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.
example: Adjective ordering preferences
linguistic view: syntactic closeness to nouns encoded rightly through Universal grammar
cog view: ordering is not strict, but more out of preference
evaluating linguistic universals
linguistic universals can often be explained by cognitive bias. a potential bias is adjective ordering: Novel information bias.,
- more unexpected or novel information to the front as this makes the message easier to phrase.
Other arguments: extensive hardwired set of rules seems biological impulsive
- language evolution: structure of language itself might have evolved to facilitate learning, which might explain some of the cog bias
Large language models
- deep network capable of predicting long units of text trained on enormous amounts of data.
- context-aware representations
- outperform human bench marks
- similiar principles in visual models
what can we learn from LLMs
- creative language generation
Imprinting
Newley hatched geese rapidly learn the features of their ‘caretaker’ become strongly emotional attached, the songs they learn as a child act as a soundboard for developing song in puberty.
are there critical or sensitive periods for learning language. evidence: feral children.
raised w little to no language, sometimes no language at all, if there is vocab better than grammar.
driving forces of language acquisition
input, social interaction, variation
- starting off small
vocab size as a function of child-directed speech,
less-is-more principle: lim cog resources, including working memory may help children acquire language.
- driving forces for language variation- Child directed speech
the way caregivers speak to infants or young children
phonology- slower, more pauses, exaggerated, higher and wider pitch, convey pos affect, esp before 12 months’
vocabulary- here and now, concrete words, stuff interesting the children
morphology + Syntax- simpligy forms, incomplete sentences but mostly statistically correct (more grape juice)
ev for limitied role of CDS (1st view)
- hunter gathere child- children are not spoken to until they can speak
- theory that it doesnt matter how children are spoken to.
ev for second view CDS
CDS helps children learn languages: linguistic feedback hypothesis= adults don’t talk to children to teach them language, but to be understood, language lessons are a side product of CDS
evidence: infants are sensitive to different types of speech. 6 month olds turn towards adults who speak in sing song voice.,
- Interaction: active participation
phonetic learning task followed by head-turn paradigm. american infants raised in english environment exposed to mandarin or english speak sounds.
- highlights social dimension: presence of a person increases attention of acoustic properties.
- variation: individual differences
- biological variation: limitation is important for language learning and has a genetic bias: twin studies indicate 30% variance due to heritability.,
- good imitators turn out to be good talkers.
quantitative differences in input: higher SES (social economic status) –> larger vocab
qualitative differences: some children might learn more from overheard speech others from CDS
INPUT
language exposure matters: it varies in amount and quality and affects rate of language development
starting small: helps acquisition in some areas of language learning.
INTERACTION
- adults use CDS, which simplifies and clarifies speech at every level
- CDS might not be necessary to acquire language
- interaction is essential for language acquisition, especially at young age.
