5. EARLY MULTI -WORD SPEECH: NATIVIST APPROACHES

Question 1

nativist approach

Answer 1

assumes that children approach the task of learning language with innate machinery that is specific to language, sometimes described as a language acquisition device or universal grammar

Question 2

nativists vs constructivists: creativity

Answer 2

N:
Children’s utterances are creative because they have access to innate grammatical rules

C:
Utterances are creative because creativity is based on the use of lexical frames learned from the language children hear, with new items inserted into variable ‘X’ slots

Question 3

nativists vs constructivists: observation

Answer 3

N:
children observe adult word order because they have an abstract rule
- subject - verb - object

C:
observe adult words order because they pick up high frequency lexical frames from their input

Question 4

nativists vs constructivists: generalisations

Answer 4

N:
generalisations (adding inflections to words) provide evidence of abstract (innate) rules

C:
generalisations demonstrate that children learn these patterns gradually from distributional analysis of the language they hear

Question 5

nativist assumptions

Answer 5

• grammar is a symbolic computational system, processing the relationships between abstract variables
• grammatical categories are given apriori in the child’s brain from birth (UG)
• predict that the acquistion of a particular aspect of grammar should have an all or nothing quality (Marcus)

Question 6

nativist general predictions

Answer 6

Radford:
- once a child able to parse an utterance like “close the door”
- can infer the verb precedes its complement, and the same for others

prediction 1:
children should learn these innately specified aspects of grammar very early on

prediction 2:
children should show consistent treatment of members of a particular grammatical category

Question 7

principles and paramters of universal grammar (UG)

Answer 7

• all possible rules for languages are innate
• grammar is universal - rules of grammar apply to all languages
• where the rules of grammar differ across languages they do so in highly constrained ways which are encoded by parameters
• children need to work out which parameter settings apply for the lanugage they are learning

Question 8

examples of parameter settings

Answer 8

word order:
verb - object (Eng), object - verb (Jap)

subject use:
in some languages subjects are obligatory (Eng), in others subjects are optional (Ital)

Question 9

theoretical advantages of UG

Answer 9

avoids problem of explaining how children acquire complex grammatical rules

allows a unified theory of acquisition across languages whilst explaining how languages differ

Question 10

empirical evidence for principles & parameters

Answer 10

• children’s early utterances observe adult word order - taken as evidence the relevant paramter is set
• children are productive from early on (allgone sticky)
• children show productive use of some Noun and Verb inflection from age 2.5 and readily combine novel nouns with other words
• some evidence that children understand the role of word order from age 2 years or earlier from preferential looking studies

Question 11

Preferential looking and poinitng studies

Answer 11

children aged 1;9 can identify the correct picture to match subject-verb-object sentences from a choice of 2 causal actions
(Gertner, Fisher, & Eisengart, 2006)

• taken as evidence for setting the word order parameter
• less clear results for distinguishing non-causal actions described with the intransitive subject-verb construction from causal actions
• disagreement as to what these results mean - comprehension vs. production

Question 12

theoretical problems for UG

Answer 12

• parameters not clearly specified
• unclear how children avoid setting parameters incorrectly
• bilingualism - how do children set 2 (or more) versions of the same parameters

Question 13

empirical evidence against principles & parameters

Answer 13

children exhibit limited knowledge of SVO word order in production and act-out studies

naturalistic data studies provide evidence of partial, lexically specific knowledge within a grammatical category - verbs, auxiliaries, determiners

many studies show a close relation between what children hear, how often, and what and when they learn

Question 14

nativist summary points

Answer 14

• nativist approaches provide an account of children’s early multiword utterances that emphasises their similarity to adult language
• continuity accounts explain dev. in terms of limitations on performance rather than limited knowledge

Question 15

maturational models

Answer 15

solution to observed ‘development’

• the child has some grammatical knowledge available from birth but other aspects of grammar ‘switch on’ at biologically predetermined points in dev.
• an attempt to explain why children’s early utterances are ungrammatical if children operate with innate grammar

Question 16

Radford’s (1990) maturational model

Answer 16

at the lexical stage of development (~20m), utterances consist of mainly content words, with other parts of corresponding adult utterance omitted

at the function stage (~24m) the child’s innate grammar ‘matures’, and parts governing the use of more complex grammatical components switch on. e.g., auxiliary verbs, determiners, inflections

Radford, 1990

Question 17

maturational model advantages + evidence

Answer 17

• explains why early utterances are not fully grammatical
• allows for dev. over time so more likely to fit the empirical data
• fits with possible patterns in other areas of dev. (piaget’s stages of intellectual dev., onset of puberty)

Question 18

maturational model: theoretical & empirical problems

Answer 18

• difficult to identify precise point in development when functional stage grammatical system comes ‘on-line’
• from earliest stages children show some use of most grammatical functions, although inconsistent
• at around 24 months, children’s use of many ‘functional’ words related to lexical frames (Lieven et al, 1997)

Question 19

the linking problem

Answer 19

How do children link up their innate knowledge of grammatical categories to the words they are hearing?
- cargegivers dont label words as e.g., nouns
- but UG - what children are hypothesised to have innately - is defined in these terms

Question 20

semantic bootstrapping

Answer 20

proposed solution to the linking problem

assumes:
- grammatical (syntactic) categories and rules innate
- children use semantics (meaning) to map words in the input onto these innate syntactic categories by using innate linking rules to map semantics onto syntax

can link semantic roles: agent, patient
to syntactic roles
- agent = subject of sentc
- patient = object of sentc

Pinker, 1984; 1989

Question 21

semantic bootstrapping: distributional analysis

Answer 21

it’s not always easy to work out grammatical categories from meaning

solution:
use a form of distributional analysis to determine word order for the language from proto typical sentences. Then apply knowledge of word order to work out grammatical category of more abstract terms

Question 22

advantages of semantic bootstrapping

Answer 22

• explains how children break into innate system
• explains why early utterances follow adult word order
• explains how children learn verbs which are not actions, nouns which are not objects etc..

Question 23

problems for semantic bootstrapping

Answer 23

• many of children’s early lexically- specific utterances are not semantically prototypical, and therefore are unlikley to be based on innate knowledge of semantic linking rules
• in passive sentences, the noun phrase (NP) which is usually the object of an active transitive becomes the subject

passive - the mouse was chased by the cat (opposed to cat chased mouse)

Question 24

the problem of passives

Answer 24

• if the child hears passive utterances early on, she may use semantic bootstrapping to conclude that her language is object-verb-subject -> problems parsing other utterances
• some nativists propose that the passive ‘parameter’ doesnt mature until later (5y) so passives are learned late
  BUT
• children do hear and use passive sentences from early on