Week 8

Question 1

What is the key question in the field of language acquisition?

Answer 1

How do humans manage to learn (‘acquire’) such complicated system?

Question 2

The innateness hypothesis

Answer 2

Children acquire their native language naturally during the first years of their lives, without much strain and without any explicit instruction.

This observation has led to the idea that the human capacity for language is innate. This “innateness hypothesis” is associated first and foremost with the linguist Noam Chomsky (1928‒).

Question 3

Chomsky’s theory of Universal Gramma

Answer 3

No linguist believes that the child’s mind is a “blank slate”. The question is rather whether children are born with specific linguistic knowledge that constrains what they will acquire (Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar) or whether language acquisition is the result of more general cognitive processes.

Question 4

Prosody

Answer 4

Melody, stress and timing.

Newborn infants already have linguistic skills. For example, it has been shown that they can discriminate two languages based on differences in prosody.

Question 5

Infants are able to perceive very slight differences between sounds that adult speakers are unable to hear. What is an example of this?

Answer 5

The phonetic realisation of a voiced bilabial stop [b] may differ depending on when the vocal cords start vibrating during the oral closure. Voicing can start at 60 ms before the stop release, or at 20 ms.

Question 6

High Amplitude Sucking (HAS)

Answer 6

1. A pacifier connected to sound-generating device.
2. Each suck produces the same sound.
3. Sucking rate gradually decreases (habituation)
4. A new stimulus (when the experimenter changes the sound) leads to increase in sucking rate.

Slide 5

Question 7

Conditioned Head-Turn Procedure

Answer 7

Conditioning phase:
1. The child learns to associate a change in sound with a visual reinforcer (e.g., an animated toy presented on a screen).
2. After a while, the visual reinforcer is presented slightly later than the change in sound.
3. The child will begin to anticipate the appearance of the visual reinforcer and look for it before it’s presented.

Testing phase:
If the child looks to the visual reinforcer immediately after a change in sound, the experimenter infers that the child has perceived the change and can therefore discriminate between the two sounds involved

Question 8

Do children show different developmental patterns depending on their different languages?

Answer 8

No, children show similar developmental patterns, irrespective of the language they’re acquiring.

Question 9

When is the acquisition process not successful?

Answer 9

The acquisition process is always successful, unless there is pathology.

Question 10

The “poverty of the stimulus” argument

Answer 10

The input that the child receives is full of mistakes, incomplete utterances and interruptions, and doesn’t contain the full range of possible grammatical structures; however, this doesn’t negatively affect acquisition.

Question 11

What has no effect on a child’s language acquisition?

Answer 11

Correction and instruction by caregivers has little to no effect.

Question 12

How is the process of first language acquisition independent?

Answer 12

The process of first language acquisition is relatively independent from the environment, the degree of linguistic input and the ambient language

Question 13

Children show similar developmental patterns, irrespective of the language they’re acquiring. Yule (p.210) calls this the ‘acquisition schedule’, what does it look like?

Answer 13

1. Cooing (first few months): early vocalisations with vowel sounds and characteristic palatal/velar consonants.
2. Babbling (between 6 and 12 months): CV syllables; these are repeated in canonical babbling and distinct in variegated babbling.
3. One-word stage (between 12 and 18 months): single-unit utterances, sometimes involving holophrastic speech (e.g. what’s up [æsʌ]).
4. Two-word stage (begins around 18 to 20 months): emergence of syntactic structure; interpretation is strongly tied to context (e.g. eat cookie).
5. Multiple-word stage (begins around 24 to 30 months): emergence of sentence structure, function words, inflectional morphology.

Note that the schedule involves different stages in language production (which lags behind language perception).

Question 14

What kind of sounds do children first produce? What is the preferred syllable structure?

Answer 14

The first words that children produce contain sounds that differ maximally from each other.

This is why the first meaningful word in languages is often [pa] or [ma] or [nana].

The CV syllable structure (or CV template) is the preferred structure in the early stages of acquisition.

Question 15

Most deleted syllables are unstressed and word-initial. Why would this be the case?

Answer 15

1) Unstressed syllables aren’t perceptually prominent as compared to stressed syllables.

2) English children may correlate the presence of a stressed syllable with the beginning of a word.

Question 16

In longer English words, syllables are often deleted. What does this suggest?

Answer 16

This suggests that trochaic feet, like syllables, function as a template in English.

Question 17

Which morphological developments appear first?

Answer 17

The child is starting to produce inflectional and functional morphemes. The first to appear is the –ing form in expressions such as cat sitting and mommy reading a book.

The next morphological development is typically the marking of regular plurals with the –s form, as in boys and cats.

Question 18

How do we know whether a child has acquired the marking of regular plurals?

Answer 18

The wug-test!

Question 19

The wug-test

Answer 19

If the child produces the form wugs [wʌɡz], then we may conclude that it has acquired the regular rule of plural formation.

Why does the test involve a non-word (wug) rather than an existing word (like boy)? If the child produces the form boys [bɔɪz], then it may have acquired a rule. But that’s not the only explanation; she may also have heard others use the word [bɔɪz], and memorised it. In that case, the child may not be applying the rule when she says [bɔɪz]; she may simply be accessing her mental lexicon.

Question 20

What is a characteristic feature of morphological development? What is an example of this?

Answer 20

A characteristic feature of morphological development is overgeneralisation.

1. My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
2. I finded Renée.
3. Once upon a time an alligator was eating a dinosaur and the dinosaur was eating the alligator and the dinosaur was eaten by the alligator and the alligator goed kerplunk.

Question 21

What so such mistakes (overgeneralisation) show?

Answer 21

1.Language-acquiring children discover patterns (cf. the wug-test) but sometimes overextend these.

2.Language-acquiring children do more than just imitate the language they hear around them.

Question 22

Analogical extension

Answer 22

A different term for overgeneralisation in the context of language change.

Question 23

What is an example of overgeneralisation?

Answer 23

What is the past tense form of go? went

What is the past tense form of slay?slew? slayed?

Slay is relatively uncommon; speakers will rarely hear the past-tense form. As a result, the ‘correct’ form slew isn’t strongly represented in memory and speakers are likely to resort to the regular rule. The past-tense form went, on the other hand, is highly frequent; it’s unlikely to be replaced by goed.

Question 24

U-shaped learning curve

Answer 24

The percentage of correct past-tense forms plotted over time has the shape of a ‘U’. This kind of development is special; with most other things, children get better as they get older. The newly appearing errors suggest that acquisition of irregular forms involves reorganisation.

Question 25

L2 Acquisition

Answer 25

Second Language Acquisition covers both learning a foreign language (learning French in school) and learning a second language (growing up in a multi-lingual environment).

Question 26

Acquiring vs. learning

Answer 26

Unconscious vs. conscious, hard work, instruction

Question 27

Teaching methods

Answer 27

1. Grammar-Translation method: emphasis on written language; memorisation of vocabulary lists; explicit teaching of grammar rules.
2. Audiolingual method: emphasis on spoken language; systematic presentation of L2 structures in the form of drills.
3. Communicative approaches: emphasis on the function (rather than the form) of the L2; different attitude to errors.

Question 28

Transfer

Answer 28

Speakers’ knowledge of the L2 is influenced by knowledge of their L1, in that elements of the L1 are used when speaking the L2. This is called transfer. Any errors in the L2 that result from this are due to negative transfer.

Some errors are not connected to either the L1 or the L2. This suggests that L2 speakers may use an in-between system with rules of its own, called an interlanguage.