Yo, Samity Sam!

Brilliantly, the tweet I am going to be famous for (at 200+ likes at the time of writing), is one in which I present myself as an idiot.

My entire childhood I heard that character's name as "Sammity Sam", like some sort of cutesy reduplication.

— Laura Bailey (@linguistlaura) July 10, 2019

Lane Greene said that American kids learnt how to pronounce 'Yosemite' because of the Looney Tunes cartoon character 'Yosemite Sam'. Despite plenty of exposure to this character, I did not similarly acquire the correct pronunciation of the word, because I interpreted the name as 'Sammity Sam', a sort of reduplicated nickname form of the name Sam. This is not unreasonable, as I'd not seen it written down and never heard of the place Yosemite. Other people did the same thing, and basically heard it as 'Yo, Sammity Sam'.

But here's the thing: I didn't interpret that first syllable as anything at all. 'Yo' wasn't specially in my vocabulary as a child in 1980s UK. So I just kind of heard it as a meaningless syllable. I'm not an acquisitionist so I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure this is NOT how language works. There are not meaningless syllables that consistently occur adjacent to a specific word. I should have definitely called on my pattern recognition skills and interpreted that sound as part of the name, or as being part of the phrase, as others did ('Yo!'). But I didn't.

Chomsky by Chomsky

I was very pleased to hear a linguistics-Chomsky question on University Challenge last night, so in celebration I thought I'd blog this great infographic. It presents the generative ('Chomskyan') view of language acquisition in a nice smart postery-type way, as an imaginary class on the topic.

Here's the image, or click the link to see it at the original site (worth doing as there's more to look at there).

Ban pens to improve language skills

Yes, I thought it was odd too. Apparently, according to this BBC article, lots of kiddiwinks (over 50% in socially deprived areas) start school without having developed the ability to speak in 'long sentences'. This is a slightly vague term, but the article claims that a class of 5- and 6-year olds took six attempts to unjumble this sentence:

past the walked we shops

I wouldn't even call that a long sentence, so if this is true it's a bit worrying. The children, claims Wendy Lee from the Communication Trust, are only using short phrases and single words, and say things more typical of much younger children, such as:

went shops

The school in question is in Wythenshawe in South Manchester, but this applies to any area where there are high levels of social deprivation. Essentially, the kids aren't being talked to at home so they aren't developing language skills at the same rate as more well-off children.

So what about this no pens thing? The school, along with 99 others, is having a No Pens Day to try to encourage greater use of longer sentences. Sounds counter-intuitive, getting children not to write, but when you think about it, it makes sense. They're only young so when they're writing they're not using long sentences. And if they can't do it in speech, it's unreasonable to expect them to write lengthy accounts of a shopping trip. Instead, all the lessons on that day are discussion-based, encouraging the kids to talk more. The questions are open-ended rather than requiring single-word answers or short phrases. Who'd have thought it, wanting kids to talk more in lessons?