Lecture 17: Language Acquisition

Question 1

Distinguishing sounds

Answer 1

○ Babies hear a lot of sounds, some words and some not
○ The first step in language acquisition is the distinguish language sounds from other sounds
○ Then parsing those sounds into phonemes
○ Then phonemes into words
○ The assigning meaning to words
§ Problems are that the same sound can mean different things, and different sounds can refer to the same things

Question 2

Learning Rules

Answer 2

○ Must learn how words are combined (grammar)
○ Must generalize to novel sentences (can’t just memorize wording)
○ Need to acquire rules that can be applied to new sentences

Question 3

Grammatical Feedback

Answer 3

• Adults do not correct grammar but do correct meaning
  
  • Typically do not need reinforcement to learn
    § Language acquisition not just imitation

Question 4

Learning Syntax/Rules

Answer 4

○ Start learning syntactic/grammar rules
○ Examples: Past tense, nonsense words
○ U-Shaped learning of irregular past tense
§ Initially, use the appropriate form (went
§ Learns the rule (add-ed) and overgeneralized (go-ed)
§ Relearn the correct past tense (went)

Question 4

Linguistic Universals

Answer 4

General language principles innate for every language

Question 5

Learning Phonemes

Answer 5

Infants can initially distinguish between all phonemes from all languages, and gradually lose discriminations that are not important in their own language

Question 6

Holophrastic

Answer 6

○ When infants first start being able to talk (one word at a time)
○ No syntax, need context to understand what is being said
○ Understand some phrases
○ Under/overgeneralization for first ~75 words

Question 7

Motherese

Answer 7

○ Adults help kids by speaking in a high pitch, slow rate, and with exaggerated intonations
○ Falling pitch and pausing signals phrase boundaries
○ Infants prefer to listen to motherese

Question 8

Telegraphic

Answer 8

○ Two word
○ Correct use of word order (subject-action, action-object)
○ Can convey lots of information succinctly

Question 9

Nonsense words

Answer 9

○ Kids know that the past tense and plurality of fake words will be -ed and -s respectively
○ Implies language learning is generative, not just imitation

Question 10

Learning Word Meanings: Parts/Wholes

Answer 10

• Will use clues from input about part/whole relationships
  ○ “this is a rabbit; these are his ears”
  § “his” is a cue that the “ears” are a part and not the whole/being

Question 11

Bias Towards Shape

Answer 11

If something is a “biff,” children will claim other objects with the same shape are also “biffs”