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COGS 156 Final > Lecture 12 > Flashcards

Lecture 12 Flashcards

1
Q

why we didn’t know a whole lot about individual differences in language development

A

individual differences got swept under the rug to a degree

they focused on finding linguistic universals: overall patterns that held across cultures and SES

we didn’t know that much about language acquisition: had to characterized usual/typical patterns before looking at variability around those patterns

• If all kids acquire language similarly
(assumption), then studying one kid in depth
was a good method

• So they would pick a kid with clear articulation so you can study what they’re saying (‘jargon’ kids hard to transcribe)

• Advanced/imitative things kid said dismissed
as anomalous

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2
Q

then, child language become interested in more than just syntax

A

people starting looking at: learning meaning, sound patterns of words

researchers looked at more “jargon-y” kids

deviations from some “perfect universal pattern” became more evident

researchers looked at kids from varied languages and socioeconomic backgrounds: do we see patterns or differences?

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3
Q

referential vs. expressive style

A

clearly expressed (good single word, highly articulate) language vs. fluent language but not as intelligible utterances (more jargon-y)

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4
Q

segmentation

A

how they break up words

how they learn things as chunks: is “mrrogers” a single word? or are there other mrs?

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5
Q

early sentences

A

two word stage: fix noun and then another noun

formulas: pronoun, verb, noun, “me eat”, “Sarah eat.”

kids use slightly diff formulas but using formals is a common pattern across kids

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6
Q

referential vs. expressive

diary study from Nelson

A

17 kids in a diary study (where you give the parents a diary and have them write down all the things kids say over a period of time)

looked at the child’s first 50 words

divided into two general classes: referential and expressive

referential kids (who were origionally mostly focused on) who are more referential tend to talk about things using words to categorize the environment and expressive kids using language more as a tool for socialization (communicating with other people): the two types have diff hypothesis for what language is for

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7
Q

referential kids

n=10

A

mostly words for object

went from 1 to 2 word stage

spurt of words near 50 word level

spurt preceded syntactic combos

talked a lot about objects

language used to categorize the world!

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8
Q

problems with Nelson’s distinction conclusion drawn from the referential vs. expressive diary study

A

1) she was using parental report: parents are overly generous in the things kids are saying, they tend overreport nouns
2) composition of lexicon (mental dictionary) vs. word frequency (there could be words that they know but that they don’t use very much = difficult to detect those words that they know but don’t use often)

  • likely to miss low frequency words (didn’t produce words within earshot)
  • two kids could look the same, but use that word differently depending on who the kid is

3) criteria to decide type of word kid’s using
- Nelson’s criteria for ‘noun’ mixed form (‘dog’ = noun) and function (saying ‘dog’ to get a doggie-ride = verb)
- just because our understanding of what a noun is what it is, doesn’t mean that that’s the kid’s understanding of that word’s function

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9
Q

expressive kids

n=7

A

fewer object words, more pronouns and function words

social phrases (go away, stop it)

less clear transition to syntactic combos

no word spurt

using language for socializing and communicating with other people

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10
Q

different ways people characterize variation referential vs. expressive dimension

A

referential words…….expressive words

code-oriented (how language is used to mean particular things)…….message-oriented

more nouns……more phrases

analytic strategy (break things down into component parts)……..holistic strategy (try to produce overall forms)

noun combos (early word combos noun+noun) or…….pronominal combos (pronoun + noun)

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11
Q

segmentation

frozen phrases?

A
  • what does the kid use as independent words?
  • may say “little red wagon,” but to the kid it might be “littleredwagon”(expressive style) is one, solid object (frozen phrases): are they naming all the component parts or is it just one object?

• possibly related to ‘cautious’ vs. ‘risk-taking’ phonology
- cautious: use rule system religiously or avoid words that they can’t say (referential)
• you’re more accurate if you produce shorter words
- risk-taking: ‘sloppy’ phonology, less clear rule system, more likely to use imitated forms (less worried about getting it right) (expressive)

          = neither strategy is faster for acquiring vocabulary
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12
Q

early sentences

bloom, lightbown, & hood

A

observed 4 kids doing 2 word combinations

found that all produced negation (“no socks” because they’re not wearing socks, or “no more beans” i don’t want any more beans) / nonexistence, recurrence (“more beans” because they want beans)

