Language Development Flashcards
Define syntax
Conventions for ordering words in ways that change the meaning of an utterance
3 Key features of syntax
- Word order
- Syntactic categories
- Abstract rules
Outline Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1993) and what this tells us about word order
19 month olds played audio which required understanding of syntax, shown two videos one correct (matched audio) and one incorrect. Infants spent longer looking at the correct video.
Shows comprehensions of word order happens very early.
Evidence for infants being able to infer syntactic categories
Mintz (2006): 12 month olds listened longer to ungrammatical sentences as they were more novel. The effect was stronger for verb frames.
What is abstract rule learning
The ability to find generalisable patterns in incoming input (language)
At what age is abstract rule learning observed
around 1 year - Gomez and Gerken (1999), listened to new grammatical sentences longer, familiarity effect.
What was Vygotskys view of language learning
Language emerges through physical activities in the “zone of proximal development” and in a social environment.
What was Skinner’s view of language learning
Children imitate what they see and hear. Associations are fine-tuning by reinforcement. Placed a heavy emphasis on the linguistic environment.
What was Piagets view of language learning
Language development occurs in pre-requisite stages and is connected to cognitive development.
What is Chomsky’s view of language acquisition
We learn rules, children have to have an innate ability to process rules or else they would struggle to understand what is ungrammatical.
What is the poverty of input argument
Children’s language input is poor and contains limited negative evidence such as no examples of ungrammatical sequences and no correction of syntactic errors.
What is the internal constituent structure
The deep structure of language that children have to be able to understand
Recursivity
The way in which a structure (like phrase or clause) is embedded within a larger structure like a sentence
Example of recursivity
The boy who saw the dog that chased the cat that scratched the girl left.
What is the critical period
The first few years of life in which children are in a rich linguistic environment which is essential to trigger the innate syntax-acquisition device
What is an example of what happens if language is learned after the critical period
Genie, child who was severely abused and neglected. Language exposure happened after the critical period for her. So instead of acquiring language she simply learned it (general-learning mechanisms)
How does Chomsky’s view differ from others like Skinner
Emphasis on necessity to explain how syntax is acquired in the face of an impoverished input.
Outline syntactic development (as proposed by Chomsky
Children have a biological endowment for language processing. Children know that languages take certain limited forms (Universal grammar). There is a continuity from infancy to adult hood.
Universal grammar has a few parameters that are free to vary from language to language.
What are the parameters of universal grammar
word order
What is Fodors (1981) view of language and syntax
Language is a stand-alone, human-specific faculty. Encapsulated. Focus on modularity where syntax is the defining core of that module
Evidence for Fodor (1981) view
Developmental language disorder (DLD). DLD affects language functions but leaves cognition relatively intact.
Outline syntactic development (Pinker, 1984, 1987)
Innate capacity for language. They have pre-conceptions about links between knowledge of roles (semantics) and knowledge of grammatical position. Such as the ‘doer’ appears before the verb. Semantic bootstrapping.
Language has occurred gradually during evolution through selection. Chomsky views it as more abrupt (possibly a genetic mutation)
What did Pinker (1979) say a theory of language acquisition had to take into account
A language instinct
The linguistic input
The cognitive ability of the child
Outline semantic bootstrapping
Proposed by Pinker, (1984), there are regularities in the observable world. Observation of a link between semantic representations and syntactic structures.
Outline syntactic development (Seidenberg, 2002)
Syntax is the knowledge of what is likely to come next given the sentence so far. Structure is represented in the input. While semantic bootstrapping can help, it is not always necessary. Focus on statistics.
Is syntax learned through statistical learning?
Marcus (1999): statistical learning doesn’t really explain rule learning. There has to be an innate ability to compute open-ended abstract relationships.
7 month olds exhibited a novelty effect for ungrammatical sentences (Transitional probabilities of all utterances (ABA and ABB) was 0 so cannot be statistical learning.
