Chapter 5

After going through chapter five in the text, I was intrigued by the various kinds of speech and the ease at which children pick up different kinds and the settings they need in order to make the process work. From a very early age, children start to pick up important and simple words that they soon turn into phrases, and learning is conducted in many different ways. It's clear from the discussion and information presented by Tomasello that words that are nouns are much easier for children to handle and use in context than verbs that need conjugation and must be altered from the start. My question is about the method of uptake of language. Tomasello lists the few different ways that children absorb language, one of them being the necessity of use via hearing it from adults as sources. The more variations that children hear for uses of verbs, the more they are able to understand verbs abstractly, which is a very important detail in human language. My question is about television for little kids. Is it the case that children's movies and videos are simply dumbing down concepts they'll need to understand some day or are they giving a leg-up for children so they can slowly absorb, little by little, different uses for verbs and words that contain abstract uses? Or, is it the case that TV is just a poor substitute for human interaction all together and children don't really absorb as much as they would via talking to another human?