Language Acquisition

Question 1

What is FLA?

Answer 1

The process by which young children come to know and use the language of their caregivers.

Question 2

What are the biological foundations of language acquisition?

Answer 2

• left hemisphere of brain specialised for language use
• fairly predictable timeline for development
• biologically programmed sensitive period

Question 3

What are the cognitive foundations of language acquisition?

Answer 3

• need to be able to perceive, comprehend, plan, produce and recall linguistic units
• understand cause&effect relations to use language to communicate
• form mental representations of reality to match words to concepts

Question 4

What are the social foundations of language acquisition?

Answer 4

• need to experience language use in interaction
• typically developing children communicate with caregiver (proto-conversation: gesture, gaze, noise)
• repetitive social routines which caregivers accompany with speech

Question 5

First 12 months

Answer 5

first words

Question 6

12-24 months

Answer 6

v early combinations of words

Question 7

by 36 months

Answer 7

utterances comprehensible to strangers

Question 8

features of early combinations?

Answer 8

lacking inflections, auxiliaries missing, no ‘I’ nominative subject, correct word order, correct negation placement

Question 9

how is FLA achieved (what we know)

Answer 9

• no explicit teaching (even if offered often not obeyed)
• on basis of intake (positive evidence)
• under a variety of circumstances (some don’t receive child directed speech)
• limited amount of time
• very similar process cross-linguistically

Question 10

what is the task of FLA?

Answer 10

• segment the soundstream to identify components
• learn the lexicon
• learn how to combine words (syntax, semantics, discourse)

Question 11

The imitation hypothesis and its problems

Answer 11

The idea that children learn language by imitating what adults say.

Problems:

• no 1-1 correspondence between input and output (75% of adult utterances to children are imperatives and interrogatives, children mostly use declaratives.
• children use novel forms such as overregularised forms. Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman 1977

Question 12

Usage based learning hypothesis

Answer 12

Children learn on an item by item basis

statistical learning + cognitive skills e.g generalisation

Question 13

Innateness hypothesis

Answer 13

Claims poverty of the stimulus
-principles and parameters rather than language specific infomation.
UG+PLD=I-language

explains cross-linguistic similarities

Question 14

What kind of data can we use?

Answer 14

Experimental data
Spontaneous speech
Comprehension data

Question 15

Segmentation of the soundstream

Answer 15

(how?!)

up to 6-8 months can make lots of detailed differentiations
beyond that begin to differentiate just phonemes

Question 16

Inflections

Answer 16

24-30 months - finite forms only
eventually learn inflections
errors are of overregularisation (use of rules!)
U shaped development: imitate, overregularise, learn irregular forms

Question 17

negation

Answer 17

1 - negative marker external to the sentence
2 - internal but no finite verb
3 - full form

Question 18

questions

Answer 18

1 - intonation (on declarative) only
2 - question marker attached to noun e.g where doggy
3 - question marker and non-finite verb
4 - full form

Question 19

production: word order

Answer 19

generally respect the basic word order of their language (Brown, 1973)
can do recursion

Question 20

Which features of grammar are the latest acquired? hypotheses as to why?

Answer 20

functional category (including aux) and movement rules.

‘no functional category?’
w regard to verbs this is the q of whether TP exists.
NO: pivot model, ‘small clause hypothesis’ (Stowell, 1983, VPs rather than TPs - are functional cats avaliable in UG but after maturation?)
YES: truncation model: functional category just isn’t realised at this stage (perhaps due to memory capacity)

Question 21

evidence for the truncation model

Answer 21

also perception data

Guasti:
correct word order in V2 langs implies TP
some examples of finite forms - could just be unanalysed chunks, but Weissenborn 1990 found that negative placement dependencies on finiteness were maintained.

Question 22

Phonetic processes in child speech - possible explanations:

basically all articulatory simplification

Answer 22

fronting: (why!? - potentially arbitrary distinctions on palate difficult?)
anticipation & preservation - difficulty in motor control prevents quick movement?
reduplication - simplified - same as above?
preference for cardinal vowels?
omission of unstressed vowels - (hard to segment speech stream? simplifies length of word?)
cluster simplification (often continuant that’s deleted - articulatory surely)
stopping (why?!)
CV bias?

Question 23

What are the differing ideas on BFLA development?

