Language Theory Midterm Flashcards
Why did the behaviorist theory fall out of favor?
Ignored cognition
Just imitation, rewards and practice
Feel good account of language acquisition
Locke: explains why a particular infant is carrying out a particular trait at a particular time
Series of individual behaviors build on one another
Assimilative behaviors
- Brain of the child is just soaking up info
* Orienting to faces
Accomodative behaviors
- Infant adapts itself to what the adult is doing
* Imitating facial expressions
Locke linking social cognition and language acquisition
Piagetian, assimilation and accommodation
“bottle” #21
epistemic child
Piaget the child trying to find out how the world is structured and in the process making the structure of his own mind.
cultural-historical child
vygotsky, in a specific historic context, in a culture that may or may not nurture
cognitive self
child referring to self as “I”, beginning to objectify themselves
Experiential child
Nelson, Piaget
Children are knowledge seeking, not innate
Usage based language acquisition
Tomasello: children learn what they hear
Meaning is use
Structure emerges from use
Joint attention is critical
mental state terms
know and think, no concrete, visible referents
Temporal and causal terms
child must be able to find themselves in time and use the terms to understand how events relate to each other
Implicit memory
Child doesn’t separate their memories from anyone else’s
Explicit memory
Need it for narratives, language is really theirs when they develop EM
modularity hypothesis
brain is divided into separate modules, each with the ability to deal with a specialized kind of information
Story narratives
Children have to understand scenes, people, sequences, actions
Conversational discourse
Admonishment and negotiation Narratives of experience Explanations Future plans Fictional stories
Mental grammar
Complete set of rules
Allows for comprehension of novel utterances
Unconscious grammatical principles
Fundamental arguments
Jackendoff
Mental Grammar
Innate Language
Construction of Experience
Innate language
the human brain contains a genetically determined specialization for language.
The way that children learn to talk implies that the human brain has a genetic predisposition to learn language.
Construction of experience
our experience of the world is actively constructed by the unconscious principles that operate in the brain
Organizing and reorganizing input
Human senses
Language is at the center of socialization, cognition, memory, joint attention, meaning, experience, categorization, representation, motivation, and perception
Universal Grammar
Jackendoff: Innate ability to learn language
Unconscious principles
Jackendoff: Genetic hypothesis (created to explain innate knowledge)
