Quick! Look up there at that mido! Where did you look, at 1 or 2? I presume you looked at either 1 or 2, and I'm going to be so bold as to say you probably looked at 2, unless you were being purposefully difficult. Why? Because 1 is a dog. What's 2? I don't know, and you probably don't know either, so it might very well be a mido. If mido means "funny little squishy orange thing with saucer eyes and tufty hair in odd places," you would have been correct to look at 2. But what if mido meant "hot dog that has sprouted legs and head and likes being rubbed on the tummy?" Then it would have been better to look in 1's direction. After all, the word "dachshund" does exist. Similarly, the word "creature" exists. If I had said "look at the creature," looking at either 1 or 2 would be equally correct.

The point is that we as language learners (and yes we are all language learners on a daily basis whether we like it or know it or not) enter into a situation with certain constraints. There is this pretty nifty article by Au & Glusman (I'd link to it, but I only have access to it through my class's course reserves through the library here) on mutual exclusivity published in 1990. The paper details a number of studies designed to figure out when we honor the principle of mutual exclusivity (because in order to learn to words at the most basic level, we must honor it) and when we don't honor it (because there are so very many times when learning new words requires that we do not honor it). I'm not going to get into the details of the studies they did - though they were kind of cool experiments, but I am going to mention some situations I think are pretty interesting.

Hierarchies. They're neat. They are! Why? Well, because you came into the mido situation thinking well, I know that's a dog, so it can't be a mido. You assumed whatever a mido is it's on the same hierarchical level as dog. It didn't occur to you that it might be on the more general level of animal/creature or more specific level of dachshund. Granted, there is already a word for animal, and one for creature, and one for dachshund. Ok, so how about...

Synonyms! There's no way mido could have meant the same thing as dog? Our first response to a new word is to assign it to a new item. If an object already has a label, why give it another one? But of course, no language has perfect one-to-one mapping of words and referents. Though I'm not giving a list of synonyms here, a dog might also be a hound, a beast, a furball, a mutt, a cur, a puppy, a pooch, a mongrel...and whatever else. Those are all (except maybe puppy) on the same hierarchical level as dog, but they are secondary (or tertiary or further). You learned the word mongrel years after you learned doggie, I will bet money and/or yarn on it. So at what point did you say, "Ok, mutual exclusivity out! Synonyms in!"? I bet you don't know, because researchers don't know either.

And what about an even cooler and more complicated case: bilingualism? Specifically bilingualism in kids young enough to still be acquiring the basics of both languages. The situation gets so much more complicated! Think about it. I'm a bilingual (French-English) baby in my first critical language-learning months (in other words, I'm moving past mama, ba-ba (bottle), no, and picking up words for animals, small objects, people, etc.) and here comes this four-legged furry thing that barks and chews bones and lives in my house. I can't make out most of the words my mother says, so I hear "Gobbledygook DOG." I have to look at the dog. I hear "Gobbledygook CHIEN." I have to look at the dog (chien in French, of course). I hear "Gobbledygook MIDO." I have to look at SOMETHING ELSE and attach mido to the cat that just walked in (or whatever). I have to be able to apply mutual exclusivity within each language but not cross-linguistically. Is it based on phonological features? Do I have to be able to tell that dog sounds English while chien sounds French and mido sounds, well, I'm not so sure. Somehow, I have to catch on pretty freaking fast!

Somehow we both honor and choose not to honor this principle of mutual exclusivity, and I just think it's fascinating how and when we do and do not, and that the whole thing happens without our being aware of it. Tell me that isn't at least a tiny bit cool.

Labels: linguistics