Midterm Flashcards
nature
[nativism/innateness] idea that that language is encoded in our dna, we are predisposed to it
nurture
[empiricism/environment] idea that we are born as a blank slate and language is learned
nature vs nurture debate - what is present when learning begins?
nature says that we have everything needed precoded, nurture says nothing
n vs n - what kinds of mechanisms or predispositions drive acquisition?
look on paper
n vs n - what kind of input drives acquisition?
look on paper
n vs n - what kind of evidence supports each position
Evidence of innateness – Lenneberg 1967 -[defined characteristics of biological system]
1. behavior is not the result of a conscious decision
2. not triggered by external events
3. direct teaching has little effecti on language acquisition
4. there is a set of milestones – even if deaf and stuff
5. there is a critical period for acquisition
learners go beyond input
pidgins and creoles – kids introducing own structure for language
kids who say things they haven’t heard before, going beyond the input
Evidence for experience
critical period
you learn your own language
once need to speak goes away can actually lose knowledge/ability to speak
once you learn one by the end of the critical period will be able to learn more
poverty of the stimulus
poverty of the stimulus – kids hear few sentence tokens than they know and understand
can’t just be imitating or memorizing
Even as adults we can make up sentences we haven’t heard before
learners who go beyond their input
learners go beyond input
pidgins and creoles – kids introducing own structure for language
kids who say things they haven’t heard before, going beyond the input
critical period
idea that there is a certain amount of time when kids have to acquire language or lose the ability to learn language fluently
Hart & Risley [1995]
link between amount of speech kids hear at home and school readiness, the more they heard at home
CHILDES database
Child language data exchange system - a database so linguists can easily share and analyze data from experiments
MLU
mean length of utterance, average length of phrases
MLT
mean length of turn, how many phrases said per turn
MLT ratio
ratio of kids mlt/mom mlt
TTR
type-to-token ratio, ratio of type [different words]/ tokens [total numbers of words]
what do kids have to learn about the sounds of their language and how?
- word/morpheme segmentation
- phonotactics of language - how able to combine sounds in a language [borrowings excluded]
- sounds/phonemes of the language and how to produce them
- intonation/stress
vowels
nope
consonants
nope
IPA chart - places of articulation
labial
IPA - manners of articulation
stop, nasal
IPA - voicing + VOT
voiced/voiceless, vot = voiced onset time, amount of time from when stop is released to voicing begins
IPA - natural classes
obstruents - obstructing air flow causing more air flow in vocal tract k, f, sonorants - continuous - n, s
categorical perception: identification vs discrimination
the unconscious automatic grouping of continuous stimulus into categories. once you define category, your ability to discriminate within worses
babbling, stages of
5 stages
- reflexive crying and vegetative sounds - from birth
- cooing and laughter - 6-8weeks
- vocal play 16-30weeks, includes sounds that wont be relevant in language
- reduplicated/cannonical babbling, 6-9 months
- varigated babbling/ non reduplicated babbling, adding prosody/intonation - 9months
markedness of speech sounds
unmarked sounds appear sooner and more often than more marked sounds, jakobsen 1968
tuning of phonological system to sounds of the ambient/native language
from 9-12 months, start realizing what sounds are produced in their language, and their ability to distingush other sounds not found in their language diminshes
infant-directed speech
higher pitch, clear long vowels, short utterances, slower, simple vocabulary, repeat stuff, variation in intonation, interactive, less grammar to parse, talk about things here and now, kids are shown to prefer it to non infant directed speech
what do kids have to learn about the words of their language and how do they learn it?
sound form - how to say it and correctly, what it means, what it doesn’t mean, syntactic knowledge - how to use in sentence, part of speech/grammatical category, morphology
phonological bootstrapping
theory that infants can find cues and properties of speech stream to find words and grammar
prosodic bootstrapping
info from intonation, stress pattern [pauses in speech stream to help them segment]
definition of a word
combination of sound and meaning, arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning that can be used to refer
phonological processes that lead to systematic pronunciation errors, rule ordering
consonant cluster reduction [deletion of a consonant in cluster] substitution [replacing] harmony [match to another part of word] reduplication [repeating] final consonant deletion weak syllable deletion voicing/devoicing
production vs comprehension
able to understand before able to actually produce sounds
phonological and semantic properties of early words
easy sounds, more nouns than verbs
overextensions/underextensions
overextension - ‘goggie’ can mean any animal, underextension, ‘baba’ - may mean their bottle and only their bottle
Quine’s problem
no 1:1 world/word mapping - the mapping between words and the world is ambiguous
word-to-world mapping
applying words to things in the worlds
fast mapping
children can form hypotheses about the meaning of a new word after only one exposure - carey & bartlett [1978]
assumptions/constraints/cues/tools that guide word learning
whole object assumption, taxonomic assumption, mutual exclusivity
Whole Object Assumptions
a novel label refers to an entire object, not to a properrty or a part of the object
Taxonomic Assumption [superordinate, basic, and subordinate-level categories]
labels refer to things of the same kind, specifically, to things of the same basic level kind
superordinate - animal
basic - rabbit, dog, cat
subordinate - golden retriever, collie, poodle
Mutual Exclusivity
different words refer to different [categories of] things
allows us to categorize objects, override the whole-object assumption
language-specific vs domain general processes or constraints
are these processes specific to language or applied to all human? learning
social cues to word meaning
pointing at stuff, only talk about things that are there, eyegaze, gestures
nouns vs verbs
nouns name physical items, verbs are more ambiguous, concept of imaging
syntactic bootstrapping
children can use cues from the linguistic [syntactic] context in which a new word is used to help them figure out its meaning
Naigles 1990 study - syntactic bootstrapping
-2yo [who are not yet producing very many verbs!) can use cues from syntax to figure out which of two simulationeous events is being labeled by a novel verb
transitive frame = causative event
intransitive frame = noncausative event
-preferential looking task
-kids familiarized to two simulationeous events, - causative and continuous event
the duck is gorping the bunny! vs the duck and the bunny are gorping! - kids heard one of these when in realtion to picutre
after familiarized, shown two videos, have to find gorping and what they think it means
seem to find the sentence that matched to their sentence
timeline of milestones in phonological and lexical development
look at paper
experimental techniques - old diary studies
description and example
new diary studies
recording everything they say
corpus mining
trying to figure out what words kids know?
