How Kids Learn Their Mother Tongue

(University of Zurich, July 11, 2013)

In her research, psycholinguist Sabine Stoll from the University of Zurich compares how children in different cultures learn their mother tongues. In a collaboration with ethnologists and linguists from Leipzig, she works on Chintang, a language spoken by only 6000 people in eastern Nepal. The language is grammatically very complex, verbs can come in up to 1800 forms - a lot compared to German with 20 and English with 3 different verb forms. Stoll and her students observed kids' communication patterns over one and a half years. Their data allows them to analyze the processes in the acquisition of language, for example whether kids first learn to use verbs or nouns.