   - no + X, no more + X
   - more + X 

  -pivot word strategy (two word formula = function word (no, no more, more) +content (noun or verb))

different in expressing action and location

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13
Q

function words

A

fewer of them, they’re closed class

pronoun, preposition, article, negatition

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14
Q

early sentences

eric and peter pivot word strategy for location and possession

A

action, location, possession w/pivot word strategy

  • articule I + X
    e. g. “I eat”
  • location: X + here
    e. g. sit here, eat here, sleep here
  • possession: My + X
    e. g. “my Gijoe”
  • pronominal strategy: have a formula with one fixed value and one that you fill in
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15
Q

early sentences

Kathryn and Gia

A

combined content words that were not fixed

  • “Gia push”, “Kathryn sock”
  • nominal strategy: combining two content words (noun+noun)
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16
Q

early sentences

around MLU of 2.5….

A

…. the patterns converged (nominal and pronominal strategies became one)

maybe these early differences end up coming back to the same place later in language development

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17
Q

how stable are these individual differences?

A

or do they happen randomly and everyone ends up in the same place eventually

pronominal strategy-using kids end up also using nouns and vice versa

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18
Q

Stability

Nelson experiment

once kids hit 2-word speech:

A
  • the referential kids started with lots of nouns (nominal strategy users)
  • expressive kids mixed nouns and pronouns
    (pronominal strategy users)
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19
Q

Stability

Starr - 1975

A

‘object’ kids do object-attribute relations more in 2-word speech

e.g. “Yummy cake”

20
Q

Stability

Bates 1988

A

27 kids from 10-28 months: longitudinal study

  • kids that were analytic at 13 mos –> advanced grammar @ 28 mos
  • holistic style @ 13 months, their level of language development was uninformative as to their performance at 28 months
21
Q

Pine and Lieven disagree with Bates

A

11 to 20 months: kids who start out with more frozen phrases at 11 months–> produce more productive word combos at 20 months

more consistent with words breaking down frozen phrases

22
Q

Peters uniting: different strategies are useful

A

fission (if you start out doing frozen phrases you can break those down into individual words)

and fusion (if you start out with individual words you can put them together)

both useful!

in adult speech we do a little bit of both: we use chunks of over learned words/phrases and we also use word-word combos

23
Q

Sources of variation

A
  • the child itself (the nature part: individual differences that would show up reliably regardless of the environment)
  • child’s input (the nurture part: if they get more complex input vs. less input that makes a difference)
  • type of language being learned (structure of the particular language)
  • variety of other people, social situations (most studied is maternal speech, though)
  • mom-to-kid: direct, converse, instruct (stable differences across moms, related to child speech)
  • directing: fewer nouns, more verbs, and social interaction (vs. routinized naming games)
  • refer/describe, request objects: more nouns
24
Q

sources of variation

variability in learning rate

A
  • first word around 1st birthday to 18 months

- not related to referential/expressive dimension

25
Q

sources of variation

shyness

A

scared of talking, of making mistakes

  • talk less and w/less complexity k-1st
  • receptive abilities (compression) may be fine they may just be shy about production
  • may be slower at second language learning
  • hard to tell if slow acquirers turn out to be shy: how do you quantify shyness?
26
Q

sources of variation

cognitive differences

A
  • referential kids more attentive to toys, so they’re better at object categorization
  • where expressive kids do more social (puppets) and symbolic (banana phone) play
27
Q

sources of variation

routinized naming games

A

Nelson: for referential kids, 28% of first 50 words were body parts (probably from routinized naming)

  • influence whether a child will be referential or expressive (word doping)
  • no body parts within the first 50 words for expressive kids
28
Q

sources of variation

expressive-speech kids’ moms

A

conventional social expressive:

please, bye, oh dear, etc.

29
Q

sources of variation

different kid style may make….

A

…different use of input

mom uses a lot of conventional social phrases but you don’t pay attention and you just really like trucks or dolls so you just pay attention when someone talks about trucks or dolls

inclined toward being referential (trucks) or inclined toward expressive (listen more to the conventional social phrases)

30
Q

sources of variation

Socioeconomic status

BIG SOURCE OF VARIATION

A

children in families with higher SES have larger vocabularies

why? word doping? the amount of child directed language that the kid gets (not getting as much language input)

not just amount of input but quality of input (variety of the input)

low quality input for 4: all they ever say is “hello baby” but with the same 4 hours they read books or do naming games

most of the kids being studies are above average because they’re in higher SES

even in lower SES more language input and better language input leads to better language outcomes

31
Q

sources of variation

input languages differ greatly…..

