4. EARLY MULTI-WORD SPEECH: CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACHES Flashcards
At what point do children put words together to create multiword utterances/multiword speech?
typically between 18 months - 2 years of age
nativist and constructivist accounts
characteristics of syntax
the ways in which a language allows words to be combined
- enables understanding between speakers
- allows productivity - can create infinite number of sentences with finite words
species-specific: language
little evidence other primates can acquire syntax even with extensive training
species-universal: language
virtually all children have acquired the majority of the grammar of their language by 5 years
characteristics of early word combinations
- mainly content words
- refers to here-and-now, easily understood in context
- creative
- observes adult word order
early lexical (word-based) rules
rules item-specific - based on individual words or schemas
limited variety of utterances until children are able to generalise between schemas
early syntactic (grammatical) rules
rules abstract - based on grammatical categories
- verb + object
- subject + verb
rules not restricted, therefore allow all utterances possible in the adult language
what is the constructivist approach
usage-based
- grammar is used for communication
- infants are motivated to learn to communicate
- grammar can be learned using general cognitive learning mechanisms (intention reading, drawing analogies, distributional learning)
constructivist: role of routines
routines allow children to predict what happens next and therefore what the language they are hearing might refer to
what type of evidence would support a constructivist/ usage-based approach?
- children begin with lexically-based linguistic representations
- high frequency items are learned early
- only gradual generalisation across exemplars to create more abstract syntactic categories and rules
the verb island hypothesis
constructivist evidence
diary data from one child aged 16-24 months
data suggest first verbs acquired in small number of social/pragmatic contexts
- parents describe activity of child or others
- parents comment on childs intentions/wishes
- parents request something of child
conclusions:
- knowledge of grammar tied to individual verbs until 2.5-3
- child unable to generalis on basis of either semantic/syntactic similarity
Tomasello, 1992
infants: familiar and unfamiliar verbs
with familiar verbs, 2-yr olds can describe actions correctly to explain who is chasing, and whom is being chased
but with unfamiliar verbs, before 3 years children struggle to explain who is doing what to whom
Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997
evidence: limited (lexical) constructions
argue children’s early utterances based around individual lexical items (words) but not exclusively verbs
- I + X can I + X
- where’s X gone X + go
- more + X Don’t + X
any high frequency word/ gorup of words can form the basis for organisation of the child’s linguistic system
the constructions children learn reflect frequence of patterns in the input
Lieven et al, Pine et al
structure combining : study task
- diary of 1 child for 6 weeks at 2;0
- 5 hours/week recorded, written diary of new utterances kept by mother
- all utterances on last hour recording noted - ‘target’
- all previous recordings searched for ‘closest’ match - ‘source’
Lieven et al., 2003
structure combining: study method
identify:
- closest prior utterance (source) to the target
- what changes required to change source into target (operations)
- frequency with which parts of the target had been said before
operations: substitution, addition, drop
Lieven et al., 2003
structure combining: study results
-295 multiword utterances (63% self repetition)
- 109 novel utterances (74% single operation change)
Lieven et al., 2003
structure combining: study conclusion
many of the child’s apparently complex utterances are based around repetitions or small changes to what she has said prior
most changes involve simple substitutions
suggests child operating with an extensive inventory of specific utterances, with fairly limited mechanism for altering these utterances to match the demands of the discourse context
Lieven et al., 2003
semantic analogy
children need to learn large numbers of verbs before they recognise similarities between them and begin to build more general schemas. commonalities reinforced, differences forgotten
semantic analogy evidence - repeating sequences
- 2 & 3 year olds repeat 4 word sentences
- manipulated 3 word frame by similarity of meaning of items in 4th ‘slot’
- children made fewer errors when items that normally occur in the slot are more similar - suggests overlap in meaning helps build flexible constructions
Matthews & Bannard, 2010
distributional learning
ability to learn the co-occurencent characteristics of the input i.e., which words occur together, or in similar contexts
experimental evidence: distributional learning
2y olds exposed to multiple transitive sentences (X is verbing Y)
- noun phrase only condition: X and Y are lexical nouns
- mixed condition: X and Y combo of lexical nouns and pronouns
- taught a new verb to describe a new action between participants
conc:
pronouns helped children extract a more abstract representation of the subject-verb-object sentence structure for use with novel verbs
Childers and Tomasello, 1998
critical evaluation of production studies
- Production studies are difficult for children – significant memory load in remembering and recalling novel words, planning entire sentences.
- Do production studies underestimate how abstract children’s knowledge of sentence structure really is?
- Exactly how sentence structures become gradually more abstract over development is not clearly specified.
