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
Imitation
is necessary but not sufficient.
is virtually unsupported.
Reinforcement
Active Construction of a Grammar
nicely accounts for predictable deviations from adult grammars, and the various stages of grammar development.
Connectionist theories account for frequency effects, can also account for regular deviations from adult grammars
Connectionist theories
Active Construction
of a Grammar and Connectionist Theories are not mutually exclusive.
To account for linguistic universals and the absence of certain patterns in language,
we must assume a type of Universal Grammar.
babies make noises, but not yet babbling
•crying, cooing
•response to some stimuli (hunger, discomfort…)
•sensitive to native and non-native sound distinctions
Prelinguistic
- starts at about 6 months of age
- not linked to biological needs
- pitch and intonation resemble language spoken around them
Babbling
One-word
begins around age 1
•speaks one-word sentences (called ‘holophrastic’)
•usually 1-syllable words, with CV structure
•consonant clusters reduced
•words learned as a whole, rather than a sequence of sounds
•‘easier’ sounds produced earlier
One-word
don’t
[dot]
[dont]
two-word stage
starts at about 1.5-2 years of age •vocabulary of +/- 50 words •sentences consist of two words (telegraphic) •e.g. allgone sock •those two words could have a number of relations •e.g. Daddy car •usually lacks function words •usually lacks inflectional morphology
beyond 2-word stage
sentences with 3+ words (no 3-word stage)
•begins using function words
•have already learned some aspects of grammar:
•word order (e.g. SVO in English, SOV in Japanese)
•position of determiners
•etc.
•grammar resembles adult grammar by about age 5
two-word stage
occur in fixed order (depending on language)
agent + action
baby + sleep
action + obj
kick ball
action + location
shit chiar
entity + location
teddy bed
possessor + possession
mommy book
entity + attribute
block red
demonstrative + entity
this shoe
One-word:
skip
[khɪp]
[skɪp]
shoe
[su]
[ʃu
one word
that
[dæt]
[ðæt]
one word
bath
[bæt]
[bæθ]
one word
