Reduplication (originally written in Singapore)

For most all mothers, it can be fascinating to observe how your child develops language, whether s/he is exposed to one or many languages at home.

My youngest is now 18 months old, and has recently added his first "Singlish"** word to his expressive repertoire. Sadly enough, from slipping so often on a wet floor, he has always had a high interest in shiny, wet surfaces. This past week, he started saying "wet-wet" when he sees such a surface, complete with proper Singlish phonology, voicing, and intonation (the vowel is of rather short duration and the /t/ is produced as a glottal stop).

His use of "wet-wet" demonstrates use of Reduplication, which evidently has roots in Chinese and Malay. Verbs, adjectives, or nouns are repeated to add qualitative information to the modified word and/or entire utterance. For example--

verb: "You roll-roll the play-doh?" (the speaker is emphasizing the action, denoting that it is just for a short while)

adjective: "My tummy very fat-fat." (the speaker is simultaneously emphasizing the descriptive aspect of his/her stomach, while also suggesting that this isn't a case of morbid obesity, but just maybe a little chubby post mealtime)

noun: "Where the cat-cat?" (again, drawing attention to the cat, and possibly adding an endearing aspect)

Reduplication has an effect on modifying the entire utterance, rather than just the single word, to increase intimacy. As I tend to think of when the interaction involves children, use of Reduplication can increase the "cuteness" of what you're saying, and serve to make your speech more appealing to children, as it draws them in closer. Its use reminds me of the diminutive in Spanish, the suffixes "-ito", "-ico", "-uca", and etc, or "ina/ino" in Italian. As in Singlish, these suffixes can be added to many different parts of speech, and often simply add affection to the entire utterance. In many cases, the use of the diminutive has nothing to do the modified word being of a smaller size. In English, we have the "-y" suffix for nouns (ex. "doggy", "piggy"), but, the English version isn't used nearly as often and for such a wide variety of purposes as similar features are employed in other languages.

To quickly define some useful terminology-- simultaneous bilinguals are typically those children who are exposed to more than one language before 3 years of age; sequential bilinguals are exposed to a 2nd or additional language after 3 years of age. Although my 3 children are, being raised in the same household, they're having quite different preschool language experiences. That story would warrant its own blog entry, but let me just say that my nearly 4-year old daughter came to Singapore 1 year ago as a simultaneous multilingual for English, Spanish, Italian, and German (although she has not maintained Italian and German). She was sequentially exposed to Singlish and Mandarin.

Over the past year, my daughter has been processing the features of Singlish relative to the base of language knowledge she had already constructed in the first 3 years of life. She was really focusing on Reduplication for a period of time. She was reduplicating everything; appropriately, inappropriate, it didn't matter. "Can I have more-more snack-snack?" "Let's put it there-there." It was happening multiple times per utterance, and going way beyond the typical part-of-speech boundaries of verbs, adjectives, and nouns. I suppose she had her language system map of how things typically worked in English, but not ignoring the fact that she had been exposed to potential other uses of language in general from the experiences she had had with the 3 other languages in her repertoire. Maybe she focused so much on Reduplication in English because it was reminiscent of ways her family in Spain or her teachers in Italy would use language-- being able to play with words in an affectionate way, while also drawing attention to specific parts of the utterance or even making a comment about the size. Maybe it was just fun to get to do that in English.

My youngest will probably never make such overgeneralizations of Singlish features. His exposure to Singlish began at around 8 months of age. His use of Reduplication will probably fall more naturally in step with the local population's rules for use of Singlish. But that's not to say that use of overgeneralization of a specific language feature by native language speakers does not occur-- it does, all the time.

During the course of typical development, overgeneralization is quite common. Who hasn't heard a child talk about who "wonned" the game, or that they saw 2 "mouses" running outside? Children typically demonstrate overgeneralization of features for which they have recently learned the "rule"; they will overgeneralize the newly learned grammatical rule for the irregular exceptions to that rule (ex. past tense -ed and plural -s, respectively, for the previous examples). That's probably why my daughter soon stopped reduplicating everything. She heard the feature, liked it, learned how to do it (the rule), tried it out, found the inappropriate usage less socially-reinforcing than the appropriate usage, and stopped using it inappropriately.

I don't know why, but I just have a hunch that maybe there won't be so much overgeneralization with my baby's use of Reduplication, and other Singlish features. We'll see what else happens in his language development. And hopefully formal research will soon help us understand the patterns of language acquisition in the local population.


** written in Singapore, 2010