JLP315 Midterm
Logical problem Kids don't make as many mistakes as would be needed for hypothesis testing. Kids seem to receive no relevant negative evidence while learning language anyway. Kids learn fast. Kids become adults with all the relevant grammatical knowledge (uniform, highly complex). Kids come to know abstract principles without access to evidence determining them. In many cases, these principles are observed in all human languages: "Poverty of the stimulus"
"Poverty of the stimulus"
Having language = being human The linguistic capacity is part of being human. Like having two arms, ten fingers, a vision system, humans have a language faculty. Specification of having arms instead of wings, etc., is somehow encoded genetically. Structure of the language faculty is predetermined, like the structure of the vision system is. The language faculty (tightly) constrains what kinds of languages a child can learn ="Universal Grammar" (UG).
"Universal Grammar" (UG)
NOT just a communication system Language unique to humans (likely to be part of their genetic make-up) No other animals use language (but yes communication No other animals can be taught language (debatable? - Washoe, Koko, Lana, Kanzi) What is missing? Creativity + formal complexity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VttrAY0g9DM&feature=related language is not just a communication system, alert calls no other animals use language animal communication has properties diff from properties of human language no other animals can be taught language missing from primate communication -- creativity and formal complexity vocalization, gesture, smells, etc for animals creativity -- can say anything in any language human language is infinitely recursive
1 language = species-specific
Whether parents spend time actively teaching children how to speak or not, the outcome is the same (and the errors they make in the course of acquisition are the same) • Crucial: need to recognize intention (theory of mind?) - The case of Glen and Jim: hearing children of deaf parents; well cared for but no linguistic interaction (just TV); discovered at 3 yrs 9 months and 18 months of age - had a vocabulary, but no morphology/syntax • That enough two wing. • Off my mittens. • This not take off plane. language doesn't need to be actively taught there needs to be two-way interaction
3a language doesn't need to be actively taught
Nicaraguan sign language: emerged when schools for the deaf were founded in the 1970s - from many different 'home signs' to full-fledged language with systematic properties Pidgins and Creoles - similar point language production can't be suppressed -- nicaraguan sign language, pidgins and creoles go over pidgin and creole slides
3b language production can't be suppressed
Slobin 1972 - Motor development: roll over, sit up, crawl, walk - Language acquisition: coo, babble, one-word stage, two-word stage, sentences - Also: second language acquisition in adulthood and similar acquisition paths paths followed -- set sequence similar paths for second language acquisition hard to compare bc no two people have same bg
4. Similar acquisition paths for languages
Necessity of stimulation from and interaction with the environment - Isolated children; birds For a biological system, the environmental input is a stimulus that triggers internal development
5. Role of environment
1. Without explicit teaching 2. On the basis of positive evidence 3. Under varying circumstances, and in a limited amount of time 4. In very similar (identical) ways across languages
Acquiring a language is an effortless achievement that occurs:
No systematic instruction provided (unlike second language acquisition) L1 (first or native language) develops spontaneously by exposure to linguistic input (necessary condition) Even when children are corrected, this generally has no effect on their use of language
Acquiring a language occurs without explicit teaching:
The nature of infants' perception ability - On the one hand, infants can discriminate between non-linguistic stimuli (not language-specific) - On the other hand, other species (chinchillas, macaques) also have categorical perception (not human-specific) Ramus et al. (2000): "some aspect of human speech perception may have built upon preexisting sensitivities of the primate auditory system"
Where does categorical perception come from
reward to options that have higher weight statistically based : learn associations between input/stimulus and output/response patterns, where input and output are connected by modifiable weighted links "goed" vs went -- went rewarded/repeated by parent more Successful modelling of verbal morphology acquisition (for English), simple word order acquire new verb past tenses by analogy to similar known ones
association theory
Cortex/gray matter (surface of brain) Cerebral hemispheres - Left hemisphere: supervises right side of body - Right hemisphere: supervises left side of body Corpus callosum connects hemispheres, integrates information between them contralateral control in brain (r → l, l → r) angular gyrus controls sensation of sound may or may not be representing sound to ourselves as we read Hemispheres Crossover or contralateral control Dominance (congenital) - Right-handers have L dominance (96%) - Left-handers: 70% L dominance, 15% R, 15% both (from now on, assume left dominance)
brain anatomy
Broca's area controls: Syntax, speech encoding, speech production/comprehension Wernicke's area controls: Semantics, speech decoding angular gyrus (region of the brain in the parietal lobe, lying near the superior edge of the temporal lobe): Sensation of sound speech encoding -- production decoding -- comprehension
broca's area vs wernicke's area
ug exists but kids don't just enter the world speaking like adults—there's development. adults don't all end up speaking the same language or dialect — there is learning.
