W9: Theories of language acquisition Flashcards
What is the behaviourism/learning theory of behaviour?
Language is acquired just like any other skill
Language develops via:
- Adults reinforcement
- Adults gradual shaping of babbling
- Childs application of general learning rules
Various types of learning are involved
What are the (3) kinds of learning in the behaviourist/learning theory of language acquisition?
- Classical conditioning
- Imitation + operant conditioning
- Social learning
What is classical conditioning?
Repeated associations between
Object (UCS) - e.g. bottle
Response (UCR) - e.g. anticipation of milk
and work (CS)
Means that the word evokes a concept - the word is understood
What is imitation + operant conditioning?
Imitation: infant imitates adults utterances
Reinforcement: infants early attempts at language are rewarded
Shaping: parents ‘shape’ childs responses
Important for accent, word choice and manner BUT infants do not imitate adults until they can so it is insufficient to explain much of language development
What is social learning?
Children observes and imitates others
- does not simply do for reward but to be like model
Models are powerful and admired
What are the weaknesses of the learning theory?
Children say things they would have never hear before so it is not just imitation (I holded the baby rabbits)
First words are not most frequent words
Children who can hear but not speak learn to comprehend
Reinforcement of correct meaning > grammar
What are the strengths of learning theories?
Imitation and praise do improve early language development
(study: gave praise for children for asking for a toy in spanish over english - increased the use of spanish in that context)
Language development cannot be impervious to learning - it is just not enough to explain language acquisition on its own
What are the connectionist/parallel distributed processing/neural network models of language acquisition?
Suggests there is enough information in the input for children to learn language
Simultaneous exposure to two stimuli (word and object) forms relationships between mental representaitons
Interconnected associations - word = meaning
Explain studies on the connectionist model of language acquisition with computers
Computer is given input about a certain aspect of grammar
- given present tense verbs and has to learn to convert them to past-tense verbs
Random connections are initially made between input and a range of outputs - every time there is output, they receive feedback on guess accuracy
Correct = stronger tendency to produce response
Incorrect = weaker tendency
Training has allowed programs to learn various features of language (plurals, past tense) very similar to young childnren
What do connectionist studies on computers provide against nativist theories?
No one would argue that a computer is born with an innate set of linguistic rules and yet can learn at least some aspects of language in a human-like way
Instead is emphasised as a product of basic, innate, associative capacities to process information
What are some weaknesses to the connectionist theory of language acquisiton?
Models to date work only for a single linguistic form at a time - children must learn numerous linguistic forms at once
Networks are given consistent feedback - not the case with children
Prelinguistic communication: what do parents encourage?
Conversational turns and parent-attributed meaning
Infants:
Burp - may be treated as a conversational turn
Crying - may be attributed to X meaning
(talking to the child as though they are having a conversation with you)
Toddlers:
Whining, crying, babbling etc are treated as attempts at words - ‘were you saying….’
When do intentions in prelinguistic communication emerge and what do they involve?
They emerge at around 12 months
May be:
Gesturing or pointing at the desired object
Making consistent babbling sounds for certain words
Use face expressively
Persisting when they are not understood
When does babbling begin?
At around 6-10 months
What is babbling?
Strings of vowels and consonants combined in syllables - repeated
Reduplicated vs. non-reduplicated babbling?
Reduplicated - same vowel over and over
Non-reduplicated - adding more vowels in or varying
What happens to babbling when first words are produced?
Begins to fade
What is the continuity hypothesis of babbling?
Any limitations?
Babbling as a direct precursor to speech
Wide range of sounds narrowed down to native sounds via reinforcement/lack of exposure
But
No consonant sounds in babble
Parents reinforce every sound at first
No apparent gradual shift to native sounds
What is the discontinuity hypothesis of babbling?
States initial stages of babbling has many consonants and then the second stage has native sounds only
When are a child’s first recognisable words produced?
From 12 months
Probably only 1-2 words for a few months
How are first words typically phonologically simplified?
Omitting final consonant (do for dog)
Reduce consonant clusters (tan for train)
Omit unstressed syllables (banana - nana)
Repeat syllables (goodnight - night night)
First words are often a…
Holophrase: an information loaded single word
Interactable objects - things they can see and touch
Things in the here and now
Content rather than function words
How much better can a 12 month old comprehend than produce?
Comprehensive is more than production by 5x
What is the vocabulary explosion?
A sudden rapid acquisition of new words
Approx 30-50 words at around the 18-20 month mark
What are 3 lexical principles that create a mapping problem?
Lexical principles are constraints on learning names for things/events in the world
Whole-object assumption: labels apply to whole objects, not just bits
Taxonomic constraint: a word refers to a category of similar things
Mutual exclusivity assumption: each object only has one label
What is N3C?
Novel name-nameless category principle
Assume novel name maps onto the object for which you don’t have a name yet
What are 3 ways in which children get words wrong that give us insight into their semantic categories
Overextension: use of a word to refer to overly large category of objects (wheels = car)
Underextension: word used to refer to refer to fewer concepts than is appropriate (bear = only a child’s toy, not an animal)
Mismatch: child misunderstands word object match on first occasion
How many of a child’s first words may be overgeneralised?
Up to 1/3
What are the 3 ideas on how children learn which word belongs to each syntactic category?
Allocate words into innate syntactic categories (nativist)
Semantic knowledge develops into syntactic knowledge - early language is asyntactic so children make semantic distinctions between nouns verbs and adjectives that then develop into syntactic categories
Notice regularities in the language about which words do what (statistical learning) - words that take only a ‘s’ are nouns, words that end in ‘Ed’ ‘ing’ are verbs
After about …. Words, children can form … word combinations
50 words, 2 word combinations
What is telegraphic speech?
Leaving out the small function words
What is mean length of utterance (MLU)?
Mean number of morphemes per average utterance at a given time
Measure of how sophisticated language is
Useful way of tracking language development
What are some individual differences in children’s language acquisition?
Some children might be more referential (refer to things in language) or might be more expressive (using language to interact)
Some may learn continually, others in short bursts
All of this is normal
Differences across cultures in language acquisition?
Despite large differences in syntactic complexity between languages, development is surprisingly uniform across languages
But some differences do exist
Finish children have no early yes or no questions
English has easy plural marking and Arabic is complex so there is earlier plural use in English then in Arabic
Has too much of what we know about language acquisition focused on English
Most of the research is on English but it is not representative of all the worlds languages in many ways so you need to exercise caution in interpretation and generalisation
