5: Nativist Approach to Early Multi-Word Speech

Question 1

what is the other term used for the nativist approach to early word speech?

Answer 1

generativist

Question 2

How do generativists explain the creative nature of word production?

Answer 2

children’s utterances are creative because they have access to innate grammatical rules

Question 3

How do nativists explain generalisations of word/grammar rules?

Answer 3

generalisations (e.g. adding inflections to words, wug -> wugs) provide evidence of abstract (innate) rules

Question 4

How do nativists view grammar?

Answer 4

Assume that grammar is a symbolic computational system which processes the relationships between abstract variables

Question 5

How do nativists explain differences on grammar between languages?

Answer 5

Where the rules of grammar differ across languages, they do so in highly constrained ways which are encoded by parameters.

Question 6

what is ana example of a word order parameter?

Answer 6

ENGLISH: I eat sashimi
JAPANESE: “watashi-wa sashimi-o tabe-tai-desu“ = I sashimi eat-want

Question 7

what is an example of a subject use parameter?

Answer 7

In some languages subjects are obligatory (English), in others subjects are
optional (Italian).
ENGLISH = It is raining
ITALIAN = Sta piovendo = is raining.

Question 8

Theoretical advantages of universal grammar?

Answer 8

Avoids problem of explaining how children acquire complex grammatical rules
Allows a unified theory of acquisition across languages whilst explaining how languages differ

Question 9

define: universal grammar

Answer 9

the innate machinery that is specific to language that children approach the task of learning language with

Question 10

What are the 2 main features of the nativist approach to early multi-word speech?

Answer 10

principles & parameters - the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches) that for particular languages are either turned on or off.

Question 11

How does maturation conflict with the nativist approach?

Answer 11

Children’s language develops (changes over time), so many researchers argue that this provides evidence that they do not start out with a full innate UG (contra continuity accounts).

Question 12

What are the 2 stages of Radford’s maturation model?

Answer 12

1. Lexical Stage (around 20 months):
2. Functional Stage (around 24 months):

Question 13

What are the defining parts of the lexical stage of multi-word development?

Answer 13

At 20 months children’s utterances consist of mainly content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, with other parts of the corresponding adult utterance omitted.

Question 14

What are the defining parts of the functional stage of multi-word development?

Answer 14

At 24 months the child’s innate grammar ‘matures’ and the parts governing the use of more complex grammatical components switch on

Question 15

What are the 3 advantages of the maturation model of early multi-word speech?

Answer 15

Explains why early utterances are not fully grammatical.
Allows for development over time so more likely to fit the empirical data.
Some have claimed a similar trajectory of learning for typically developing children with normal hearing, deaf, blind (e.g. Gleitman, 1981), despite their experiences of the world being different.

Question 16

What are the 2 disadvantages of the maturation model of early multi-word speech?

Answer 16

Difficult to identify precise points in development when maturing aspects of the grammatical system come ‘on-line’.
From earliest stages children show some use of most grammatical functions, although inconsistent, and varies across languages

Question 17

What is the linking problem?

Answer 17

How do children link up their innate knowledge of grammatical categories to the words they are hearing?

Question 18

What is the solution to the linking problem for nativists?

Answer 18

semantic bootstrapping - 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

Question 18

How do children understand words that lie outside the norm for their category (eg verbs that are not actions or non-concrete nouns)

Answer 18

Distributional analysis - determine word order for the language from prototypical sentences. Then apply knowledge of word order to work out grammatical categories of more abstract terms.