development vs learning
Karl Wernicke (German) in 1874 -Fluent speech -Good intonaIon -Lexical errors -Nonsense words -"Word salad" -Comprehension impaired "I felt worse because I can no longer keep in mind from the mind of the minds to keep me from mind and up to the ear which can be to find among ourselves." "Me? Yes sir. I'm a male demaploze on my own. I still know my tubaboys what for I have that's gone hell and some of them go." "If you had said that, we had said that, poomer, near the fortunate, porpunate, tamppoo, all around the fourth of martz. Oh, I get all confused." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVhYN7NTIKU&feature=related Wernicke's aphasia: damage to the brain in the parietal/temporal region in the left hemisphere
Language in the brain - Wernicke's aphasia
refers to the localization of a specific function in one or the other hemisphere R : responsible for creative and emotional skills, spatial reasoning? L : responsible for logic, analysis, mathematics? Best evidence of lateralization for one specific ability: Ø LANGUAGE (left hemisphere) Ø L: speech Ø R: non-speech sounds, music
Lateralization
Language lateralization -- Wada test: inject sodium amytol into one hemisphere and observe subject behavior across different tasks (effect: paralysis of body side controlled by that hemisphere; if dominant for language - verbal behavior disrupted for several minutes) -- Brain mapping: expose brain and stimulate portions of it during speech production - associated with language: Broca's area in frontal lobe, Wernicke's area in temporal lobe -- Commisurotomy (split-brain): if corpus callosum severed, contralateral effect doesn't change, but the two hemispheres cannot communicate with each other => patients cannot verbally describe tactile info sent to right brain (left hand or left visual field) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&feature=related; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8 ) -- Dichotic listening: play different stimuli in different ears, see which one is processed faster; gender effect (Test yourselves: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/dichotic/ dichotic.html)
Modularity of the Brain
The case of Christopher: IQ 60-70 but remarkable language skills learned language fast, 20 languages could not learn manmade language w artificial negation rule pattern recognition and other cognitive ability lacking language ability diff from general cognition Dyslexia: developmental, appears during acquisition Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (hardly "specific") - No brain lesions - Acquisition delayed - No other cognitive deficits (normal IQ) => language ability ≠ general cognition
Modularity of the brain: more evidence
Derek Bickerton (who studied Hawaiian Creole) argued that children are genetically programmed to learn language. Analogy: children are genetically programmed to learn to walk upright. He claims that features of creoles are already programmed into our heads. In most situations, children have to alter their preprogrammed grammar to conform to what they hear around them (English, French, etc.). In a pidgin situation, they don't have to (because of the lack of structure); they just take the words they hear and use them with their innate grammar. bioprogram hypothesis features of creoles are innate grammar don't have to alter pre-programmed grammar to conform to grammatical rules heard languages differ from ug due to imperfect acquisition, 'laziness factor' for sound change, innovation creoles around the world have similar grammar regardless of input language
The Bioprogram Hypothesis (1984)
Extensive brain development occurs as a child acquires speech during childhood. - the brain is shaped by the environment in which a child lives (genetic inheritance does NOT include a specialized body and mind fitted to a specific environmental niche) - ability to grasp complex patterns and a brain that grows through interacting with the environment - potential to learn from a wide number of possible environments narrowed to fit the actual one in which a child lives
The Infant Brain Development
Do infants recognize... - Specific words? NO - Mean energy? NO (backwards speech not recognized) - Segmental properties? NO (low-pass filtered speech still recognized) - Prosodic (suprasegmental) information? YES
