Mod 9 Flashcards
Children’s acquisition of language occurs…
quickly •adult-like grammar after about 5-6 years •without explicit instruction •uniformly •uniform stages of
what must a child learn?
The sounds of a language (phonetics)
•The sound patterns of a language (phonology)
•Rules of word-formation (morphology)
•How words combine into phrases/sentences (syntax)
•How to derive meaning from a sentence (semantics)
•How to properly use language in context (pragmatics)
•Lexical items (words, morphemes, idioms, etc)
Innateness Hypothesis
- Attempts to Explains:
- speed of acquisition
- ease of acquisition
- uniformity of acquisition process
- uniformity in adult language
- universalities across languages
Universal Grammar
(UG) refers to the “set of structural characteristics shared by all languages”
•Innateness Hypothesis takes UG to be innate.
•UG is not, however, dependent on innateness hypothesis.
Sign language
Overview of sign languages: •have gesture system (cf. phonology) •have morphology rules •have syntactic rules •have semantic rules •have dictionary of arbitrary signs
Support for innateness:
acquired without explicit instruction
•acquired in similar stages as spoken language
Theories of Acquisition
- Imitation
- Reinforcement
- Active Construction of a Grammar
- Connectionist Theories
- Main idea: children imitate what they hear
- Evidence:
- Specific languages are not transferred genetically.
- Words
Imitation
Problems:
•Children produce things not said by adults.
•Children’s ‘mistakes’ are predictable and consistent.
•Children often fail to accurately mimic adult utterances.
•Children produce and understand novel sentences.
•Children may invent a new language in the right circumstances.
Imitation
Main idea: children learn through positive and negative reinforcement
•Evidence:
•very little
Main idea: children learn through positive and negative reinforcement
•Evidence:
•very little
Problems:
•ignores how children initially learn to produce utterances
•rarely occurs
•fails when it does occur
•fails to explain
•children’s own grammar rules
•why children seem impervious to correction
•Role of reinforcement limited to ability to be understood or not.
Reinforcement
Children invent grammar rules themselves.
•Ability to develop rules is innate.
Active Construction of a Grammar
Acquisition process: •Listen •Try to find patterns •Hypothesize a rule for the pattern •e.g. past tense /-ed/ •Test hypothesis •Modify rule as necessary •i.e. Children have a ‘working grammar’.
Active Construction of a Grammar
Active Construction of a Grammar
Explains what imitation/reinforcement can’t:
•children are expected to make mistakes
•children are expected to follow non-random patterns
•regression
•Explains why children fail to accurately produce adult forms
•child grammars differ from adult grammars
•Problems:
•says nothing about what patterns are learnable
Connectionist Theories
Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections.
•Higher frequency → stronger connections
•allows for exploitation of statistical information
•‘rules’ derived from strength of connections
Problems:
•predicts that any pattern is learnable by humans, but this is demonstrably false
Connectionist Theories
