Developmental wk 5 Flashcards
nativists argue
children approach learning lang with innate machinery specific to language.
referred to as Acquisition device or universal grammar
needs to be applicable to all grammatical systems
nativist assumptions
- assume grammar is a symbolic computational system which processes relationships between abstract linguistic variables
Assume these grammatical categories and rules are given in the brain from birth
Predicts acquisition of grammar should be an all or nothing quality.
e.g. as soon as you figure out a word is a noun, you can apply it where all nouns can be applied
what evidence did that bloke in the video give ab nativist lang
children produce new utterences that don’t match adults utterances. They are being productive from an early age.
suggest that they are using innate knowlege to do this.
use of past tense rule. we holded. he stickted. overgeneralised rule of ed on innapropriate verbs from an early age. = innate rule.
why do nativists say that child speech is:
- creative
- have adult word order
- generalise gramatical rules
- creative because they use their innate gramatical rules
- have adult word order because they’re using the innate cues
- BECAUSE THEY HAVE INNATE RULES
Radford 2 predictions of nativist language learning
- children should learn the innately specified aspects of grammar pretty early on.
- children should show consistent treatment of members of a particular grammatical category
principles and parameters argues
All possible rules for languages are innate.
Grammar is universal (rules apply to all languages).
the rules of grammar beween languages differ,
!! they do so in highly consrained ways, eclosed by parameters !!
.
- children need to work out which parameter settings apply for their language.
examples of word parameters settings
Word order - Verb-Object in english. or Object-verb in japanese.
Subject use – In some languages subjects are
obligatory (English), in others subjects are
optional (Italian).
theoretical advantages of UG
- avoids problem of HOW the chidren develop the complex rules
- Allows a unified theory of acquisition ACROSS languages, while explaining how they differ.
Empirical Evidence for Principles
& Parameters
- Children’s early utterances (usually) similar to adult word
order (have relevant parameter set) - Children are productive from early on (allgone sticky). - applying rules of grammar.
- Some evidence that children understand the role of word
order (Subject-Verb-Object transitive construction) from age 2yrs or earlier from preferential looking studies
what do Preferential looking & pointing studies say about UG
Children aged (just below 2) can identify the correct picture to match
Subject-Verb-Object sentences from a choice of 2 causal
actions. (set correct parameter).
BUT - disagreement from constructivists as to what these
results mean
– comprehension vs. production. e.g. the children point to the first thing they hear is doing the action. doesn’t necesarrily mean they understand. there
- Theoretical problems for UG
- Parameters not clearly specified.
-How many parameters are there?
-Which aspects of language are coded by parameters
-and which are not? - Unclear how children avoid setting parameters incorrectly.
- Want a drink?, Got to go now
- Bilingualism – how do children set two (or more) versions of same parameters?
Empirical evidence against P&P
- Children display limited knowledge of SVO word order in
production and act-out studies. e.g. show me the frog meeking the lion. - Naturalistic data studies provide evidence of partial,
lexically specific knowledge within a grammatical category e.g. rules about some verbs, auxiliaries, determiners - Many studies show a very close relation between what children hear, how often, and what and when they learn
continuity accounts (that posit grammatical rules from the outset) explain development in terms of
limitations on performances rather than limited knowledge
maturational innate grammar
UG develops and matures over time based on a biologically determined clock
Radford’s (1990) maturational model
- Lexical stage (20 months) mainly content words with adult corresponding parts omitted
- functional stage (around 24 months)
advantages and (1 piece of) evidence of nativist maturational innate grammar
- explains why early utterances aren’t entirely grammatical
- expl development over time = fit with empirical data
- some have claimed similar trajectory of learning fr deaf, blind, normal hearing (Gleitman) despite diff experience of world
theoretical and empirical problems with maturational innate grammar
- difficult to idnetify specific points in time where different grammatical aspects come online
- From earliest stages, children show some use of most grammatical functions, although inconsistent and varies across languages
- Around 24 mnths, children’s use of many functional words is related to their lexical frames. e.g. Don’t + x
what is the linking problem
(nativist)
how do children link their innate grammatical categories to the words they’re hearing?
semantic bootstrapping
(nativist)
- grammatical (syntactic) categories and their rules are innate.
- children use semantics (meaning) to map words in the input onto these innate syntactic categories using innate Linking Rules.
i.e. the meanings of the categories are innate, and once they assign a meaning to the words, they assign a category
e.g. finding out who the agent and who the patient is
know that the agent is the subject, action is the verb, and patient is the object
what is the problem with semantic bootstrapping
how is this solved
sometimes it’s not always obvious to work out grammatical word categories from meaning
solved via a form of distributional analysis. e.g. use language from prototypical sentences, then apply knowledge of order to work out grammatical category of more abstract terms
advantages of semantic bootstrapping
explains:
- how children break into that innate system.
- why early utterances follow adult word order
- Explais how children learn verbs which are not actions, nouns which are not objects etc.
problems with semantic bootstrapping
many of childrens lexically-specific early utterances are not semantically prototypical , and therefore are not likely to be based on innate knowledge of semantic linking rules
e.g. I want a drink is learned early. is abstract e.g. the agent is I. and so they wouldn’t of learned enough prototypes to base this off.
In passive sentances, the noun phrase that usually is the object of an active transitive becomes the subject.
e.g. the mouse was chased by the cat.
how do nativists tackle the problem of passives?
the passive ‘parameter’ doesn’t arrive till age 5. so passives are learned late.
BUT
children do use passive sentances fairly early on, especially in other languages