The Source of Discrimination - how do infants tell languages apart when they don't know either
Innate behaviors (Lenneberg 1967): often distinguished by the existence of critical periods during which the ability to acquire the competence reaches its peak (e.g. visual abilities in animals, bird songs, attachment in young of various species, etc.) Is language subject to critical period effects? The answer appears to be YES. Feral children (Victor of Aveyron, Genie) Deaf people exposed to a signed language at different ages SLA
The critical period
Fetuses: can hear inside the womb and were shown to be sensitive to voices, native language, intonation, syllables (can their brain process individual sounds?) Due to liquid medium, individual sounds greatly distorted; prosody more pervasive 3-day olds recognize their mother's voice As early as 6 months children seem to understand words like mommy/daddy (preferential looking technique)
The infant's acoustic surroundings
From birth to 4 months, infants' vocal tract: similar to that of apes. Differences from adults: higher larynx (starts descending around 4-6 months, process complete around 3 years of age) smaller throat shorter vocal tract different tongue shape Babbling can only occur once the configuration of the vocal tract is ready for it.
The maturation of the vocal apparatus
A grammar: mental generative procedure that uses finite means to generate an indefinite number of sentences UG tightly constrains the learning process. Study of syntax, phonology, etc., is generally trying to uncover properties of Language, to specify what kind of languages a child can learn, to see what kinds of restrictions UG places on language.
The notion of Grammar
Stage 1: smiled, sang, held = all memorized Stage 2: smiled, singed/sanged, holded, = learned past, over-regularization Stage 3: smiled, sang, held = learned allomorphy At Stage 2 the child will over-regularize based on the weight of -ed, but then s/he will modify this weight for irregular verbs because s/he does not encounter these combinations (irregular verb stem + ed) in the input.
U-shaped curve of verbal morphology acquisition
Common assumption: children learn language by imitating their parents problems: 1. Does not apply to comprehension at all 2. Children will create their own language - creoles (stable language, fully expressive, complete with grammatical markers, created by children raised in pidgin in language contact scenario) and nicaraguan sign language (created by children in congregated deaf program from their home sign) 3. Children say things their parents wouldn't (but somebody else's parents would) e.g. negative agreement Child English: I don't get nothing?! (age 3;4) Adult English: I don't get anything? Gianni non ha visto niente John not has seen nothing "John didn't see anything" (Italian)
imitation theory and problems
People eventually end up with a system with which they can produce (and rate) sentences: a grammar. Even if a native speaker of English has never heard a sentence before, they know if it's possible in English constraints on form and meaning Every native speaker of English knows these things. Nobody who speaks English as a first language was explicitly taught (growing up) "wanna-contraction is not possible when the questioned element is the subject of the infinitival clause" or "You can't use a proper name if it's c-commanded by something coindexed with it." Trying to use any simple kind of general learning principle based on (analogy to) other sentences seems almost sure to lead you astray.
knowledge of language
Cerebellum: intonation, inflection of voice Right Hemisphere: discourse, prosody, overall structure BILINGUALS - Increased right activity, different degrees of recovery for each language after stroke
language outside left hemisphere
PLD → LAD → grammar The Primary Linguistic Data (PLD) serves as input to a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which makes use of this information to produce a grammar of the language being learned.
ug language acquisition schema
Hypothesis 1: Move the first is (or modal, auxiliary) to the front. Hypothesis 2: Move the first is after the subject noun phrase to the front. [The man who is here]NP is eating dinner.
