LING 203 1st Edition Exam 1 Study Guide Language Acquisition Definition The study of how language is acquired usually infancy How do we study language acquisition Observe and describe what and when Crucial next step explain what we observe how and why How are children s grammars constrained What does their internal grammar look like Why do children make the errors they make How does it evolve into the adult grammar How do they sound when they talk The same or different from adults o Different They may imitate components of adult speech but the errors they make are not radically different from adults and they don t produce random errors Examples I m gonna fall this on you Don t eat her she s smelly Don t giggle me This is my jigsaw I m sawing some jig My legpit hurts I want you pick up me She be s the big sister and I be s the little sister A starting point for explanation What we know about adult grammar Recursion Embedding clauses This is the cat that chased the rat that ate the cheese that sat on the shelf Coordination Take 2 components of equal type and put them together John reads books a writes stories and bakes cookies What do these properties of language enable us to do o We can express almost infinite always creative expressions If what we have is an infinite capacity how is this acquired The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition o o Children aren t born knowing a particular language but they come to know their native language quickly How does that happen The Poverty of the Stimulus what does that mean These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute impoverished input the input children hear contains to some small degree ill formed utterances false starts incomplete thoughts or sentences and errors slips of the tongue but these utterances are not labeled for the child as defective How does the child know which utterances are well formed and which are not finite input infinite ability the child hears only a finite and rather small set of sentences of their language yet they come to have the ability to produce and comprehend an infinite set of sentences implicit knowledge children come to know certain things about language that they were not and could not have been taught e g that a given sentence is ambiguous or that a given sentence is ungrammatical There is some biological basis for language language does not arise solely from the environment This biological capacity common to all humans is often called Universal Grammar What is evidence that children have implicit knowledge o Children know things about language that they were not explicitly taught 1 Knowledge of Structure Dependency 1 Yes No Questions if children can correctly form Yes No questions they know about the structural relations between phrases without explicit instruction Crain and Nakayama 1987 1 The girl is running 2 Is the girl running Hypothesis Move the first auxiliary verb to the front of the sentence 3 The girl who is tall is running 4 Is the girl who tall is running 5 Is the girl who is tall running Modified Hypothesis Move the first auxiliary verb after the subject to the front of the sentence Problem How do you know what the subject is the girl vs the girl who is tall Crain and Nakayama 1987 2 2 Wanna Contraction children know the environments where this contraction is allowed Thornton 1990 Sometimes want to wanna 6 This is the rabbit I want to banish 7 This is the rabbit I wanna banish but not always 8 This is the rabbit I want to vanish 9 This is the rabbit I wanna vanish Why Different underlying structures 10 I want to banish this rabbit 11 I want this rabbit to vanish How would you know Given only 6 and 8 they look the same Thornton 1990 2 The Developmental Problem of Language Acquisition Part of the answer to the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition is that the capacity for language is innate So why isn t language acquisition instantaneous It takes time for the vocal tract to mature It takes time to learn the lexicon vocabulary It takes time to learn the rules of the particular grammar Children are creative o 3 Why do children talk differently Hypothesis 1 children don t pay attention or aren t able to hear the smaller words parts of words BUT Children are highly attuned to minute phonetic differences that adults can t even hear e g retroflex vs dental stops Gerken and McIntosh 1993 children are attuned to words they themselves omit e g articles the Find the bird for me Find bird for me Find was bird for me Find gub bird for me Hypothesis 2 children s grammar is different from that of adults Maybe grammatical knowledge takes time to acquire or Maybe the mental processes involved in producing sentences need to develop Theories of Language Acquisition 1 Input Based Approaches 1 Early views Behaviorism Skinner 1957 language is a learned behavior a habit emerges as a result of input from the environment What happens when a man speaks or responds to speech is clearly a question about human behavior and hence a question to be answered with the concepts and techniques of psychology as an experimental science of behavior The skillful speaker learns to tease out weak behavior and to manipulate variables which will generate and strengthen new responses in his repertoire Skinner 1957 1 2 Recent views Usage based approaches aka emergentist functionalist proponents include Tomasello Akhtar and Tomasello 2000 child initially expresses a small set of concrete concepts ideas through imitation need to communicate Ability to acquire language is innate but linguistic categories are not Language is actively learned not an instinct grammar develops gradually through cultural interaction reinforcement Word meanings are learned through interaction with parents observing the world parent s attention etc Child forms an association between label and salient object Sentence structure acquired is a set of constructions templates not a system of rules Analogies are drawn from one context to another Take N Eat N Draw N on N but grammatical categories are slow to develop no Noun category until age 2 Verb category even later These approaches assume the input provides enough information to attain the adult grammar HOW MUCH can be learned from the input 2 Constructivism Piaget 1923 child constructs language through a combination of schemas biologically given intelligence and interaction with other people e g parents