Lecture 5, Nativist Approaches Flashcards
What do nativist approaches assume?
Children approach the task of learning language with innate machinery specific to language
What can the innate machinery also be known as?
A Language Acquisition Device or Universal Grammar
What other assumptions does the nativist approach propose?
> Child utterances are “creative” because they have access to innate grammatical rules
Children observe adult word order because they have an abstract rule [subject-verb-object]
Generalisations provide evidence of innate rules
What does the nativist approach say about grammar?
It is a symbolic computational system that processes the relationships between abstract variables
Categories/rules are given in the child’s brain before birth
Acquisition should have an ‘all-or-nothing’ quality
Proposed by Radford, 1990, what are the two predictions of nativist approaches?
Prediction 1: children should learn innately specified aspects of grammar early on
Prediction 2: children should show consistent treatment of members of a particular grammatical category
When rules of grammar differ across languages, in which way are they ‘highly constrained’?
They’re encoded by parameters
Are there any theoretical advantages of universal grammar, if so, what are they?
Yes, universal grammar avoids the problem of explaining how children acquire complex grammatical rules. It also allows a unified theory of acquisition across languages whilst also explaining how languages differ
Is there any empirical evidence for principles and parameters?
Yes,
> early utterances usually follow adult word order
> early productivity [allgone sticky]
> productive use of noun and verb inflection from 2 and a half, and combine nouns with other words
> evidence that children understand word order from preferential looking studies
What have preferential and pointing studies shown us?
That children aged 1-9 can identify the correct picture to match subject-verb-object sentences from a choice of 2 casual options. - Taken as evidence for setting the word order parameter.
What are the preferential looking and pointing studies less clear about?
Distinguishing non-causal actions described with the intransitive subject-verb construction from causal actions
What are the theoretical problems with principles and parameters?
- Not clearly specified
- Unclear how children avoid setting parameters incorrectly
- Bilingualism
Is there any empirical evidence against principles and parameters?
- Children exhibit limited knowledge of SVO order in production and act-out studies
- Naturalistic data studies provide evidence of partial, lexically specific knowledge within a grammatical category
- Many studies show a very close relation between what children hear, how often, and what and when they learn
What do maturational models argue?
- Children do not start out with full UG, so maturational models argue that UG matures over time, or only switches on later in development
So what is an assumption of the maturational model?
The child has some grammatical knowledge available from birth, but other aspects of grammar ‘switch on’ at biologically predetermine points in development
What does Radford’s, 1990, maturational model argue?
At lexical stage [20 months], children’s utterances mainly consist of content words [nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions]. At functional stage [24 months], innate grammar ‘matures’ and parts governing the use of more complex grammatical components switch on.
What are the theoretical advantages of maturational models?
- They explain why early utterances are not fully grammatical
- Allow for development over time so more likely to fit the empirical data
Is there any evidence for maturational models?
Yes, it fits with possible patterns in other areas of development, such as Piaget’s stages of intellectual development and the onset of puberty
What are the theoretical and empirical problems of maturational models?
- Difficult to identify precise point in development of ‘onset stage’
- From earliest stages, children show use of grammatical functions
- 24 months - children’s ‘functional’ words related to lexical frames
What is the linking problem?
Proposes the query, how do children link up their innate knowledge of grammar categories to the words they are hearing?
What are the assumptions of semantic bootstrapping?
Grammatical [syntactic] categories are innate. Children use semantics [meaning] to map words in the input onto these syntactic categories by using the linking rules to map semantics onto syntax
What does it mean to link rules between meaning and syntax?
The child ‘links’ individual words to innate grammatical categories
What semantic roles can the child also link to?
Agent - the person carrying out the action [SUBJECT OF SENTENCE]
Patient - the person or thing affected by the action [OBJECT OF SENTENCE]
What is the solution to the problem of not being able to work out grammatical categories from meaning?
Using a form of distributional analysis to determine word order for the language from prototypical sentences - apply knowledge of word order to work out grammatical category of more abstract terms
What are the advantages of semantic boostrapping?
- Explain how children break into innate system
- Explain why early utterances follow adult order
- Explain how children learn verbs which are not actions, nouns, objects.
What are the limitations of semantic bootstrapping?
- Children’s early lexically-specific utterances are not semantically prototypical, and therefore are unlikely to be based on innate knowledge of semantic linking rules.
- Passive sentences
What are the problems of passives?
- Children may use semantic bootstrapping to conclude that a passive utterance is object-verb-subject -> problems pairing other utterances
- Some nativists propose that the ‘passive’ parameter doesn’t mature until later
