Week 4 Lecture 4 - early multi-word speech (constructivist) Flashcards
What doe syntax enable and allow?
enables understanding
allows productivity –> produces an infinite number of possible sentences
Is there a lot of repetition in early language?
yes from both parent and infant
language is species-specific, what doe this mean?
little evidence primates can acquire syntax, even with intensive training
language is species-universal, what doe this mean?
most children acquire the majority of their grammar by 5yo
What are some characteristics of early word combinations?
- content words
- here and now
- creative
- observes adult word order
What do the characteristics of early word combinations suggest?
some kind of organising principles
Are lexical rules item-specific?
yes –> based on individual words/schemas
there is a limited variety of utterances within children until they can do what?
generalise between schemas
What are syntactic rules?
- abstract
- based on grammatical categories
Are syntactic rules restricted?
no
allow all utterances possible in adult language
What is the constructivist approach to early word combinations?
- grammar is communicative, infants are motivated to communicate
- grammar can be learned using general cognitive learning mechanisms
What are some cognitive learning mechanisms used to learn grammar?
- communicative intention reading
- drawing analogies
- distributional learning
What is the role of routines in early word combinations?
- allows children to predict what comes next and therefore what language is referring to
- repetitive chunks of language can be learned in context where the meaning becomes more transparent
What evidence is there for a constructivist approach?
- children begin with lexically-based linguistic representations
- high frequency items are learned early
- only gradual generalisations across exemplars to create more abstract syntactic categories and rules
What is the verb island hypothesis? (Tomasello, 1992)
diary data from 1 child aged 16-24 months
- data suggests first verbs acquired in small number of social/pragmatic contexts
- knowledge of grammar tied to individuals verbs until 2.5 - 3 yo
- child unable to generalise on basis of either semantic or syntactic similarity
Describe experimental evidence for the verb island hypothesis
- with unfamiliar verbs, 2yo able to describe actions correctly to explain who is chasing and who is being chased
- but with unfamiliar verbs, before 3yo children struggle to explain who is doing what to whom
What is the evidence of limited (lexical) constructions?
- argues that children’s early utterance are based around individuals lexical items but not exclusively verbs
- any high frequency (group of) words can form the basis for organisation of the child’s linguistic system
- the constructions children learn reflect the frequency of particular patterns on the input
What was the method for Lieven et al’s., 2003 study into structure combining?
Identify:
- Closest prior utterance (source) to the target
- What changes required to change source into target (operations)
- Frequency with which parts of the target had been said before
Operations could be either word substitution, word drop or word additon
What did a study by Lieven et al., 2003, into structure combining conclude?
- many “complex” utterances are based on repetitions and small changes to what was said before
- most changes involve simple substitutions within a lexically based frame –> or add or subtract a single word
- suggests child is operating with extensive inventory of specific utterances
What are semantic analogies?
children need to learn large numbers of verbs before recognising similarities between them and building more general schemas
What evidence is there for semantic analogies (Matthews & Bannard, 2010)?
- 2-3 yr olds asked to repeat 4-word sequences and manipulated 3-word frame by similarity of meaning of items in 4th “slot”
- children made fewer errors when items that normally occur in the slot are more similar
- suggests overlap in meaning helps build flexible constructions
What is distributional learning?
ability to learn the co-occurrence characteristics of the input
What evidence is there for distributional learning? (Childers & Tomasello, 1998)
- 2yo exposed to multiple transitive sentences of from “X is verbing Y” with familiar verbs
- children taught novel verb to describe new actions
- pronouns helped children extract a more abstract representation of the subject-verb-object sentence structure for use with novel verbs
