Week 4 Lecture 4 - early multi-word speech (constructivist)

Question 1

What doe syntax enable and allow?

Answer 1

enables understanding
allows productivity –> produces an infinite number of possible sentences

Question 2

Is there a lot of repetition in early language?

Answer 2

yes from both parent and infant

Question 3

language is species-specific, what doe this mean?

Answer 3

little evidence primates can acquire syntax, even with intensive training

Question 4

language is species-universal, what doe this mean?

Answer 4

most children acquire the majority of their grammar by 5yo

Question 5

What are some characteristics of early word combinations?

Answer 5

• content words
• here and now
• creative
• observes adult word order

Question 6

What do the characteristics of early word combinations suggest?

Answer 6

some kind of organising principles

Question 7

Are lexical rules item-specific?

Answer 7

yes –> based on individual words/schemas

Question 8

there is a limited variety of utterances within children until they can do what?

Answer 8

generalise between schemas

Question 9

What are syntactic rules?

Answer 9

• abstract
• based on grammatical categories

Question 10

Are syntactic rules restricted?

Answer 10

no
allow all utterances possible in adult language

Question 11

What is the constructivist approach to early word combinations?

Answer 11

• grammar is communicative, infants are motivated to communicate
• grammar can be learned using general cognitive learning mechanisms

Question 12

What are some cognitive learning mechanisms used to learn grammar?

Answer 12

• communicative intention reading
• drawing analogies
• distributional learning

Question 13

What is the role of routines in early word combinations?

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

What evidence is there for a constructivist approach?

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

What is the verb island hypothesis? (Tomasello, 1992)

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Describe experimental evidence for the verb island hypothesis

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

What is the evidence of limited (lexical) constructions?

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

What was the method for Lieven et al’s., 2003 study into structure combining?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What did a study by Lieven et al., 2003, into structure combining conclude?

Answer 19

• 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

Question 20

What are semantic analogies?

Answer 20

children need to learn large numbers of verbs before recognising similarities between them and building more general schemas

Question 21

What evidence is there for semantic analogies (Matthews & Bannard, 2010)?

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

What is distributional learning?

Answer 22

ability to learn the co-occurrence characteristics of the input

Question 23

What evidence is there for distributional learning? (Childers & Tomasello, 1998)

Answer 23

• 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