Through her research into children and language, Lila Gleitman, who died on August 8th at the age of 91, helped define psycholinguistics, a field that hardly existed before
It was a turning-point in the young scholar’s career. She had already switched from English literature to classics, in which she quickly became bored of her teacher’s digressions on Athenian society . Realising that her two-year-old already had an understanding of language made Gleitman want to get into her child’s head, and those of other children. The questions that shaped her career were, as she put it, “the presidential questions” of children’s knowledge.
An early piece of Gleitman’s research, for example, investigated small children’s “telegraphic” speech, in which many words are left out: a toddler might say “throw ball” rather than “throw me the ball”. This seems to imply that the child’s knowledge is primitive. But she found that children nonetheless comply with instructions better when their parents use adult-style English than when they mimic their offspring. She and her colleagues concluded that youngsters know more than they can say.
As the learning process goes on, children deploy some remarkable strategies. They often seem to correctly guess what a word means after hearing it just once. The physical environment is an obvious spur . But how would a child guess the meaning of the verb in “I believed that he lost his keys”? Gleitman noticed that the sentence structure is identical to those with other verbs that mean similar things : saw, remembered, imagined, forgot, worried and doubted.
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