"invisible" structure: yes-no questions
Oral mechanism: oral space smaller, lower jaw smaller and retracted, sucking pads present, teeth emerge. Tongue large compared to size of oral cavity: more restricted movement. Epiglotts and soft palate are in approximation as a protective mechanism. Newborns breathe/swallow at same time. Larynx higher in newborn. Perception: "By at least 2 days of age, the neonate has an ability to discriminate language specific acoustic distinctions...The 12 month old human has developed the capacity to categorize only those phonemes which are in its native language"
0 to 1 y.o.
2 aspects - All human babies: capable of learning any language - All languages: cut from the same mold (universal properties) Universal grammar: blueprint for language (same components, same organization and functions, same principles and parameters, variation = constrained; surface) any human infant is capable of learning any lang all languages share universal properties/components ug is blueprint for language variation is constrained languages have different words, have to be memorized remove surface variability and same skeleton emerges
2 language = universal
EARLY VIEW (Jakobson 1968): babbling and word production unrelated (no continuity) TODAY: there is continuity, babbling = fundamental step in development of language, direct connection to word production (allows babies to practice the sounds of their languages, which naturally leads up to their first words)
Babbling and word production
Another important finding Lisker & Abramson's results: speakers of different languages divide the VOT dimension in different ways Categorical distinction is influenced by native language: Spanish and English only 2 regions, with a different boundary; Thai: 3 regions - e.g. English listeners have a /b/-/p/ boundary at + 25 ms VOT, while Spanish listeners have theirs at -20 VOT. Tentative conclusion Cross-linguistic differences in categorical perception suggest that enhanced discriminability at phoneme category boundaries arises from language experience. So... prelinguistic infants should not exhibit categorical perception 1971 study: Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, and Vigorito - Subjects: 1-4 month olds - High-amplitude sucking procedure: what changes can infants detect? - Stimuli: Different phonemes: +20 ms VOT / +40 ms VOT Same phonemes: -20 ms VOT / 0 ms VOT Identical stimuli 0 ms VOT / 0 ms VOT sucking rate went up for different english phonemes with different vot, and also went up for differences in vot between same english phoneme! stayed the same for same phoneme with same vot Amazing discovery: infants have categorical perception for ALL the possible phonemes in human languages The acquisition process is gradually learning to ignore the difference between sounds that aren't phonemic in your language linguistic experience influences this Infants have categorical perception for ALL the possible phonemes in human languages but adults do not tests on infants, babies, adults on phonemic contrasts not present in English What happens with older children? Testing ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSIwuttMhl4A ) for categorical perception (preferential looking paradigm)
Categorical perception
Focus: voice onset time (VOT) VOT: time interval between the release of an articulator and the onset of laryngeal vibration (voicing) - Used by most languages for phonemic distinctions (e.g. /b/ vs. /p/, /d/ vs. /t/, /g/ vs. /k/). - Distinctions in VOT are highly robust articulatorily /ba/: voicing occurs during lip closure prior to articulator release /pa/: voicing occurs after articulator release /pha/: voicing is delayed after articulator release; aspiration occurs
Categorical perception and VOT
Support: The case of Victor (Wild Boy of Aveyron, 1797), Genie (Secret of the Wild Child), and other feral children (but confound present in that traumas may interfere with this), deaf children to hearing parents (ALL unable to acquire grammar after the critical period) a critical period for bird songs Biologically determined window of opportunity? critical age hypothesis feral children unable to acquire grammar after critical period biologically determined window of opportunity confounds present due to trauma, no control possible, may be due to pre-existing issues as well can't be directly tested bird song has a critical period role of envt -- need stimulation from and interaction with envt input is stimulus that triggers internal development children that couldn't learn language just by watching tv
Critical Age Hypothesis
Experimental procedure: high-amplitude sucking (HAS) Robust finding replicated in many experiments Some exceptions (e.g. 2-month old English babies cannot discriminate between English and Dutch, but 5-month olds can) Experimental evidence Intriguing since both languages: unknown to infant Where does the capacity to distinguish come from? Infants: able to rapidly build some type of representation of what they hear
Discriminating native vs. foreign languages
Comprehension Hypothesis: adults understand grammatical sentences and do not understand ungrammatical ones Approval Hypothesis: adults respond positively to grammatical sentences and negatively to ungrammatical ones Brown & Hanlon (1970) found that adults understood and expressed approval after ungrammatical sentences at the same frequency as grammatical sentences This doesn't look good for comprehension or approval as a source of negative evidence for kids.