A

…may lead to different patterns of acquisition

  • more vs. less nouns (noun bias in English but not in Mandarin)
  • synthetic (e.g. Polish: hard to learn all the case endings) vs. agglutinated (e.g. Turkish: dummy syllables for unlearned) morphology
32
Q

sources of variation

interaction factors

A

e.g. child’s preferences and parent’s response

depends on whether the parent indulges the child’s preference or not: so names a lot of objects cause kid likes it or use a lot of social phrases cause they feel they need more work there

maybe child attends to objects a lot and does parent notice and engage in joint attention labeling a lot?

33
Q

implications to keep in mind when we’re talking about the study of language development

A
  • not just English, which as dull (impoverished) morphology
  • expressive kids underrepresented in language studies
  • kids and adults use formulas (not just rules)
    • don’t talk back to Darth Vader – he’ll get ya!
    • Donttalkbackto _____ hellgetya! (frozen form with one variable element)

• contexts tested (toy play) usually elicit object labels
- may misrepresent (underestimate) some kids: not tapping the language resources that they have

• diff cultures place diff values on language behaviors (English has a strong preference to label things)

34
Q

Theoretical approaches

A

structuralism vs. functionalism

competence vs. performance

nativism vs. empiricism

35
Q

Is there an answer to the problem of language acquisition?

A

we don’t have a perfect, grand unifying theory of language development that physics, biology, etc..

we have a lot of complex data and people tend to focus on one part of the data = if you’re only working on one small area it’s hard to see commonalties across domains

there are different theoretical approaches that drive experimentation

different people think different things constitute evidence: “they can’t produce subject-verb sentence but they can comprehend those sentences: what does that mean?”

36
Q

structuralism vs. functionalism

A
  • linguistic structure as explanation: what you’re studying is how do children come to form syntactic utterances that match their language community
  • behavior (language in –> behavior out)
    • don’t necessarily care about linguistic form
37
Q

competence vs. performance (Chomsky’s distinction)

A

• competence = knowledge of language rules
- mostly structuralist

• performance = things (memory, attention) that make you mess up

 - mostly functionalists 
- these things are relevant and suggest constraints
38
Q

nativism vs. empiricism

A
  • language is mostly governed by biology

- language is mostly governed by environment, like any other behavior

39
Q

interactionist or emergentists

A

language is a constant recombination of nature and nurture (they interact in complex, dynamic ways)

40
Q

really old: behaviorist

A

associate language stimulus with behavioral response

but kids don’t get reinforced/punished by parents

Skinner

41
Q

research approaches

mid 20th century: linguistic (nativist)

A
  • language acquisition device (module)
  • poverty of the stimulus: you couldn’t get the grammar back from the language input kids get, so it must be built into your brain
  • mostly about grammar, but some speech is special arguments too: note that reading is also really automatic, yet we don’t seem to have innate reading areas
  • recursion (embedding of rule within itself): “ the singer Natalie likes died.” (but you can only get like 3 until meaning is lost - nativists account for it by saying it’s just a performance problem)
  • serial processing: processing bit by bit
42
Q

Interactionist (emergentist)

A
  • Piaget, Bates, McWhinney
  • Associated with UCSD
  • approach to development generally, not just language
  • language has complex structure, but many factors affect it
  • social interaction is very important
  • performance limitations are relevant
  • parallel, not serial, processing
  • PDP models: can learn things that look like rules (will over-regularize and can even do embedding)
43
Q

pivot word strategy

A

two word formula = function word (no, no more, more) +content (noun or verb)

  • no + X,
  • no more + X
  • more + X
44
Q

synthetic languages

A

Polish

some of the morphemes in the language have multiple pieces of meaning attached to them

e.g. one morpheme might indidicate that I’m singular, feminine, and in the accusitve cases (3 pieces of meaning in the same morpheme)

hard for a kid to learn all the case endings in Polish cause it’s computationally more difficult

so Polish kids may look less advanced

45
Q

agglutinated languages

A

have several morphemes that each carry a single meaning attached to it

somewhat more simple because there’s a one to one mapping between meaning and morpheme

kids may produce dummy syllables for unlearned words: fill in nonsense syllables

COGS 156 Final (7 decks)

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