's right. Whether we're raised in a tent or a high rise, the vast majority of us learn language. And the people who read this interview deal with individuals who have difficulty along the way, but language is as natural to humans as spinning spider webs is for spiders.
SP/Beck: So humans strive for and create language in general, but aren't there cases of some humans without language?
Golinkoff: Yes. Very rare, but they exist. There's a population of individuals who do not have language. They're deaf children and adults who do not have access to signing communities and they live in an isolated world, unable to communicate their wants, ideas, and needs beyond the simplest gesturing. There was also a book about a Mexican fellow written by Susan Schaller, who was 28-years-old and had no language. It's as if he was locked inside. In fact, a parallel case has emerged in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua there were never schools for the deaf. A woman named Judy Kegel went there to do research on the deaf. She discovered there were no opportunities for people who were deaf so she decided to start a deaf school. These people did not have sign or oral language, and now that they have come together, we're currently watching a language grow and develop among them.
SP/Beck: That's amazing. In the book you mention that when babies are ready to learn any language, they become attuned to the sounds of their particular language(s) and other sounds are usually dismissed.
Golinkoff: That's true. Until about 8 months of age, it looks like babies are capable of discriminating between phonemes (sounds) in pretty much all the world's languages. Between 8 and 10 months babies lose the ability to distinguish between non-native phonemes that they're not exposed to on a daily basis. Now, that doesn't mean this ability is lost forever because if it was, you and I could never learn a second language that uses different phonemic contrasts than our own language. So we know these distinctions can be re-learned. It must be pretty easy for kids to re-learn them because up until the age of about 5 or 6 years, if you put kids into a new language community,they learn it like a native . Adults can learn a second language but it's much more difficult.
SP/Beck: Oftentimes, moms and dads of deaf children think that everything's okay because the child's making normal babbling and cooing sounds. Can you discuss that a little bit?
Golinkoff: Sure. We used to think that deaf babies babbled in just the same way as hearing babies. Lenneberg and Rebelsky found that deaf babies' and hearing babies' babbles seemed to be the same. Subsequent work by Oller and Eilers, however, showed that the babbles of deaf babies are not identical to the babbles of hearing babies. There's something called a canonical syllables. It is a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) such as dap. Turns out that deaf babies produce far fewer canonical syllables in their babble than hearing babies. If we don't have input through hearing, we're not going to produce the same kinds of babble as kids that can hear. And also there's some research that suggests babies babble sounds that are like the communities they find themselves in, using some of the same sounds. And obviously you're not going to see that with deaf children. You're not going to see movement in the direction of the native language with babies who can't hear.
SP/Beck: And then the deaf baby doesn't get the input, and doesn't hear the native phonemes, and they don't try to mimic the same CVCs, and of course they don't develop the linguistic repertoire upon which hearing babies base their language development. It is an amazing process. In your book you also spoke about teenage pregnancy and teenage moms and the idea that perhaps their offspring do a little less well as far as language development. Can you address that please?
Golinkoff: Sure. When you're talking about kids having babies, you know that's problematic from the get go! Nonetheless, the reason babies of teenagers might not do as well with language development may be because when you're still an adolescent yourself, you have a lot of self-consciousness issues. You think everybody is looking at you, you imagine you have an audience, and you're less likely to engage in language play with your baby! You're less likely to allow yourself to sound like a fool the way we all do when we talk to babies in motherese. That may explain it. We know that depressed mothers speak differently to their babies and use less of the high pitched and exciting baby talk that babies like and seem to thrive on. I always like to point out that the term motherese is a misnomer because it's not just women who do it but men too, and even 4-year-olds use baby talk to 2-year-olds-even 4-year-olds who don't have younger siblings!.
SP/Beck: Yes, good point. Can you talk about Early Neurological Imperialism?
Golinkoff: Sure. That was a term I used to explain why kids lose the ability to deal with non-native phonemes. It's as if the native phonemes kids hear take up the neurons and leave none for the non-native phonemes.
SP/Beck: Can you speak a little bit about the critical language period?
Golinkoff: There was a wonderful study done at the University of Illinois by Johnson and Newport. They found speakers of Korean and Chinese who had come to the United States years before, and had been here at least 25 years. The difference within this population was at what age they arrived. Some of them arrived when they were really little and some arrived later, but they all had about 25 years of exposure to English. They gave them a test of sensitivity to grammatical norms in English. Things like word order, and the researchers asked the subjects to say which sentences were correct and which were incorrect. They found that people who began speaking English before they were 5 or 6 years answered exactly the same way that native English speakers do. It got a little bit worse as these people approached adolescence as their age of arrival, and after adolesence the data fell off the cliff. That's the critical period. There was a sharp decline if you started speaking or learning a language after adolescence, about age 12 years or so.
