Week 2

Question 1

When does a child actively produce its first word?

Answer 1

Around 8 months

Question 2

How big is the active vocabulary of an 18-month old?

Answer 2

Around 50 words.

Question 3

How big is the active vocabulary of a 24-month old?

Answer 3

Around 200 words

Question 4

How big is the active vocabulary of a 3-year old?

Answer 4

Around 1000 words

Question 5

How big is the active vocabulary of a 5-year old?

Answer 5

Around 3000 words

Question 6

How big is the active vocabulary of an adult?

Answer 6

Around 50.000 words

Question 7

How big is the passive vocabulary of an 8-month old?

Answer 7

Less than 100 words.

Question 8

What is the passive vocabulary of a 6-year old?

Answer 8

Probably 6000.

Question 9

What 3 periods does K.Nelson describe in lexical development?

Answer 9

1) Reference
2) Denotation
3) Sense

Question 10

Describe the reference period according to K. Nelson:

Answer 10

The relation between word form and a specific object or event.

Question 11

Describe the denotation period according to K. Nelson:

Answer 11

The relation between word form and a particular meaning or concept.

[Not the specific object, but all instances of the object, the object in general]

Question 12

Describe the sense period according to K. Nelson:

Answer 12

The semantic relation between mutual word meanings, a network.

Question 13

Reference problem

Answer 13

The problem of determining the thing/action/… that the speaker is verbally describing. What are the constraints of its meaning?

Question 14

Overextension

Answer 14

Applying a word to a broader context than its meaning denotes.

Question 15

Underextension

Answer 15

Applying a word only to part of its actual context.

Question 16

What does ‘syntactic zoom lens’ mean according to Fisher et al. ?

Answer 16

The interpretation of a new verb is guided by the choice of sentential Subject and Object.

Question 17

transitive

Answer 17

Verbs that require a direct object (two arguments)

Question 18

Decontextualisation

Answer 18

The process of isolating a constituent from its normal or expected context. A child needs to extend the meaning of a certain word form to more than one context.

Question 19

Inductive reasoning

Answer 19

Arriving at a generalisation on the basis of a number of specific observations.

Question 20

Gavagai problem

Answer 20

A learnability problem in the domain of the lexicon. What does a word form refer to?

Question 21

Whole object bias

Answer 21

The tendency of children to assume that a new label refers to the object as a whole and not to its parts, attributes or properties.

Question 22

Taxonomic bias

Answer 22

The tendency of children to assume that a new label that refers to one thing, also refers to similar things.

Question 23

Mutual exclusivity bias

Answer 23

The tendency of children to assume that a certain object only has one label.

Question 24

domain-general

Answer 24

Humans are born with mechanisms to support learning on a broad level regardless of the type of information being learned.

Question 25

Give an example of domain-general learning:

Answer 25

Associative learning

Question 26

Associative learning

Answer 26

When the presence of one cue is a reliable indicator that another cue is also present.

Question 27

domain-specific learning

Answer 27

The development of one set of skills is independent from the development of other types of skills.

Question 28

Why is verb learning so difficult?

Answer 28

Actions are more difficult than objects to pick out as discrete entities from the environment.

Question 29

Why can an observer who notices everything learn nothing?

Answer 29

Then there is no end to categories known to describe a situation

Question 30

What did Landau & Gleitman find about blind children?

Answer 30

The representations of vision-related terms were very much alike amongst blind and sighted children.

Question 31

haptic

Answer 31

referring to touch

Question 32

subcategorization frame

Answer 32

Gives you information about the syntactic category a verb combines with.

Question 33

What did Nappa et al. research?

Answer 33

Whether linguistic information or eye gaze is more influencing on the childs understanding of the thematic roles.

Question 34

Conceptual bias

Answer 34

The assumption that actions move in a forward direction, i.e. ‘chase’ is more likely to appear than ‘flee’.

Question 35

What did Nappa et al. find?

Answer 35

That children relied heavily on speaker’s eye gaze when there was no linguistic information about thematic roles, but when this information was present they discarded eye gaze/

Question 36

What did Paquette-Smith and Johnson research?

Answer 36

Whether children know rules for forming plurals.

Question 37

arguments

Answer 37

The minimally required elements that accompany a predicate.

Question 38

arity

Answer 38

The number of arguments a predicate can take.

Question 39

How is a one-place predicate also referred to?

Answer 39

monadic predicate

Question 40

How is a two-place predicate also referred to?

Answer 40

dyadic predicate

Question 41

valence

Answer 41

The number of arguments a predicate takes

Question 42

Does the argument structure correlate with the syntactically realized number of categories?

Answer 42

No

Question 43

Name the three different levels of description of a sentence:

Answer 43

1) Functional
2) Form
3) Thematic

Question 44

Describe the functional level of description of a sentence:

Answer 44

The grammatical function like ‘Subject’ or ‘Predicate’.

Question 45

Describe the form level of description of a sentence:

Answer 45

The consituents (tree path style) of a sentence, written in brackets.

Question 46

Describe the thematic level of description of a sentence:

Answer 46

The thematic role like ‘Agent’ or ‘Instrument.

Question 47

idiosyncratic

Answer 47

individual

Question 48

c-selection

Answer 48

The selection of syntactic categories that a particular predicate takes.

Question 49

subcategorization frame

Answer 49

GIves information about the syntactic categories a predicate combines with.

Question 50

EPP

Answer 50

extended projection principle

Question 51

What was the research question of Nappe et al.?

Answer 51

What is the influence of the speaker’s gaxe and linguistic context on the conceptual bias in children’s learning of novel perspective verbs?

Question 52

What was the research question of Nappe et al.?

Answer 52

What is the influence of the speaker’s gaxe and linguistic context on the conceptual bias in children’s learning of novel perspective verbs?

Question 53

What was the first experiment described in the article by Nappa et al.?

Answer 53

The child watches a video with Andy in it, describing a picture. Andy uses ‘He … him’ and looks at one of the characters in the picture. The child is then asked what the verb means. The influence of eye gaze on the understanding of verbs is tested.

Question 54

What was the second experiment described in the article by Nappa et al.?

Answer 54

Andy (the man in the video) now describes the picture using ‘The elephant … the rabbit’. He also looks at one of the characters. The child is again asked to tell what the verb means.

Question 55

What was the research question in the article by Paquette-Smith and Johnson?

Answer 55

At what age do children use grammatical cues to learn plural word forms?

Question 56

How did Paquette-Smith and Johnson perform their experiment?

Answer 56

They used a non-existing word and showed one picture of a car and one of two balls (e.g.). Then the child was asked to point at the plural non-existing word, when they saw pictures of two balls and two cars.

Question 57

What is the main question on verb learning according to Gleitman?

Answer 57

How does the learner decide which which particular phonological object corresponds to which particular verb object?

Question 58

What does Gleitman say about the role of word-to-world mapping in language acquisition?

Answer 58

It is unsufficiently constrained to answer the question of how a child matches verb items with their meanings

Question 59

What is the solution Gleitman offers for how children match verb items with their meanings?

Answer 59

She says that semantically relevant information in syntactic structures can rescue observational learning.

Question 60

What are some critiques Gleitman mentions about syntactic bootstrapping?

Answer 60

No one knows how the verb lexicon is organized semantically, there is little orderly data about the syntactic input a child receives.

Question 61

fast mapping

Answer 61

The ability to acquire a word rapidly with little information