Do kids get "implicit" negative evidence?
1. Its cognitive function is species-specific 2. The specific properties of its cognitive function are replicated in every member of the species 3. The cognitive processes and capacities associated with this system are differentiated spontaneously with maturation 4. Certain aspects of behavior and cognitive function for this system emerge only during infancy 5. Certain social phenomena come about by spontaneous adaptation of the behavior of the growing individual to the behavior of other individuals around him
Eric Lenneberg (1960s) 5 general criteria to determine if a system is based in the biology of a species
Infants' surprising sensitivity to acoustic cues characteristic of natural language (e.g. syllables, phonemes, prosodic structure): bias to pay attention to speech stimuli? Learning the phonological system of one's language: narrowing down from paying attention to everything (linguistic) in the acoustic signal to only paying attention to what matters in your language Learning language: selective process (experience narrows perceptual sensitivity)
First steps into language
Listen to a sentence Try out one of the possibilities If it works, 'reward' that possibility If it doesn't work, 'punish' that possibility Eventually, the right possibilities will eliminate the others Learning by Unlearning start with options A, B, C → more reward for option C → C used
How do children learn the parameters?
in english, null subjects are variable in input and production, but kids learn that english requires a subject and isn't like italian (subject can be inferred from verb conjugation) bc english has poor verb agreement or mandarin (subject inferred from context and not required) because english requires an expletive subject when there's no logical one ex "it rains"
How do children learn the parameters? (null subjects example)
While speech perception is apparent from birth, speech production starts around 6 months of age. Between 6-8 months: babbling (manual or vocal) → identical timing suggests this is due to maturation of the neural substrate supporting language)
Infants' speech production
Children come 'equipped' with knowledge about language Principles: language universals that children are born knowing and so don't have to learn (e.g. an NP can't be moved out of another NP) Parameters: the choices that languages can make (e.g. ordering of elements in phrase structure rules, whether a subject is required to be present on the surface); children are born knowing the possibilities A large part of their task is to eliminate the possibilities that aren't part of their language Consequences: 1 there are some mistakes that children never make 2 the mistakes that children do make are possible in other languages -- English learning babies will use syntax from German/Mandarin.
Innateness Hypothesis
recent centuries have seen the birth of new languages, called Creoles These have been intensively studied by linguists Some linguists and psycholinguists argue that these languages are created by children from innate grammatical knowledge Pidgins When speakers of different languages come into contact, they often develop a rough means of communication called a pidgin Pidgins are not natural languages: do not have fully developed syntactic rules for combining and manipulating phrases, clauses, etc. Consist of a lexicon of words, usually taken from the contact languages, and very rudimentary ways of combining them Examples of Pidgins Trade Languages - West African Pidgin English (developed into Krio, official language of Sierra Leone); - Melanesian Pidgin English (developed into Tok Pisin); - Pidgin Arabic developed recently among immigrant oil workers in the Middle East; - Chinook Jargon: trade language in the Pacific Northwest, based on Native American languages, English, and French. Forced Labor Pidgins - 1500-1900: England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain establish labor-intensive agricultural colonies in isolated locations. - Colonies depend on cheap labor (slavery) imported from around the world. - Workers come first from West Africa, later East Africa, India, and the Orient. - Workers speak a variety of mutually incomprehensible languages. - Very few speakers of the colonial language. - Workers communicate via pidgin based on colonial language. Birth of Creoles Children born into a community whose means of communication is a pidgin. Children do not simply acquire the pidgin — Pidgin words suddenly used in sophisticated ways, using grammatical mechanisms attested in natural