SP/Beck: All right. What have you found in the last two or three years that you wish was in the book - but isn't?
Golinkoff: Oh -- that's a wonderful question! While humans are indeed prepared to learn language at birth the species specificity of that claim has been challenged. We know now that chinchillas and monkeys can discriminate between phonemes too. Work in our lab suggests that human babies come prepared to distinguish between signs in the same way. Pretty amazing when you consider that we tested hearing babies who were not exposed to sign. Yet they could discriminate between signs that were different phonemes. That's work by my graduate student Stephanie Baker.
SP/Beck: Even if other species can make phonemic discriminations (although maybe they couldn't do it in sign), it doesn't diminish its value in humans.
Golinkoff: No, absolutely not. But there were claims that the ability to discriminate between phonemes was a species-specific capability. Pat Kuhl at the University of Washington showed that it was not true because chinchilla and now we know, monkeys, can do it too.
SP/Beck: For their survival, it seems that other animals must be able to communicate amongst themselves. It might be more basic languages but whether it's grunts, groans, barks, meows, whatever, as long as it gets the essence of the message out, I think it can be considered communication, and perhaps language?
Golinkoff: There's a wonderful book by Mark Hauser at Harvard called Evolution of Communication where he talks about the different ways in which a variety of species do communicate and how those ways differ from human language. What other species have seems to be very different from human language.
SP/Beck: Before I let you run, can you tell me about children and the issues related to learning verbs versus nouns?
Golinkoff: One of the things we found interesting in our research is how difficult it is to get young children to learn verbs. It's much easier to get them to learn nouns. In my lab we're currently struggling with why this is the case. It's clear that verbs are more difficult than nouns because they talk about relations, and they occur over time. For example running doesn't last forever, unlike that pencil on the table. Running has a starting point and an end point and there must be an agent carrying it out. Also, you have to understand something about social intent. For example, take the difference between running and fleeing. They look quite similar but in running you might be doing it for fun; the sense of fleeing is that you are doing it to get away from something. So verbs tax children's ability to think relationally, not something they are very good at early on. Anyway, we find that it's very difficult for young kids to learn verbs, and perhaps in a year or two we'll have more solid information in this. I'm wondering if the SLPs in the trenches find that children who have language difficulty have more difficulty with verbs than they do with nouns and if there are any tricks about how they teach verbs. I'd love to get their input.
SP/Beck: And if somebody wanted to comment on that what email address would they send those notes to?
Golinkoff: Roberta@udel.edu at the University of Delaware.
SP/Beck: Thanks so much for your time today. It really has been a lot of fun speaking with you.
Golinkoff: Thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed it too!
SP/Beck: Where did you do your graduate work?
Golinkoff: Cornell University. I finished my doctorate in 1973.
SP/Beck: What was your dissertation on?
Golinkoff: Semantic Development in Babies. And then I did a post-doctoral fellowship at The Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. And that's kind of where I picked up the instructional psych side. And then I've been at the University of Delaware since 1974, I'm a lifer.
SP/Beck: Being a lifer is unusual these days, but it sounds kinda nice. Have you authored other books, or was this your first?
Golinkoff: I've written a few books with my colleague Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. She's a professor at Temple University. We've written a number of academic books that most people don't want to read! They're primarily for developmental psycholinguists who want to understand how it is that kids learn language. We focus much more on language development than on speech.
SP/Beck: I guess How Babies Talk (ISBN #0-452-28173-3) has been out there a few years now, and I picked it up quite a while ago. It really made me re-think some basic, core issues about language. What was the inspiration for writing the book?
Golinkoff: The book was written for parents as well as professionals. Kathy and I have been working on language acquisition and related issues for longer than I care to admit! We are continually amazed at babies and young children's capabilities and wanted to share our excitement with the lay public as well as professionals who don't get a chance to review every journal about what kids know very early about language.
SP/Beck: One of the things I really liked when I read the book was the statement you made early on.... Communicating through language was the crowning achievement of the human species. Dogs can't do it. Whales can't do it. Even our evolutionary cousins the great apes can't do it. Language enabled us to embrace an idea.
