Week 2 Flashcards
When does a child actively produce its first word?
Around 8 months
How big is the active vocabulary of an 18-month old?
Around 50 words.
How big is the active vocabulary of a 24-month old?
Around 200 words
How big is the active vocabulary of a 3-year old?
Around 1000 words
How big is the active vocabulary of a 5-year old?
Around 3000 words
How big is the active vocabulary of an adult?
Around 50.000 words
How big is the passive vocabulary of an 8-month old?
Less than 100 words.
What is the passive vocabulary of a 6-year old?
Probably 6000.
What 3 periods does K.Nelson describe in lexical development?
1) Reference
2) Denotation
3) Sense
Describe the reference period according to K. Nelson:
The relation between word form and a specific object or event.
Describe the denotation period according to K. Nelson:
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]
Describe the sense period according to K. Nelson:
The semantic relation between mutual word meanings, a network.
Reference problem
The problem of determining the thing/action/… that the speaker is verbally describing. What are the constraints of its meaning?
Overextension
Applying a word to a broader context than its meaning denotes.
Underextension
Applying a word only to part of its actual context.
What does ‘syntactic zoom lens’ mean according to Fisher et al. ?
The interpretation of a new verb is guided by the choice of sentential Subject and Object.
transitive
Verbs that require a direct object (two arguments)
Decontextualisation
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.
Inductive reasoning
Arriving at a generalisation on the basis of a number of specific observations.
Gavagai problem
A learnability problem in the domain of the lexicon. What does a word form refer to?
Whole object bias
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.
Taxonomic bias
The tendency of children to assume that a new label that refers to one thing, also refers to similar things.
Mutual exclusivity bias
The tendency of children to assume that a certain object only has one label.
domain-general
Humans are born with mechanisms to support learning on a broad level regardless of the type of information being learned.
Give an example of domain-general learning:
Associative learning
Associative learning
When the presence of one cue is a reliable indicator that another cue is also present.
domain-specific learning
The development of one set of skills is independent from the development of other types of skills.
Why is verb learning so difficult?
Actions are more difficult than objects to pick out as discrete entities from the environment.
Why can an observer who notices everything learn nothing?
Then there is no end to categories known to describe a situation
What did Landau & Gleitman find about blind children?
The representations of vision-related terms were very much alike amongst blind and sighted children.
haptic
referring to touch
subcategorization frame
Gives you information about the syntactic category a verb combines with.
What did Nappa et al. research?
Whether linguistic information or eye gaze is more influencing on the childs understanding of the thematic roles.
Conceptual bias
The assumption that actions move in a forward direction, i.e. ‘chase’ is more likely to appear than ‘flee’.
What did Nappa et al. find?
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/
What did Paquette-Smith and Johnson research?
Whether children know rules for forming plurals.
arguments
The minimally required elements that accompany a predicate.
arity
The number of arguments a predicate can take.
How is a one-place predicate also referred to?
monadic predicate
How is a two-place predicate also referred to?
dyadic predicate
valence
The number of arguments a predicate takes
Does the argument structure correlate with the syntactically realized number of categories?
No
Name the three different levels of description of a sentence:
1) Functional
2) Form
3) Thematic
Describe the functional level of description of a sentence:
The grammatical function like ‘Subject’ or ‘Predicate’.
Describe the form level of description of a sentence:
The consituents (tree path style) of a sentence, written in brackets.
Describe the thematic level of description of a sentence:
The thematic role like ‘Agent’ or ‘Instrument.
idiosyncratic
individual
c-selection
The selection of syntactic categories that a particular predicate takes.
subcategorization frame
GIves information about the syntactic categories a predicate combines with.
EPP
extended projection principle
What was the research question of Nappe et al.?
What is the influence of the speaker’s gaxe and linguistic context on the conceptual bias in children’s learning of novel perspective verbs?
What was the research question of Nappe et al.?
What is the influence of the speaker’s gaxe and linguistic context on the conceptual bias in children’s learning of novel perspective verbs?
What was the first experiment described in the article by Nappa et al.?
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.
What was the second experiment described in the article by Nappa et al.?
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.
What was the research question in the article by Paquette-Smith and Johnson?
At what age do children use grammatical cues to learn plural word forms?
How did Paquette-Smith and Johnson perform their experiment?
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.
What is the main question on verb learning according to Gleitman?
How does the learner decide which which particular phonological object corresponds to which particular verb object?
What does Gleitman say about the role of word-to-world mapping in language acquisition?
It is unsufficiently constrained to answer the question of how a child matches verb items with their meanings
What is the solution Gleitman offers for how children match verb items with their meanings?
She says that semantically relevant information in syntactic structures can rescue observational learning.
What are some critiques Gleitman mentions about syntactic bootstrapping?
No one knows how the verb lexicon is organized semantically, there is little orderly data about the syntactic input a child receives.
fast mapping
The ability to acquire a word rapidly with little information
