Language Acquisition Flashcards
Language Acquisition
What must a child learn?
* The sounds of a language (phonetics)
* The sound patterns of a language (phonology)
* Rules of word-formation (morphology)
* How words combine into phrases/sentences (syntax)
* How to derive meaning from a sentence (semantics)
* How to properly use language in context (pragmatics)
* Lexical items (words, morphemes, idioms, etc)
Innateness Hypothesis
Living organisms have innate behaviors:
* newly-hatched see turtles move toward ocean
* honeybees perform dance for communication
* birds fly
* The ‘Innateness Hypothesis’ argues that our ability to acquire
(human) language is innate (genetically encoded).
* not simply derived from other human cognitive abilities
* Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Attempts to Explains:
* speed of acquisition
* ease of acquisition
* uniformity of acquisition process
* uniformity in adult language
* universalities across languages
Universal Grammar
Universal Grammar (UG) refers to the “set of structural
characteristics shared by all languages”
* Innateness Hypothesis takes UG to be innate.
* UG is not, however, dependent on innateness hypothesis.
* The goal of theoretical linguistics is to discover the properties
of UG.
Sign Language - Innateness of UG
Overview of sign languages:
* have gesture system (cf. phonology)
* have morphology rules
* have syntactic rules
* have semantic rules
* have dictionary of arbitrary signs
*
Support for innateness:
* acquired without explicit instruction
* acquired in similar stages as spoken language
Case Study: Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL)
* NSL didn’t exist before 1980.
* School for deaf children opened.
* Teachers used only limited signs (for the alphabet).
* The deaf children naturally and quickly created their own sign
language.
* NSL quickly became a full-fledged language.
Theories of Acquisition
- Imitation
- Reinforcement
- Active Construction of a Grammar
- Connectionist Theories
Imitation
Main idea: children imitate what they hear
* Evidence: Specific languages are not transferred genetically.
Words are arbitrary, thus children must hear them to ‘imitate’
them.
Problems:
* Children produce things not said by adults.
* Children’s ‘mistakes’ are predictable and consistent.
* Children often fail to accurately mimic adult utterances.
* Children produce and understand novel sentences.
* Children may invent a new language in the right circumstances.
Reinforcement
- Main idea: children learn through positive and negative
reinforcement - Evidence: very little
- Problems:
- ignores how children initially learn to produce utterances
- rarely occurs
- fails when it does occur
- fails to explain
- children’s own grammar rules
- why children seem impervious to correction
- Role of reinforcement limited to ability to be understood or
not.
Imitation / Reinforcement
Example
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: No, say ‘Nobody likes me.’
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
(dialogue repeated eight times)
Mother (now exasperated): Now, listen carefully. Say ‘Nobody
likes me.’
Child: Oh, nobody don’t likes me.
Imitation / Reinforcement
Example:
Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbit and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say that your teacher held the baby rabbit?
Child: Yes.
Adult: What did you say she did?
Child: She holded the baby rabbit and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say she held them tightly?
Child: No, she holded them loosely.
Active Construction of a Grammar
- Children invent grammar rules themselves.
- Ability to develop rules is innate.
- Acquisition process:
- Listen
- Try to find patterns
- Hypothesize a rule for the pattern
- e.g. past tense /-ed/
- Test hypothesis
- Modify rule as necessary
- i.e. Children have a ‘working grammar’.
- Explains what imitation/reinforcement can’t:
- children are expected to make mistakes
- children are expected to follow non-random patterns
- regression
- Explains why children fail to accurately produce adult forms
- child grammars differ from adult grammars
- Problems:
- says nothing about what patterns are learnable
Connectionist Theories
- Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens
neural connections. - Higher frequency → stronger connections
- allows for exploitation of statistical information
- ‘rules’ derived from strength of connections
- Evidence:
- there are clear frequency effects in some aspects of language
- e.g. ‘blick’ tests conforming to frequency of sound sequences
- there are clearly neural connections
- e.g. easily seen with linguistic priming tests
- predicts ‘errors’ based on frequency effects
- e.g. sing-sang-sung, ring-rang-rung → ding-dang-dung
- Problems:
- predicts that any pattern is learnable by humans, but this is
demonstrably false
Summary of Theories
- To account for language acquisition:
- Imitation is necessary but not sufficient.
- Reinforcement is virtually unsupported.
- Active Construction of a Grammar nicely accounts for predictable
deviations from adult grammars, and the various stages of grammar
development. - Connectionist theories account for frequency effects, can also
account for regular deviations from adult grammars. - Active Construction of a Grammar and Connectionist Theories are not
mutually exclusive. - To account for linguistic universals and the absence of certain
patterns in language, we must assume a type of Universal Grammar.
Critical Period
- Is there a ‘critical’ period for language?
- child vs. adult language learning
- native vs. nonnative speakers
- cf. age of immigration and language ability
- arrive before age 6 generally pass as native speakers
- arrive after puberty generally do not pass as native speakers
Critical Period Hypothesis
- basic idea: there is a critical period in development during
which a language can be acquired like a native speaker - strong hypothesis: after this critical period, it is impossible to
acquire a language as well as a native speaker - weak hypothesis: there are ‘sensitive periods’ during which
the ease of learning certain aspects of language decline - different aspects of language (e.g. phonology, syntax) have
different sensitive periods - Evidence:
- ‘feral children’
- ‘Genie’
- isolated for 13 years
- similar stages of language acquisition as children (1-word, 2-word…)
- learned many words rather quickly
- never fully developed syntax or morphology
Stages of Development
- Babbling
- One-word
- two-word stage
- beyond 2-word stage
