Believe it or not, I've never taken a linguistics class. Now I am taking one. It's my last class in the M.Ed. program. I'm learning that almost all linguists who write about first language acquisition in kids are talking about their own kids. They record the kids at home and in the car and then analyze.
Stephen: I wonder where you get tiger food.
Brother: Tigers eat meat.
Mother: [teasingly] Give it a little boy.
Stephen: [pause] Is a boy meat?
Stephen is four.
Mother: A creature is anything that's alive.
Stephen: [sounding astonished] Are we creatures?
The linguist reporting these conversations, Clare Painter, is talking about how kids learn to draw inferences from linguistically presented information. In the margins, though, I just have "Hahahahaha" and "AWESOME" and "!". I'm less interested in analysis, and more interested laughing at the hilarity of kids. Yeah, I totally want one.
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