language 3 Flashcards
children + learning words
- the fast rate of word learning in later life is probably due to a child’s capacity for fast mapping: learning the correct referent of a word alter only one or two labeling.
shape bias (what bias children rely on when learning words)
- children prefer to categorise most nouns by shape
- emerges over the course of the second year
- may be learned based on associations betwene words and features of categories to pick out
evidence for shape bias
- teaching chuldren new nouns cleanly organised by shape speeds up later word learning
mutual exclusivity
children generally assume items don’t have more than one label.
social reasoning
infants only labels if the speaker is looking at the objects.
- infants learn that the object is a dawnoo if the speaker is looking at it when they label it. if speaker not looking at it they mislabel
parts of speech
are associated with different roles in the sentence, these are often called arguments
object, verb, subject
object= usually denotes the non-actor things involved in a sentence
subject= usually denotes the actor or the agent who is doing the action
word order in english
primary= I see dead people= SVO
passive= secondary (passive) word order is OVS- my homework was eaten by my dog
word order matters
language is compositional: the meaning of a phrase or sentence just a mixture of its words
children learn word order early
- recognition: children are aware of word order very early (8 months)
- production: even the first sentences, through they drop words, usually have the right order for the words that are produced
the rest of grammar comes quickly
lost of individual variability- but this is the kind of rapid expansion expected.
verbs are in charge
most linguistics agree that, regardless of the word order, verbs in every language are the heads of the sentence.
- they determine what the arguments are
‘Ziggy likes music’ - one object and one subject
‘She put the rubbish in the bin’- subject, 2 objects.
- because of their importance a lot of grammar learning is actually about verb learning.
learning verb arguments
- how do we learn that different verbs take different arguments? we probs dont learn just by brute mimicry. people are willing to say verbs in ordered argument structures, they have never heard before: overgeneralizing errors suggest that children aren’t mimicking.
possible solutions to the logical problem of language acquisition,
- negative evidence: children are told when they get something wrong, - this doesn’t happen
more subtle kinds: like rephrasing does occur- doesn’t fix the whole problem
implicit negative evidence: it predicts the overgeneralization errors should be more common for infrequent verbs.
it’s not just verb arguments
- we also have to learn the morphological rules governing how morphemes can be used and combined in language
- morphemes are the smallest units that convey meaning. (er), (s), (un). Includes tense, which overlaps with mood (might, will) and aspect (have walked, is walking.)
