W9: Theories of language acquisition

Question 1

What is the behaviourism/learning theory of behaviour?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What are the (3) kinds of learning in the behaviourist/learning theory of language acquisition?

Answer 2

1. Classical conditioning
2. Imitation + operant conditioning
3. Social learning

Question 3

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What is imitation + operant conditioning?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

What is social learning?

Answer 5

Children observes and imitates others
- does not simply do for reward but to be like model
Models are powerful and admired

Question 6

What are the weaknesses of the learning theory?

Answer 6

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

Question 7

What are the strengths of learning theories?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What are the connectionist/parallel distributed processing/neural network models of language acquisition?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Explain studies on the connectionist model of language acquisition with computers

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What do connectionist studies on computers provide against nativist theories?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

What are some weaknesses to the connectionist theory of language acquisiton?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Prelinguistic communication: what do parents encourage?

Answer 12

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….’

Question 13

When do intentions in prelinguistic communication emerge and what do they involve?

Answer 13

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

Question 14

When does babbling begin?

Answer 14

At around 6-10 months

Question 15

What is babbling?

Answer 15

Strings of vowels and consonants combined in syllables - repeated

Question 16

Reduplicated vs. non-reduplicated babbling?

Answer 16

Reduplicated - same vowel over and over

Non-reduplicated - adding more vowels in or varying

Question 17

What happens to babbling when first words are produced?

Answer 17

Begins to fade

Question 18

What is the continuity hypothesis of babbling?

Any limitations?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What is the discontinuity hypothesis of babbling?

Answer 19

States initial stages of babbling has many consonants and then the second stage has native sounds only

Question 20

When are a child’s first recognisable words produced?

Answer 20

From 12 months

Probably only 1-2 words for a few months

Question 21

How are first words typically phonologically simplified?

Answer 21

Omitting final consonant (do for dog)

Reduce consonant clusters (tan for train)

Omit unstressed syllables (banana - nana)

Repeat syllables (goodnight - night night)

Question 22

First words are often a…

Answer 22

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

Question 23

How much better can a 12 month old comprehend than produce?

Answer 23

Comprehensive is more than production by 5x

Question 24

What is the vocabulary explosion?

Answer 24

A sudden rapid acquisition of new words

Approx 30-50 words at around the 18-20 month mark

Question 25

What are 3 lexical principles that create a mapping problem?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What is N3C?

Answer 26

Novel name-nameless category principle

Assume novel name maps onto the object for which you don’t have a name yet

Question 27

What are 3 ways in which children get words wrong that give us insight into their semantic categories

Answer 27

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

Question 28

How many of a child’s first words may be overgeneralised?

Answer 28

Up to 1/3

Question 29

What are the 3 ideas on how children learn which word belongs to each syntactic category?

Answer 29

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

Question 30

After about …. Words, children can form … word combinations

Answer 30

50 words, 2 word combinations

Question 31

What is telegraphic speech?

Answer 31

Leaving out the small function words

Question 32

What is mean length of utterance (MLU)?

Answer 32

Mean number of morphemes per average utterance at a given time

Measure of how sophisticated language is

Useful way of tracking language development

Question 33

What are some individual differences in children’s language acquisition?

Answer 33

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

Question 34

Differences across cultures in language acquisition?

Answer 34

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

Question 35

Has too much of what we know about language acquisition focused on English

Answer 35

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