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Eric Miller,
Ph.D. candidate, Folklore Program,
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).
Summary of dissertation research project. 
 

“Verbal Play and Language Learning”
2003-4

At this moment in history, many of the world’s traditional verbal arts are in danger of becoming extinct.  Even among people living in and around forest areas, many of the traditional songs are nearly forgotten.  The old people today are the last generation that has been raised without the presence of electricity and mass media such as television.  Just as it has been shown that bio-diversity in the environment is beneficial for human beings, the same is true for cultural diversity.  Therefore, it is crucial to seize the moment and to collect the traditional verbal arts before they are lost.  Once the traditional verbal arts are collected, people in future generations – both inside and outside the group – will be able to study, enjoy, and learn from them.

Verbal arts are especially alive when they are being used to help educate the young.  Thus, I am hoping to collect stories, proverbs, and lullabies that adults sing and tell to children.  I would also collect songs, verbal games, riddles, puns, and tongue-twisters that children share amongst themselves. 

A primary research question of this dissertation is, "How might verbal play assist in the child's language learning process?"  It is my hypothesis that verbal play indeed does help with language learning, and I will be searching for scientific proof to support this claim.  I will pay special attention to the occurrences of repetition with variation (including substitution, modification, and addition of verbal elements from one phrase or sentence to the next) in children’s exploring and practicing of spoken language.  I will also observe the uses of melody, rhythm, and gesture, and how these features may improve verbal memory (Jakobson 1960; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976).  Throughout, I will consider issues relating to verbal play and phonetics (sounds), semantics (words), and syntax (sentence structure) in the experience of the growing child. 

A central problem to be investigated will be, “What are successful methods of teaching and learning spoken language and verbal arts?”  The fieldwork will help me to develop a general method, utilizing verbal play and games, for teaching spoken language (Maley and Duff 1982).  This method would function for teaching adults as well as children. 

The language learning process is often considered to involve three successive stages: the afore-mentioned phonetics, semantics, and syntax (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Sherzer).  Related to syntax is accidence, a language’s rules for the forms words take when they are combined to make phrases and sentences.  Together, phonetics, syntax, and accidence constitute a language’s grammar (Oxford English Dictionary).  It should be kept in mind that “while language acquisition studies generally indicate that the child is syntactically competent by about the age of four years, phonological dominance is maintained long after the child is theoretically competent semantically and syntactically” (Sanches and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 105).  In other words, children are often most sensitive to the sounds of speech, rather than to the abstract meanings created by words and sentences.

The following schedule varies greatly from child to child (Garvey; Farb):  Infants may begin to coo and babble shortly after birth.  At six months, reduplicative babbling is common.  At eight months, "children use intonation patterns similar to those changes in pitch heard in adult exclamations and questions" (Farb 10).  At 12 months, single-syllable words are sometimes uttered.  At 18 months, a child's vocabulary is often between three and 50 words, and the child may be able to utter simple stock phrases, such as to request something.  It is approximately at this time that the "naming explosion" or "word spurt" may begin.  The naming explosion tends to occur at the same time as the onset of productive syntax.

At 24 months, a child may be able to name most of the physical objects he comes into contact with on a daily basis, and two- and three-word utterances are common.  For many children, 36 months marks the end of the naming explosion period: now the child's vocabulary may be 1,000 words.  At 48 months, typically the child has mastered most of the syntactical structures of the language.  By this time, the development of the child's cognitive architecture -- involving such distinctions as those, for example, between the name of a dog, the abstract category, dog, and the abstract category, animal -- is also well underway.  At this time, the child can also engage in many interactional routines, especially those involving questions-and-answers.

Numerous theories have been created to account for how children learn language.  Among these theories are B. F. Skinner's theory of Behaviorism, and Noam Chomsky's theory of a Universal Grammar.  To briefly summarize these theories:

Skinner's theory of Behaviorism posits that all learning results from environmental conditioning, from positive and negative feedback (rewards and punishments).  These reinforcements inculcate habits in the learner.  Behaviorism states that all learning results from memorization of what has been presented from without.

Chomsky's theory of a Universal Grammar refutes Skinner's claim, instead positing that humans are born with "innate behavior patterns, and tendencies to learn in specific ways" (Chomsky 57).  People are born with a "grammatical sense" (Chomsky 56), a "built-in structure of an information-processing (hypothesis-forming) system [which] enables them to arrive at the grammar of a language from the available data at the time" (Chomsky 58).  According to this theory, there are fundamental internal processes at work in each human, quite independent of feedback from the environment.  "The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling ability of an unknown character and complexity" (Chomsky 57).