languages around the world. The children often also acquire the language(s) of their parents; But they adopt the creole as their primary language, use it with their peers. Creoles The creole achieves uniformity almost overnight. Creoles from remote areas tend to share grammatical features. Often these grammatical features are not found in any of the contact languages that formed the pidgin. Example: Hawaiian Creole 1876-1900: Boom in sugar production leads to importation of multinational workforce. By 1900 indentured laborers from China, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Puerto Rico outnumber other groups in Hawaii 2-1. After annexation of Hawaii to US in 1898, pidgin based on English becomes lingua franca. Children born after 1905 speak a full-fledged creole. Hawaiian Creole Hawaiian Pidgin: no subordinate clauses, no auxiliary verbs, few prepositions or articles, often no verb. Pidgin - Good, this one. Kaukau [food] any kind this one. Pilipin island no good. No more money. Hawaiian Creole - Hawaii more better than Philippines, over here get [=there is] plenty kaukau, over there no can, bra [=brother], you no more money for buy kaukau, 'a'swhy. Common Creole Features Creoles around the world share the same features: - Same distinction between neutral and singular/plural number - Same distinction between accomplished and unaccomplished purposes Im gaan fi bied. (Jamaican Creole) 'He went with the intention of washing.' Im gaan go bied. 'He went to wash and did.' - Word order almost always SVO.
Language Creation
Paul Broca (French) in 1864 intelligence not necessarily affected Understanding affected in subtle way (does real-world knowledge compensate for syntactic deficits?) production severely impaired - Labored speech - Fragmentary - Trouble with function words aphasia = any language disorder resulting from brain damage (phasis = utterance, a = without, Greek) "Yes ... Monday ... Dad, and Dad ... hospital, and ... Wednesday, Wednesday, nine o'clock and ... Thursday, ten o'clock ... doctors, two, two ... doctors and ... teeth, yah. And a doctor ... girl, and gums, and I." "Me ... build-ing ... chairs, no, no cab-in-ets. One, saw ... then, cuttng wood ... working ..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2IiMEbMnPM, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocIUW3Ego&feature=related Broca's aphasia: damage to left hemisphere, where the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes meet
Language in the brain - Broca's aphasia
6-8 months: all children babble (even deaf children) 10-12 months: first words occur 20-24 months: words start being combined 2-3 years: same errors (infinitive verbs in main clauses, subject dropping, over-regularization) The similarities among stages are striking considering the variations in input and conditions of acquisition
Linguistic milestones achieved similarly (regardless of the language, or whether it is spoken or signed)
- Brain weight: increase from 25% of adult weight at birth to 80% of adult weight during first years of life; aids in grasp of complex patterns (e.g. those underlying speech) - Selective elimination: brain begins with "extra" cell connections in areas responsible for speech learning: if used → strengthened and retained, while if unused → eliminated - Growth and elaboration: of cell connections, including those for speech learning; enriched environment → increased numbers of synapses per neuron in both children and adults; environmental deprivation decreases # of cell connections - Myelin sheaths: insulator speeding electrical transmission of signals between cells (gross and fine motor movements). Myelination begins 3 months before birth; peak growth between birth and end of year 1; growth continues until adulthood. - Wernicke's area: functional region in left temporal lobe; language comprehension; peak in # of cell connections during first half of year 1; mature # reached during second half of year 1. Girls at 9: more dendritic connections in Wernicke's area than boys. University education: more dendritic connections than high school diploma - Broca's area: functional region in left frontal hemisphere; controls speech; density of cell connections peaks around 15 months, and reaches mature # around 6-8 y.o. - Hippocampus: working memory and speech activities (memory retention, word retrieval); develops after birth, especially year 2. - Prefrontal cortex: cognitive activities underlying speech (reasoning, planning, judgment, attention); cell connections in prefrontal lobes develop slowly during childhood, mature after adolescence.
