Language acquisition Flashcards

Question

Children are really good at learning words

Answer 1

✤ The first words are piecemeal, but at some point (usually between 14-24 months) there is a vocabulary spurt characterised by very rapid learning ✤ Individual variability is tremendous and not that meaningful at this age Vocabulary growth varies with SES and environment due to amount of word they hear

Answer 2

✤ Shape bias (children prefer to categorise (most) nouns by shape) ✤ Mutual exclusivity (children generally assume items don’t have more than one label) ✤ Size principle(multiple examples are evidence for the smallest category that covers them) ✤ Social reasoning (Infants only learn labels if the speaker is looking at the objects)

Answer 3

-May be learned based on statistical associations between words and features of the categories they pick out Evidence for learning: teaching children new nouns cleanly organised by shape speeds up later word learning but teaching material noun does not work

Answer 4

three organisation level :superordinate (animal), basic(dog), subordinate (shepard)

Answer 5

Children do not learn labels if the speaker has previously mislabeled other items

Answer 6

``` These are things like noun, verb, etc. Different languages vary on what parts of speech they have and there is no fully agreed-upon classification scheme,although there are some basic similarities -seperate into open class and close class Parts of speech are associated with different roles in the sentence (subject, object, etc). These are often called arguments. ```

Answer 7

- easy to add new members - carry much of the content - produced earlier - easier for 2nd language learners

Answer 8

- hard to add new members - carry much of the grammar - produced later - harder for 2nd language learners

Answer 9

Most languages have a default word order English: primary word order is SVO (subject-verb-object) secondary word order is OVS Word orders vary across languages, mostly SOV and SVO

Answer 10

Language is compositional: the meaning of a phrase or sentence is not just a mixture of the meaning of its words -different word order can result in drastic different sentences

Answer 11

Children learn word order early Even the first sentences, though they drop words, usually have the right order for the words that are produced The rest of grammar comes quickly. Lots of individual varibility but rapid expansion

Answer 12

Most linguists agree that, regardless of the word order, verbs in every language are the “heads” of the sentence They determine what the arguments are They determine if arguments are optional or not Because of their importance, a lot of grammar learning is actually about verb learning

Answer 13

We probably don’t learn just by brute mimicry (i.e., only using verbs with arguments we have seen them used before) People (adults and children, in the lab and out) are willing to say verbs in argument structures they have never heard before: they are generalising beyond the input People don’t just generalise arbitrarily, however There are patterns for which verbs occur with which kind of argument structures

Answer 14

✤ Maybe children are told when they get things wrong? (i.e., perhaps they receive negative evidence) ✴ This probably doesn’t play much role: children appear not to receive much, or notice it when they do Possible solutions to the logical problem of language acquisition ✤ Maybe they are sensitive to more subtle kinds of negative evidence, like rephrasings that statistically occur more often ✴ This does occur (statistically), although it’s arguable whether it is enough to entirely solve the problem (Chouinard & Clark, 2003) ✤ Maybe they use implicit negative evidence about which argument structures don’t appear ✴ This does also happen: it predicts n that over generalisation errors should be more common for infrequent verbs, which does happen (Ambridge et al., 2008)

Answer 15

We also have to learn the morphological rules that apply to verbs Morphological rules are rules governing how morphemes can be used and combined in a language Morphemes are the smallest units that convey meaning Includes tense (i.e., when the action took place), which overlaps somewhat with mood (i.e., whether it is certain to happen) and aspect (i.e., whether it is ongoing)

Answer 16

Regular: add +ed Almost all new verbs are regular, which indicates that the past tense rule is productive and has some psychological reality Irregular: mostly occur in clusters based on similarity of stem These are also psychologically real: people are more confused about new verbs that sound like irregulars

Answer 17

Irregular verbs are the most frequent, which suggests an evolutionary story If a verb is infrequent, it’s unlikely to be wellmemorised. That means people are more likely to use the regular +ed rule when they use it. Only the frequent verbs will be so well memorised that they are impervious to regularisation over time.

Answer 18

Follows a general U-shaped curve early: few verbs are used, but most of them have correct tense morphology middle: past-tense rules often overgeneralised end: eventually these mistakes are corrected Revolves around whether there are two opposing mechanisms (rules vs memorisation) or whether it all emerges from statistical learning

Answer 19

learning the rules of a language = learning words immediately follow other words There are long-distance dependencies between words in sentences, which suggests there is some deep or hidden structure (probably related to the verb) linking them But People probably don’t use just n-grams to capture grammatical rules as its impossible to track all long distance dependencies

Answer 20

Most linguists agree that it has phrase structure: phrases nested in with one another in our underlying mental representation The underlying depiction of a sentence’s phrase structure is called its parse tree

Answer 21

Syntactic ambiguity arises from sentences with the same words but different meanings. This is because they have different parse trees. It’s also interesting because it suggests that parse trees are psychologically real, and tells us something about how we process language.

Answer 22

People actually do our best to figure the phrase structure out as we’re hearing the sentence Sometimes this results in us getting misled into choosing the wrong parse tree, and then having to go back and reanalyse it from the beginning. These are called garden path sentences. This implies that sentences with larger long-distance dependencies tend to be more difficult

Answer 23

Developmentally: even children are remarkably good at figuring out language “as it comes” — a skill distinct from but correlated with knowledge of vocabulary