habituation
exposed to a stimulus until they become habituated to it, see this habituation 4 different ways
heart-rate monitoring
watching heart rate, faster for new, slower for habituated
high-amplitude/non-nutritive sucking
measuring sucking rate, faster when interested in stimulus
conditioned head-turn
conditioned to certain sound lighting up box
head-turn preference paradigm
while child is looking at center, plays speakers and lights, english and russian playing from speaker, experiment will turn on one light and speaker then recenter him then play the other, and will keep doing until kid realizes which english comes from, next the kid gets to pick which they hear, head turn preference is which the kid turns to more often and how long they hear it
preferential looking
see which they look at most, this is the one they are not habituated to
object manipulation
holding up objects and asking questions
human subjects paradigm
yeah i dont know
Gleitman & Newport [1995]
- general issue being addressed and why it matters 2. methodology used 3. what they found and what the implications of that finding are - concepts not numbers
Kisilevsky et al. [2003]
Kisilevsky et all 2003
Q: while in utero, can foetuses distinguish theirmother’s voice from the voice of a different female?
Methods: 2 min recording, spliced with silence 2 min before and 2 min after, 30 kids heard their own mother’s voice and 30 other woman’s voice, placed speaker 10cm above abdomen played the voices
measures to tell how kid can tell if recognize voice or noticeable
fetal body movement – didnt find really correlation
fetal heart rate – found some, gave silence at first to make sure they all started with the same heart rate
children = post foetuses
Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk & Vigorito [1971]
looking at morpheme boundaries and how kids perceive them, habituation study with nonnutritive sucking, recognized stimulus as separate phoneme, but within VOT did not recognize stimulus as different, kids can distinguish voiced from voiceless stop consonants even at such a young age, and additionally they are capable of perceiving stops with VOT within the same phonemic range as belonging to the same category, is evidence that humans are wired on some level to acquire this distinction, strong evidence to innateness theories.
Werker & Tees [1984]
me and delana - sets out timeline of language development, shows that children can distinguish contrasts that dont appear in their language, head turn paradigm, testing thompson contrast, then testing hindi and thompson and english contrast, adults can tell difference in own language, children can usually tell in both, between 8-12 lose ability to distinguish sounds not heard/contrasted in this language, may help them focus on a particular language
Maye [2003]
commentary of werker and tees, helped elucidate a timeline of language development, still had a lot of questions, especially about second language development
Saffran, Aslin & Newport [1996]
strings of syllables within random syllables, dishabituation studies with head turn preference, transitional probability, where the syllable boundary most likely is depending on language
Aslin, Saffran & Newport [1998]
different made up syllables with real words interspersed, habituation study with head turn preference, hypothesis was that they would be more attentive to the part words than the words in their language, hypothesis was confirmed, provides evidence that one of the methods used by infants to segment speech is conditional probability.
Bergelson & Swingley [2012]
since many kids dont say their first word until about a year of age, it is believed that kids dont understand words until that age either, helps set a timeline for infant language development, [conditioned head turn/head-turn preference paradigm?] ‘language-guided looking’, or ‘looking-while-listening’, infants were shown a number of pictures while their parents said the name of one/sentence, majority of the kids got most of the words, at 6-9 months, infants have already begun to link words with their referants over a range of food and body-part terms, were better at extremely stripped down context could also understand related alternatives, and have some idea of how language generally works.
Waxman & Markow [1995]
linking of noun categories; hypo - 12 to 13 month old infants are capable of linking words to meaning and they expect that a new word applied to an object will refer to that object, familiarization phase of objects, kids familiarized quicker when its part of a category, understand categories, especially at superordinate level, categorization behavior is not evident in unrelated groups of words, in higher vocab group the novel word and novel adj helped them recognize categories at superordinate level, in low vocab group neither helped , 12 month olds do not distinguish between nouns and adjectives, link between infants vocabulary and their ability to connect words with object categories, start to be able to apply words to larger category
Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman & Lederer [1999]
testing adults on vocabulary learning, showed silent videos with beep, students were supposed to identify what word was, did better when had context, nouns easier because of imageability
Hoff chapters 1, 4, 5
a
Videos - An interview with Brian MacWhinney of CHILDES [dilara kiran 9-8]
sharin stuff with peeps, wanted to collect data woot
The Human Language, part 2
how do kids learn language, mimicing vs innateness
Deb Roy TED talk
set up cameras in his house, gaga -> wawa
Patricia Kuhl TED talk
statistics on language, japanese vs american infants, video and audio no learning, social part of brain controls statistic taking
phonotactics
The set of allowed arrangements or sequences of speech sounds in a given language.