Golinkoff: I still think that that's absolutely the case. I consulted on the Kanzi Project in Georgia. Kanzi is an amazing pygmy chimpanzee and he understands oral language. His mother was trained with a computer system where she would press something and the word would be pronounced and the object would show up. Kanzi was a baby, just hanging out with her. And they were shocked to discover that he could understand oral language. But there's absolutely no comparison between what he knows and what a two-year-old child knows about language.
SP/Beck: What was the most amazing thing you saw the chimps do?
Golinkoff: I watched a female pygmy chimp whose name was Panbanisha. She was on my shoulder and I said, Give me your hands. I reached up and she took my hands, and I thought, Naw - she didn't really understand that. It's because I put my hands up. So then I was walking along with my colleague and I said, Kathy, watch this. I kept my hands at my side and I said, Give me your hands Panban. And she reached down to grab my hands -- I felt like I was making contact with another world! She seemed to understand.
SP/Beck: That almost argues against the statement you made in your book, that language is the product of a human mind?
Golinkoff: I think it's true that language is a product of the human mind. Although with training, some primates can learn some vocabulary, what they do bears no comparison to the knowledge that a two-year-old human child has.
SP/Beck: Maybe the key is that humans strive for language, whereas the chimps may have been able to learn a little of it, they didn't create or strive for it. In the book you noted that language in humans is a function; much like breathing and eating, it's got to be there.
Golinkoff: That's right. Whether we're raised in a tent or a high rise, the vast majority of us learn language. And the people who read this interview deal with individuals who have difficulty along the way, but language is as natural to humans as spinning spider webs is for spiders.
SP/Beck: So humans strive for and create language in general, but aren't there cases of some humans without language?
Golinkoff: Yes. Very rare, but they exist. There's a population of individuals who do not have language. They're deaf children and adults who do not have access to signing communities and they live in an isolated world, unable to communicate their wants, ideas, and needs beyond the simplest gesturing. There was also a book about a Mexican fellow written by Susan Schaller, who was 28-years-old and had no language. It's as if he was locked inside. In fact, a parallel case has emerged in Nicaragua. In Nicaragua there were never schools for the deaf. A woman named Judy Kegel went there to do research on the deaf. She discovered there were no opportunities for people who were deaf so she decided to start a deaf school. These people did not have sign or oral language, and now that they have come together, we're currently watching a language grow and develop among them.
SP/Beck: That's amazing. In the book you mention that when babies are ready to learn any language, they become attuned to the sounds of their particular language(s) and other sounds are usually dismissed.
Golinkoff: That's true. Until about 8 months of age, it looks like babies are capable of discriminating between phonemes (sounds) in pretty much all the world's languages. Between 8 and 10 months babies lose the ability to distinguish between non-native phonemes that they're not exposed to on a daily basis. Now, that doesn't mean this ability is lost forever because if it was, you and I could never learn a second language that uses different phonemic contrasts than our own language. So we know these distinctions can be re-learned. It must be pretty easy for kids to re-learn them because up until the age of about 5 or 6 years, if you put kids into a new language community,they learn it like a native . Adults can learn a second language but it's much more difficult.
SP/Beck: Oftentimes, moms and dads of deaf children think that everything's okay because the child's making normal babbling and cooing sounds. Can you discuss that a little bit?
Golinkoff: Sure. We used to think that deaf babies babbled in just the same way as hearing babies. Lenneberg and Rebelsky found that deaf babies' and hearing babies' babbles seemed to be the same. Subsequent work by Oller and Eilers, however, showed that the babbles of deaf babies are not identical to the babbles of hearing babies. There's something called a canonical syllables. It is a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) such as dap. Turns out that deaf babies produce far fewer canonical syllables in their babble than hearing babies. If we don't have input through hearing, we're not going to produce the same kinds of babble as kids that can hear. And also there's some research that suggests babies babble sounds that are like the communities they find themselves in, using some of the same sounds. And obviously you're not going to see that with deaf children. You're not going to see movement in the direction of the native language with babies who can't hear.
SP/Beck: And then the deaf baby doesn't get the input, and doesn't hear the native phonemes, and they don't try to mimic the same CVCs, and of course they don't develop the linguistic repertoire upon which hearing babies base their language development. It is an amazing process. In your book you also spoke about teenage pregnancy and teenage moms and the idea that perhaps their offspring do a little less well as far as language development. Can you address that please?
