Week 5 Lecture 5 - Nativist approaches

Question 1

What does the nativist approach assume about language acquisition?

Answer 1

• children learn language with innate machinery that is specific to language
• universal grammar

Question 2

What do nativist argue that utterances are? Why?

Answer 2

• children’s utterances are creative because they have access to innate grammatical rules

Question 3

What do Constructivists argue that utterances are? Why?

Answer 3

• children’s utterances are creative because creativity is based on the use of lexical frames learned from the language the child hears

Question 4

What do nativist argue about adult word order?

Answer 4

children observe adult word order because they have an abstract rule

Question 5

What do constructivists argue about adult word order?

Answer 5

children observe adult word order because they pick up high frequency lexical frames from their input

Question 6

What do nativist argue about generalisations?

Answer 6

they provide evidence of abstract (innate) rules

Question 7

What do constrcutivists argue about generalisations?

Answer 7

generalisations demonstrate that children learn these patterns gradually from distributional analysis of the languages they hear

Question 8

What are the nativist assumptions?

Answer 8

• grammar is a symbolic computational system which process the relationships between abstract variables
• grammatical categories and rules are there from birth
• predict that the acquisition of a particular aspect of grammar should have an all-or-nothing quality

Question 9

What are 2 general predictions of the nativist approach?

Answer 9

1.) children should learn these innately specified aspects of grammar very early on
2.) children should show consistent treatment of members of a particular grammatical category

Question 10

What are the principles are parameters of Universal Grammar?

Answer 10

• all the possible rules for languages are innate
• grammar rules apply in all languages
• where the rules of grammar differ across languages, they do so in highly constrained ways which are encoded by parameters
• children need to work out which parameter settings apply for the language they are learning

Question 11

What are the theoretical advantages of UG?

Answer 11

• avoids problem of explaining how children acquire complex grammatical rules
• allows a unified theory of acquisition across languages whilst explaining how languages differ

Question 12

What empirical evidence is there for principles and parameters?

Answer 12

• children’s early utterances observes adult word order (parameter set)
• children are productive from early on
• children show productive use of some Noun and Verb inflection from age 2.5 and readily combine novel Nouns with other words
  children understand role of word order from 2yo (preferential looking studies)

Question 13

What does evidence from preferential looking studies suggest?

Answer 13

• children can identify the correct picture to match subject-verb-object sentences from a choice of 2 causal actions (Gertner, Fishers & Eisengart, 2006)
  Taken as evidence for setting the word order pattern

Question 14

Is there clear results for distinguishing non-causal actions described with subject-verb construction? (Preferential looking studies)

Answer 14

No not as clear as for causal action

Disagreement as to what these results mean - comprehension vs. production

Question 15

What are some theoretical problems for UG?

Answer 15

• parameters not clearly specified
• unclear how children avoid setting parameters incorrectly
• bilingualism –> how do children set 2 or more versions of the same parameter?

Question 16

What empirical evidence is there against P&P?

Answer 16

• children exhibit limited knowledge of SVO word order in production and act-out studies
• naturalistic data studies provide evidence of partial lexically specific knowledge with a grammatical category
• many studies show a very close relationship between what children hear, how often and what and when they learn

Question 17

What are maturational models (Radford’s, 1990)?

Answer 17

The child has some grammatical knowledge available from birth but other aspects of grammar “switch on” at biologically predetermined points in development

Question 18

Why did maturational models develop?

Answer 18

an attempt to explain why children’s early utterances are ungrammatical if children operate with innate grammar

Question 19

Under Radford’s maturational model, at the Lexical stage of development (20 mns) what happens?

Answer 19

children’s utterances consist of mainly content words with other parts omitted

Question 20

Radford’s maturational model, at the Functional stage of development (24 mns) what happens?

Answer 20

child’s innate grammar “matures” and the part governing the use of more complex grammatical components switch on

Question 21

What are the theoretical advantages and evidence for maturational models?

Answer 21

• explains why early utterances aren’t fully grammatical
• allows for dev. over time so more likely to fit empirical data
• fits with possible patterns in other areas of dev. e.g., Piaget

Question 22

What are the theoretical and empirical problems for maturational models?

Answer 22

• difficult to identify precise points of dev.
• from earliest stages children show some use of most grammatical functions although inconsistent
• around 24 mns, children’s use of many “functional” words related to lexical frames

Question 23

What is the linking problem?

Answer 23

How do children link up their innate knowledge of grammatical categories to the words they are hearing?

Problem but UG is defined in these terms

Question 24

What is a possible solution to the linking problem?

Answer 24

Semantic bootstrapping (Pinker, 1984)

Question 25

What does sematic bootstrapping assume? (Pinker, 1984)

Answer 25

• grammatical categories and rules innate
• children use semantics to map words in the input onto these innate syntactic categories by using innate Linking rules to map semantics into syntax

Question 26

What are the linking rules between meaning and syntax?

Answer 26

attribute –> adjective
person, thing –> noun
action, change of state –> verb
spatial relation, path, direction –> preposition

Question 27

Can children also link semantic roles to syntactic roles?

Answer 27

yes

Question 28

A problem with sematic bootstrapping is that it’s not always easy to work out grammatical categories from mean
Expand on this

Answer 28

• not all verbs are actions
• not all nouns are concrete objects
• not all subjects are agents

Question 29

What is a solution to the difficulty in working out grammatical categories in semantic bootstrapping?

Answer 29

distributional analysis –> determine word order for the language from prototypical sentences.
Then apply knowledge of word order to work out grammatical category of more abstract terms

Question 30

What are some advantages of semantic bootstrapping?

Answer 30

• explains how children break into innate system
• explains why early utterances follow adult word order
• explains how children learn verbs which are not action, nouns which are not objects etc.

Question 31

What are some problems for semantic bootstrapping?

Answer 31

• many of children’s early utterances aren’t semantically prototypical therefore unlikely based on innate knowledge of sematic linking rules
• in passive sentences, the noun phrase which is usually the object of an active transitive becomes the subject

Question 32

What is the problem with passives?

Answer 32

• if child hears passive utterances, they may use sematic bootstrapping to conc. their language is OVS

Question 33

When do some nativists propose passives are learnt? What is a problem with this?

Answer 33

5yo
but children hear passive sentences from fairly early on