language Flashcards
+language as classical conditioning
- General learning mechanism: through imitation and positive reinforcement when child and parent establishes succesful communication
- Emphasises the role of environmental input, highlights external reinforcement (eg explicit feedback) where adult like or meaningful speech is rewardsed.
Proponents: Skinner.
- Emphasises the role of environmental input, highlights external reinforcement (eg explicit feedback) where adult like or meaningful speech is rewardsed.
linguistics view: skinner
- Poverty of the stimulus: language input children receive is not enough to explain how they acquire the complex structures of their languages
- Speed and universality: children learn all kinds of language quickly and easily, suggests innate language acquisition mechanism.
- Creative use of language:L coming upw ith new and unique sentences is difficult to explain without resorting to language specific innate principles.
statistical learning view
- Highlights experience rather than innate principles.
- Assumes different mechanisms than behavioursm where conditioning principles (immitation confitioning) lead to languqage acquisition
- Sensitivity to statistical regularities in our perceptual experiences.
- Emphasizes implicit learning and ifentification of statistical regularities.
social interactioinst view
- Role parents have in shaping the social communicative setting (for example shared book reading
- Emphasizes social experiences as primary way in which children acquire language
Social skills such as turn taking, mutual gaxe and joint attention
- Emphasizes social experiences as primary way in which children acquire language
language specific
- Parot- 80 words, rela language or rote learning? Bonobo- communicates symbolically however has no function words and limited morphography.
Key insight: social aspect of language, many qualitative aspects of language in animals, but higher quantitative difference.
brocas area and aphasia
- Brocas area: left inferior frontal gyrus inportant for speech production
Adjacent to the part of the motor control area for the jaws, lips and tongue. - Aphasia: - No problem understanding but slow, poorly articulated and ungrammatical speech
- Prepositions, speech prepositions, articles, conjunctions often left out, speech can be laborious and halting, with scrambled sentences.
wernickes area and aphasia
Wenicke’s area: adjacent to the primary auditory area that recieves linguistic input, left superior temporal gyrus, very involved with hearing, oricessing words and meaning.
- Wernickes aphasia:
Difficulty accessing verbs, nouns and adjectives, fluent speech that is completley lacking senee.
behaviorist view on language (skinner)
- general learning mechanism: through imitation and pos reinforcement when a child and parent establish successful communication.
- emphasizes role of environment input, and external reinforcement when meaningful speech is rewarded
linguistics view
(Chompsky)
poverty of the stimulus: language input children receive is not rich enough to explain how they acquire the complex rules and structures of their language
- speed and universality: children learn all kinds of language quickly and easily: suggests innate language acquisition mechanism
creative use of language: coming up with new and unique sentences is difficult to explain without resorting to language specific innate principles
statistical learning view
language is learned the same way in which all human learning occurs
- highlights experiences rather than innate principles
- assumes different mechanisms than behaviorism where conditioning principles (imitation conditioning) lead to language acquisition
- emphasizes implicit learning and identification of statistical regularities
social- Interactionist views
(Vygotsky)
language occurs in a social context:
- role parents have in shaping the social communicative setting
- emphasizes social experiences as primary way in which children acquire language’
- social skills such as turn taking, mutual gaze
logical problem of language acquisition
- children generate and understand an infinite number of sentences that have never heard before, which suggests an innate capacity for language acquisition,
- the rules for forming sentences are non-obvious, and its hard to explain how we know when or what they are, yet everyone agrees with them.
feedback or negative evidence
- one possibility is that we just try saying things and are told when we are wrong. lack of corrective input for grammatical errors: children dont get told when they say something is gramatically wrong.
explanation: Universal grammar
- theory of the primitives and rules of inferences that enable the child to learn any natural grammar with limited input.
- learning a specific language= parameter setting
- sets boundaries on what acquired languages look like, languages cannot vary in every possible way= language universals
evidence= linguistic universals
absolute: no languages from questions by reversing the word order
statistical: in about all languages, subjects proceed the object
implicational: if a language has X, it will have Y. if a language is SOV, it has question words at the end of a sentence
general: all languages make certain distinctions. noun-verb distinction; all spoken languages have vowels and consonants.
