combining words

Question 1

sentence comprehension

Answer 1

english is SVO
word order can vary across languages
word order alone not enough

Question 2

Golinkoff 1995

Answer 2

17 month olds look at correct picture (dog lick cat)

-infants at 1 word stage can understand word order

Question 3

ambiguity

Answer 3

must learn morphology (internal) and syntax (rules to combine)

Question 4

learning morphological rules

Answer 4

the “wug” test – testing grammar

• morphological inflections - past tense - ed, plural s
• –adding the morphemes to words not to change their meaning but to change their tense

Question 5

brown’s stages 1973

Answer 5

longer sentence - grammatically complex
Simple theory of grammar
-subject, noun phrases, verb phrases, preposition phrases

syntactic tree structures
learning theory

Question 6

Victor

Answer 6

feral child - never learnt to talk

-window for language acquisition

Question 7

evidence against Learning theory

Answer 7

lack of negative feedback - poverty of stimulus, speech only corrected for meaning

inconsistency of feedback - varies in frequency

limited feedback too intermittent - sometimes correced
-best kind of reward = intermittent -

occasional contrast may enable change - children more likely to repeat adults expansions of their utterances

without negative feedback children would have to rely on innate knowledge

presence of saying things never heard

pattern of acquisition of irregular past tense/plural doesnt fit - gived = gave

babbling not random

Question 8

tomasello - usage based accounts

Answer 8

may reflect most frequent utterances exposed to
verb islands - early verbs form basis - build sentences around them

counter argument to nativist - syntactic knowledge may arise without much semantic

Question 9

chomsky

Answer 9

poverty of input - degenerate input, not enough info

Question 10

LAD

Answer 10

fixed constraints of acquisition

parameters allow adaptation to given language - drop it if not exposed - depends on input

Question 11

merge

Answer 11

linguistic hierarchal - phonological, morphological, syntax
structural representations formed by merge
-taking units to fit them together

-6-12 week old can discriminate between langages that differ in head direction - english is head initial “read books” whereas japanese is head final “books read”

evidence for universal grammar

Question 12

support for universal grammar

Answer 12

Pidgens and creoles
-evidence for strong bio drive:
pidgins - highly simplified
creoles - syntactically rich

deaf chilrdren not exposed develop system that has own syntax

Question 13

Pinker - how do we learn syntactic categories

Answer 13

innate knowledge about categories, linking rules

Semantic bootstrapping
-innate syntactic categories/linking rules
-learn meaning of some coontent words
-semantic representation of some simple input sentences
if you can workout person doing verb - becomes subject

Question 14

evidence

Answer 14

SB requires exposure to utterances containing easily identifiable agents + actions
verbs that can be bootstrapped should be learnt earlier e.g. fall - maps onto subject easier than have
both both learnt at same time

contrasted with assimilation theory - may give better account of data without innate principles
-before we form syntactic categories, form semantic categories

Question 15

Eval of LAD

Answer 15

why does it take so long + so many errors?

continuity hypothesis - all available at birth, restricted by factors e.g. memory

maturation hypothesis - emergent over time as result of maturation

bilingualism - requires different parameters