Golinkoff: Sure. When you're talking about kids having babies, you know that's problematic from the get go! Nonetheless, the reason babies of teenagers might not do as well with language development may be because when you're still an adolescent yourself, you have a lot of self-consciousness issues. You think everybody is looking at you, you imagine you have an audience, and you're less likely to engage in language play with your baby! You're less likely to allow yourself to sound like a fool the way we all do when we talk to babies in motherese. That may explain it. We know that depressed mothers speak differently to their babies and use less of the high pitched and exciting baby talk that babies like and seem to thrive on. I always like to point out that the term motherese is a misnomer because it's not just women who do it but men too, and even 4-year-olds use baby talk to 2-year-olds-even 4-year-olds who don't have younger siblings!.
SP/Beck: Yes, good point. Can you talk about Early Neurological Imperialism?
Golinkoff: Sure. That was a term I used to explain why kids lose the ability to deal with non-native phonemes. It's as if the native phonemes kids hear take up the neurons and leave none for the non-native phonemes.
SP/Beck: Can you speak a little bit about the critical language period?
Golinkoff: There was a wonderful study done at the University of Illinois by Johnson and Newport. They found speakers of Korean and Chinese who had come to the United States years before, and had been here at least 25 years. The difference within this population was at what age they arrived. Some of them arrived when they were really little and some arrived later, but they all had about 25 years of exposure to English. They gave them a test of sensitivity to grammatical norms in English. Things like word order, and the researchers asked the subjects to say which sentences were correct and which were incorrect. They found that people who began speaking English before they were 5 or 6 years answered exactly the same way that native English speakers do. It got a little bit worse as these people approached adolescence as their age of arrival, and after adolesence the data fell off the cliff. That's the critical period. There was a sharp decline if you started speaking or learning a language after adolescence, about age 12 years or so.
SP/Beck: All right. What have you found in the last two or three years that you wish was in the book - but isn't?
Golinkoff: Oh -- that's a wonderful question! While humans are indeed prepared to learn language at birth the species specificity of that claim has been challenged. We know now that chinchillas and monkeys can discriminate between phonemes too. Work in our lab suggests that human babies come prepared to distinguish between signs in the same way. Pretty amazing when you consider that we tested hearing babies who were not exposed to sign. Yet they could discriminate between signs that were different phonemes. That's work by my graduate student Stephanie Baker.
SP/Beck: Even if other species can make phonemic discriminations (although maybe they couldn't do it in sign), it doesn't diminish its value in humans.
Golinkoff: No, absolutely not. But there were claims that the ability to discriminate between phonemes was a species-specific capability. Pat Kuhl at the University of Washington showed that it was not true because chinchilla and now we know, monkeys, can do it too.
SP/Beck: For their survival, it seems that other animals must be able to communicate amongst themselves. It might be more basic languages but whether it's grunts, groans, barks, meows, whatever, as long as it gets the essence of the message out, I think it can be considered communication, and perhaps language?
Golinkoff: There's a wonderful book by Mark Hauser at Harvard called Evolution of Communication where he talks about the different ways in which a variety of species do communicate and how those ways differ from human language. What other species have seems to be very different from human language.
SP/Beck: Before I let you run, can you tell me about children and the issues related to learning verbs versus nouns?
Golinkoff: One of the things we found interesting in our research is how difficult it is to get young children to learn verbs. It's much easier to get them to learn nouns. In my lab we're currently struggling with why this is the case. It's clear that verbs are more difficult than nouns because they talk about relations, and they occur over time. For example running doesn't last forever, unlike that pencil on the table. Running has a starting point and an end point and there must be an agent carrying it out. Also, you have to understand something about social intent. For example, take the difference between running and fleeing. They look quite similar but in running you might be doing it for fun; the sense of fleeing is that you are doing it to get away from something. So verbs tax children's ability to think relationally, not something they are very good at early on. Anyway, we find that it's very difficult for young kids to learn verbs, and perhaps in a year or two we'll have more solid information in this. I'm wondering if the SLPs in the trenches find that children who have language difficulty have more difficulty with verbs than they do with nouns and if there are any tricks about how they teach verbs. I'd love to get their input.
SP/Beck: And if somebody wanted to comment on that what email address would they send those notes to?
Golinkoff: Roberta@udel.edu at the University of Delaware.
SP/Beck: Thanks so much for your time today. It really has been a lot of fun speaking with you.
Golinkoff: Thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed it too!
