Language Development- Multi Word Utternces Flashcards
Children’s first sentences
-children’s early multi word combinations are shorter, simpler sentences
-tend to omit obligatory words/ word endings eg cow ear instead of the cow is eating
-inflections eg producing he like instead of he likes
Nature
-some of the linguistic knowledge of human beings is not acquired or learned form sensory experience
-learning is only a process of recollection
Nurture
-human beings acquire all of most of their linguistic knowledge in a sense based way
-what we do know is that there is no doubt innate biases but not necessarily linguistic knowledge. Similar pattern detection mechanisms for visual and linguistic processing
Constructivist theories- usage based theory
The role of distributional analysis/ statistical learning and semantic analogy
Generative linguistic theory
-what is claimed to be innate?
The logical problem of language acquisition
-the knowledge acquired is complex
What data is available to show the knowledge acquired for language acquisition is complex
-children received impoverished inputs
-they dont hear every possible sentence
-they get very little feedback about grammar- parents mostly correct what is untrue rather than ungrammatical
-children often ignore feedback and correction
The nativist solution
-innate linguistic knowledge
-the universal knowledge is said to guide the child in constructing the language from the input
-information from environment> language acquisition device (unconscious process inside child’s mind used only for learning language) language acquisition
Linguistic nativist/ generative assumptions
Children approach the language learning problem with significant innate language specific knowledge- a universal grammar
Negative evidence
Different ways to discover a sentence is ungrammatical
Directly - someone tells you
Pragmatically- you try to use it and no one understands you
Indirectly- you never observe that sentence
How are children’s errors explained
-children do have a full set of principles form birth but errors are caused by performance limitations eg smaller working memory or limited attention span
-also that children’s competence is underestimated
Usage based/ émergentsit approaches
-an empiricist approach: children’s input contains information of sufficient quality and quantity to support acquisition
-children apply general learning mechanisms to linguistic input
-children have access to indirect feedback and distributional evidence in correcting errors
-so humans are born with innate biases to communicate and have innate learning mechanisms for extracting patterns and generalist
Usage based theories
- communicative intention reading
-statistical/ distributional learning
-semantic analogy
-schema combination
Communicative intention reading
The ability to understand intention
Important for correct interpretation and to learn the correct meaning of a sentence
Statistica/ distributional learning
Children analyse the distributions of words in the sentence. Use the distributional patterns from the input in their learning
