Developmental wk 5

Question 1

nativists assume what about language

Answer 1

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

Question 2

nativist assumptions

Answer 2

assume grammar is a symbolic computational system which processes relationships between abstract variables

Assume these grammatical categories and rules are given in the brain

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

Question 3

Radford 2 predictions of nativist language learning

Answer 3

1. children should learn the innately specified aspects of grammar pretty early on.
2. children should show consistent treatment of members of a particular grammatical category

Question 4

what would the rules of a universal grammar look like?
(apply to all languages)

Answer 4

where the rules of grammar beween languages differ, they do so in highly consrained ways, eclosed by parameers.
- children need to work out which parameter settings apply for their language.

Question 5

examples of word parameters settings

Answer 5

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).

Question 6

Empirical Evidence for Principles
& Parameters

Answer 6

• Children’s early utterances (usually) observe adult word
  order – taken as evidence the relevant parameter is set.
• Children are productive from early on (allgone sticky) –taken as evidence they are 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…

Question 7

Preferential looking & pointing studies found wgat for UG
(universal grammar)

Answer 7

Children aged 1;9 can identify the correct picture to match
Subject-Verb-Object sentences from a choice of 2 causal
actions
 Taken as evidence for setting the word order parameter
 BUT - disagreement from constructivists as to what these
results mean – comprehension vs. production

Question 8

4. Theoretical problems for UG

Answer 8

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?

Question 9

Empirical evidence against P&P

Answer 9

Children display limited knowledge of SVO word order in
production and act-out studies (e.g. Akhtar et al, 1997; Akhtar,
1999; Matthews et al, 2005; Chan et al, 2010).
 Naturalistic data studies provide evidence of partial,
lexically specific knowledge within a grammatical category
– verbs, auxiliaries, determiners (e.g. Pine et al, 1998; Lieven et
al, 1997; Wilson, 2003)
 Many studies show a very close relation between what
children hear, how often, and what and when they learn(e.g. Ambridge et al., 2015)

Question 10

continuity accounts (that posit grammatical rules from the outset) explain development in terms of

Answer 10

limitations on performances rather than limited knowledge

Question 11

maturational innate grammar

Answer 11

UG develops and matures over time based on a biologically determined clock

Question 12

Radford’s (1990) maturational model

Answer 12

Lexical stage (20 months) mainly content words with adult corresponding parts omitted

functional stage (around 24 months)

Question 13

advantages and evidence of nativis maturational innat grammar

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

theoretical and empirical problems with maturational innate grammar

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

what is the linking problem

Answer 15

how do children link their innate grammatical categories to the words their hearing?

Question 16

semantic bootstrapping

Answer 16

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

linking rules link meaning to gramatical 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

Question 17

what is the problem with semantic bootstrapping

how is this solved

Answer 17

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

Question 18

advantages of semantic bootstrapping

Answer 18

explains:
- hoe 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.

Question 19

problems with semantic bootstrapping

Answer 19

many of childrens lexically-specific early utterances are not semantically prototypical , and therefore are 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 usually the object of an active transitive becomes the subject.
e.g. the mouse was chased by the cat.

Question 20

how do nativists tackle the problem of passives?

Answer 20

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