Language Development

Question 1

Define syntax

Answer 1

Conventions for ordering words in ways that change the meaning of an utterance

Question 2

3 Key features of syntax

Answer 2

1. Word order
2. Syntactic categories
3. Abstract rules

Question 3

Outline Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1993) and what this tells us about word order

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Evidence for infants being able to infer syntactic categories

Answer 4

Mintz (2006): 12 month olds listened longer to ungrammatical sentences as they were more novel. The effect was stronger for verb frames.

Question 5

What is abstract rule learning

Answer 5

The ability to find generalisable patterns in incoming input (language)

Question 6

At what age is abstract rule learning observed

Answer 6

around 1 year - Gomez and Gerken (1999), listened to new grammatical sentences longer, familiarity effect.

Question 7

What was Vygotskys view of language learning

Answer 7

Language emerges through physical activities in the “zone of proximal development” and in a social environment.

Question 8

What was Skinner’s view of language learning

Answer 8

Children imitate what they see and hear. Associations are fine-tuning by reinforcement. Placed a heavy emphasis on the linguistic environment.

Question 9

What was Piagets view of language learning

Answer 9

Language development occurs in pre-requisite stages and is connected to cognitive development.

Question 10

What is Chomsky’s view of language acquisition

Answer 10

We learn rules, children have to have an innate ability to process rules or else they would struggle to understand what is ungrammatical.

Question 11

What is the poverty of input argument

Answer 11

Children’s language input is poor and contains limited negative evidence such as no examples of ungrammatical sequences and no correction of syntactic errors.

Question 12

What is the internal constituent structure

Answer 12

The deep structure of language that children have to be able to understand

Question 13

Recursivity

Answer 13

The way in which a structure (like phrase or clause) is embedded within a larger structure like a sentence

Question 14

Example of recursivity

Answer 14

The boy who saw the dog that chased the cat that scratched the girl left.

Question 15

What is the critical period

Answer 15

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

Question 16

What is an example of what happens if language is learned after the critical period

Answer 16

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)

Question 17

How does Chomsky’s view differ from others like Skinner

Answer 17

Emphasis on necessity to explain how syntax is acquired in the face of an impoverished input.

Question 18

Outline syntactic development (as proposed by Chomsky

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

What are the parameters of universal grammar

Answer 19

word order

Question 20

What is Fodors (1981) view of language and syntax

Answer 20

Language is a stand-alone, human-specific faculty. Encapsulated. Focus on modularity where syntax is the defining core of that module

Question 21

Evidence for Fodor (1981) view

Answer 21

Developmental language disorder (DLD). DLD affects language functions but leaves cognition relatively intact.

Question 22

Outline syntactic development (Pinker, 1984, 1987)

Answer 22

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)

Question 23

What did Pinker (1979) say a theory of language acquisition had to take into account

Answer 23

A language instinct
The linguistic input
The cognitive ability of the child

Question 24

Outline semantic bootstrapping

Answer 24

Proposed by Pinker, (1984), there are regularities in the observable world. Observation of a link between semantic representations and syntactic structures.

Question 25

Outline syntactic development (Seidenberg, 2002)

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

Is syntax learned through statistical learning?

Answer 26

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.