Answer 23

Unitary language system hypothesis (Genesee 1989)

Separate development hypothesis (De Houwer, 2009):
Volterra & Taeschner 1978 believe that it begins as one system, then the lexicons diverge, then the grammars diverge. suggested to happen between 2-3 years of age. (no-one is saying they never differentiate lol)

Question 24

possible ways in which BFLA languages could interact (not saying they do because they don’t lolll just suggestions)

Answer 24

• transfer - incorporation of grammatical property from language into the other (e.g due to language dominance)
• acceleration - a certain property emerges in the grammar earlier than it would in monolingual FLA
• languages are both acquired slower than in monolingual FLA due to greater memory load

Question 25

problems with the maturation hypothesis?

that language development is biologically determined

Answer 25

• diff langs have diff rates

- more input -> faster acquisition

Question 26

language mixing vs code switching

Answer 26

language mixing is a problem of competence whereas code switching is the result of a pragmatic decision (or to fill lexical gaps)

Question 27

When evaluating evidence in language acquisition, what conditions does your evidence have to meet?

Answer 27

• be systematic
  
  • cannot be explained by error
  • cannot be explained by particularities of the input received by the specific child.

Question 28

BFLA Vocabulary Size

Answer 28

ULS would expect BFLA children to have a combined vocabulary the same size as that of a monolingual child. According to Pearson et al (1993) this is the case, however there are many reasons why this might not indicate a ULS: child’s memory capacity, the fact that they probably do not receive DOUBLE the amount of input as a monolingual child.

Question 29

BFLA translation equivalents

Answer 29

Because of the ‘mutual exclusivity’ bias (Markman, 1989), ULS children would surely avoid learning TEs until the differentiation. BUT De Houwer et al (2006) found that all children studied knew at least one pair of translational equivalents.
(Villa (1984) notes the possible use of TEs as units with different meanings due to underextension, however Leopold (1970) gives examples of children using TEs during an interaction to refer to the same physical object).

Question 30

BFLA bilingual blends

Answer 30

Leopold (1970) - where children merge words from different languages ‘bydersehen’.
Suggests ULS however could just be a performance error. (choosing between langs just as monolinguals create blends when choosing between words).

Question 31

BFLA mixed utterances re lexicon

Answer 31

• generally only involve nouns from another language (Cantone, 2007)
• Paradis & Genesee 1996 don’t find them to be systematic
• Celce-Murcia (1978) finds that the child often doesn’t know the TE
• Deuchar & Muntz (2003) find that children who do not produce mixed utterances have parents who encourage single language utterances as opposed to those with parents who code mix.

Can’t be used as compelling evidence for unitary language system.

Question 32

BFLA rate of development

Answer 32

Marchman et al (2004) note that a larger vocab in one lang corresponds to greater structural complexity in that same language but not cross-lingustically - this supports SDH as it suggests words used are reserved fro structures in the same language and rate of acquisition (affected by input etc) is limited to each different language.

Question 33

BFLA structural features

Answer 33

Kaiser (1994) found that from the emergence of func cat, french-german bilingual children had separate verb placement, agreement, tense & case marking in the 2 languages. (Anti ULS)

This said - Dopke (1998) found that German-English bilinguals create target deviant structures in German which reflect the syntactic rules of English. This is not systematic however (De Houwer, 1990 - very small proportion) (could also be influenced by learning from L2 speakers.)

Question 34

BFLA mixed utterances re structures

Answer 34

De Houwer 1995 does find instances where a bound morpheme is attached to a free morpheme of another language (e.g schraubing) - though not systematically. Also, it is always the free morpheme which is inserted into the utterance rather than the bound morpheme, so a case of lexical gap filling?

Maiwald and Tracy (1994) found a Ge/Eng child who regularly inserted German functional elements into English but this was before the emergence of the Func Cat in English so due to lack of knowledge probs.

Question 35

Adult SLA: Phonology

Answer 35

• attaining native-like pronunciation is the hardest feature of adult SLA
• also intonation, timing and prosodic features are difficult to acquire

Question 36

Critical/sensitive period

Answer 36

In UG we would say this is when parameters are set.

Just in general, Lenneberg (1967) finds there is a biologically determined period for language to be learned perfectly (and naturally) due to loss of brain plasticity.

Supposedly this period ends at puberty

Question 37

Adult SLA and the lexicon

Answer 37

natural input is better than explicit teaching for the lexicon because not only do we need to know word meaning but also collocations.

See transfer phenomena such as I have very hungry (J’ai tres faim)