Another theory of language that should be mentioned in this context is Edward Sapir's and Benjamin Whorf's Sapir-Whorf theory of language.  According to this theory, "Language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but rather is itself the shaper of ideas.  We dissect nature along the lines laid down by our native language" (as cited in Farb 180).  That is, a language guides its users into perceiving, thinking about, and expressing reality in well-worn channels.  Languages create these constraints simply through the limited options they offer, in terms of such elements as words (or lack of them), gender and verb tense forms, and the ways that words combine and interact.

India has been chosen for this research project because India is very rich in traditional verbal arts.  Tamil Nadu has been chosen because of the beauty and ancient history of the Tamil language and culture.  Finally, the southernmost Western Ghats has been chosen as the specific fieldwork location because traditional verbal arts are best studied where they continue to function as primary sources of entertainment, far from the centers of mass media production and consumption.

Having chosen the fieldwork location, I discovered that the Kanikaran people live there (Stephen 1997; Tharmaraj 1994).  Two special features of Kanikaran language are:

Firstly:  A people’s language is influenced by the environment.  The Kanikaran people mostly live in forest areas.  Thus, their language is likely to be affected in many ways   by the natural elements.  My preliminary impression is that sounds and movements of animals are often imitated in Kanikaran children's songs and games; that animals, vegetation, weather, and geographical landmarks play important roles in Kanikaran folksongs and folktales; and that everyday Kanikaran language contains many expressions about the natural elements.

Secondly:  Most of the Kanikaran people speak Tamil and live in Tamil Nadu, and it is here that I hope to do the great majority of my fieldwork.  (I have studied Tamil in university classrooms in the USA and India for a number of years, and I am working hard to become fluent in the spoken language.)  However, some Kanikaran people also live in neighboring areas of Kerala and speak Malayalam.  Thus, the group’s language features a mixture of Tamil and Malayalam languages, at times forming a hybrid, combination language.  There is even a slang hybrid mode of language, known as “Kani pasi.”  Although some literary purists may look down on such hybrid oral languages, many scholars find them very interesting (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986).

The research project will aspire to work within the tradition of the Ethnography of Speaking.  In 1962, Dell Hymes founded this interdisciplinary field, calling upon scholars to survey the full range of speech activities in the communities they would study (Hymes 1962).  Extended to communication in general, the field has also come to be known as the Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1972). 

Another field of study that grew out of Hymes’ work, and which pays close attention to the process of communication, is known as the Performance-centered Approach to Folklore (Paredes and Bauman 1972).  The cohort of folklorists that developed this approach, beginning in the late 60’s, was primarily concerned with the styles of performance; the tones and rhythms of voice; body language; and teller-listener interactions.  They paid close attention to the social situations in which the verbal arts were performed. 

Two methodologies that will be used in the course of the fieldwork project are that I will visit schools (regarding older children) and families (regarding younger children).  The data to be collected will be that which pertains to the teaching and performing of oral language and verbal arts.  When possible, I will interview both teachers and learners of language and verbal arts, regarding techniques of teaching and learning. 

The language teaching and storytelling by grandmothers will come under special attention, as elderly women in rural India tend to be especially knowledgeable about various verbal arts, including the chanting and singing of lullabies and laments (Venugopal 1996). 

Throughout the fieldwork project, the following four-step transcription-translation process will be utilized: 

1) Tamil.
2) English transliteration, that is, sounds 
       (this is the phonetic level).
3) English words (this is the semantic level). 
4) English sentences (this is the syntax level).

This four-step system will enable the English-literate reader to see, in a single glance, what English sounds and words the Tamil script refers to, syllable for syllable.  Following in the tradition of ethnopoetics, scoring techniques will be used to indicate voice tone, melody, and rhythm (Tedlock 1992).  Transcriptions will also include notation of gesture (Birdwhistell 1970).

In summary:  The above-described research project represents a golden opportunity to rescue from possible oblivion many of the Kanikaran people’s traditional verbal arts.  It would also make possible, for the present researcher and for future researchers, the study of the Kanikaran people’s methods of teaching those verbal arts to the young, and of teaching the language itself.  The successful completion of the project would most certainly contribute to the word’s storehouse of linguistic treasures.
 

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