language acquisition (topic 4)

Question 1

how do newborns perform on sound distinction and how does this change during the first year of their life?

Answer 1

young infants recognize all sound distinctions, whether native or non-native. around 8-10 months, they start to lose the sensitivities to non-native distinctions, and by 11-12 months, they are exclusively sensitive to the distinctions of their native language.

Question 2

what are the three stages in initial speech production of infants? what changes during the second stage?

Answer 2

• 2-6 months: cooing = nasal sounds with sometimes palatal/velar closure; no syllables recognizable.
• 6-12 months: babbling = repetition of syllable-like patterns (CV). at 6 months there is no difference depending on native language, but around 10 months babbling starts to reflect the language they are exposed to.
• from 12 months, 1-3 years: first word production.

Question 3

what are four ways that early word production phonetically differs from their adult targets? and what can one say about the prosody of this early word production?

Answer 3

• cluster reduction
• coda deletion
• consonant harmony (assimilation)
• omission of weak syllables

infants babble the most frequent prosodic structure of words in the target language (syllables, stress placement)

Question 4

what is the development of early perceptual syntactic development (4 stages)?

Answer 4

• from 2 months: remembering word order, if heard in coherent sentence intonation
• 4,5 months: responding to well-formed vs. ill-formed phrasal boundaries across languages
• by 6 months they only respond to differences in their native language; they have learned to recognize the correct prosodic flow in their native language
• 7 months: generalize underlying patterns: recognizing ABA vs. ABB syllable sequencing

Question 5

what are the three stages in early syntactic production?

Answer 5

• 10-11 months: one-word utterances
• 14 months: two-word utterances
• 16-17: phrases and sentences

Question 6

what is telegraphic speech?

Answer 6

infants producing speech that, compared to adult grammar, misses functional elements (wrong case, missing inflection, etc.). this doesn’t happen in all languages.

Question 7

what can you say about word order and language development?

Answer 7

early production rarely violates basic word order of target language. by 18 months, infants can interpret word order differences leading to meaning differences (subject, object).

Question 8

what is the rationalist model of acquisition and what are its characteristics (3)?

Answer 8

a model according to which children have innate knowledge (UG) they use in acquisition

• continuity: no qualitative difference between child languages and adult language
• hard-wiring / innateness
• domain-specifity

Question 9

what is the argument behind UG?

Answer 9

it seems impossible for children to learn language if they don’t have any present innate knowledge, especially because they don’t get any negative evidence (direct information about what is ill-formed)

Question 10

what is the content of UG? and how does learning work with this?

Answer 10

principles: universal principles (e.g. structure dependence, X-bar template)
parameters: principled, limited parameters of variation (e.g. null subject, head direction)
clustering of characteristics means that they only have to see one instance of a parameter –> knowing about all the other rules related to it as well

Question 11

what is a criticism to UG?

Answer 11

structure dependence could also be learnt from hearing relevant examples; innateness not absolutely necessary

Question 12

what is optimality theory? by what is the learning space constrained in OT?

Answer 12

child and adult grammar consist of same, innate constraints (e.g. markedness, faithfulness). initially they are ordered markedness&raquo_space; faithfulness, but in learning they get reordered.

asymmetry in markedness.

Question 13

what is the empiricist perspective to language acquisition? what are its characteristics (3)?

Answer 13

there is no a priori structurally-defined learning space, but there are some non-linguistic biases (outside of grammar).

• emergentism: principles emerge through abstraction over acquisition; child language is-not adult language.
• experience-dependency
• domain-generality

Question 14

what are the three stages of the item-based model of syntax acquisition?

Answer 14

• grammarless holophrases
• schemas
• constructions

Question 15

what are some arguments for the item-based acquisition of syntax?

Answer 15

• det+noun tends to be analysed as chunks

- little productivity

Question 16

how can children learn without any principles being innate and without negative evidence? (3 things)

Answer 16

• entrenchment: repeated input makes other uses sound unconventional
• pre-epmtion: alternative forms block extension
• functional analysis (e.g. semantic hints)

Question 17

what is a challenge for the items-and-analogy learning analysis?

Answer 17

there are many surface level patterns that we would expect to find in child’s language, but we don’t

Question 18

what is the whole-word model of phonological acquisition? what are its stages?

Answer 18

you learn the shape of words and then abstract templates from that

• vocal motor scheme
• templates
• more specific templates

Question 19

what is a challenge to the whole-word model of phonological acquisition?

Answer 19

it does not explain how we learn non-lexical phonology (intonation, stress, etc.)

Question 20

what are some non-linguistic biases that constraint our language, in the empiricist view?

Answer 20

• perceptuo-motor factors –> CV is easy to hear/produce

- processing factors –> doer before doee –> S before O