Major Aspects of Brain Development
Sensitivity to consonant contrasts - Infants discriminate between consonantal contrasts very early. - Perception of consonantal contrasts is categorical. - Infants can discriminate native as well as nonnative contrasts. - Infants gradually lose the ability to distinguish nonnative contrasts - process complete by age 1 (same as adults).
Sensitivity to consonant contrasts
Slower speech, longer pauses Higher pitch, greater pitch range Exaggerated intonation and stress More varied loudness Fewer disfluencies More restricted vocabulary More rephrasings More repetitions Shorter, less complex utterances More imperatives and questions Fewer complex (multiclause) sentences
Some properties of "Motherese"
Discrimination implies being able to compare between two different representations. What is the nature of the representation that infants rely on? A rhythmic-based representation: - Stress-timed languages (Morse code): Dutch, English, Russian, Swedish - Syllable-timed languages (machine gun): Italian, French, Greek, Spanish - Mora-timed languages: Japanese, Tamil Predictions of this hypothesis confirmed: - Infants discriminate stress-timed from syllable-timed languages. YES - Infants discriminate stress-timed from mora-timed languages. YES - Infants discriminate syllable-timed from mora-timed languages. NOT TESTED - Infants do not (initially) discriminate between two stress-/syllable-/mora-timed languages. YES CONCLUSION: rhythmic information that infants rely upon is not language-specific, but class-specific (Nazzi et al. 1998).
The rhythm-based language discrimination hypothesis (Mehler et al. 1996)
Complete: consistent response, indicates unambiguously "grammatical" or "ungrammatical." Partial: IF there is a response, it indicates "grammatical" or "ungrammatical" Noisy: response given to both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, but with different/detectable frequency.
Three possible types of feedback for negative evidence
Michael Tomasello: in Innateness Theory, the role the social experience in language acquisition is underrated. Language emerges out of multiple experiences of meaning-making; language CAN be learned from language use itself, by means of social skills like joint attention, and by means of powerful generalization mechanisms: Data-driven learning (no innate linguistic representations) Each usage experience affects construction knowledge following general principles of learning relating to: Frequency Contingency Semantic prototypicality Verb-Argument Constructions (verb islands): see daddy + wave bye-bye = See daddy wave bye-bye. role of social experience in lang acquisition underrated language is a social phenomenon can be learned w social skills and generalization innate structures of *learning* based on frequency etc have tools to construct based on input given to us verb islands -- verb is crucial component of lang start small w verb island and build all necessary information nature vs nurture utterance composed of compounds of common phrases full syntax w embedded sentence not there when you hear child say see daddy wave bye bye children can extract/interpolate underlying meaning later, start with data innateness -- start w underlying structure, data informs later
Usage-Based/Emergentist Theories
initially uses subset of possible human sounds (not restricted to native language); by 8-10 months, modulated by linguistic experience (infants' production mirrors statistical tendencies of native language: vowel quality, segment frequency, syllable type) not associated with meaning Reduplicated or variegated Manual babbling: very similar features Language capacity: amodal, or flexible enough to allow reorganization to a different means of expression, not originally selected for it?
Vocal babbling - syllabic organization
corrections (rare and ineffective) more subtle parental reactions - not understanding, looking disappointed, rephrasing the ungrammatical sentence grammatically
examples of negative evidence
1 Languages are very complex. 2 Languages differ (something has to be learned). 3 Children get insufficient and variable evidence to deduce the uniform rules of grammar they end up with (poverty of the stimulus) 4 Children end up having adult-like grammars relatively quickly. The proposed solution to the apparent paradox is to suppose that to a large extent all human languages are the same. The grammatical systems obey the same principles in all human languages. different levers turned on and off Languages differ, but only in highly limited ways. This reduces the task for the child immensely—all that the kid needs to do is to determine from the input which setting each of the parameters needs to have for the language in his/her environment.
learnability paradox and the principles and parameters model
problems: 1 Children treat verbs differently depending on their grammatical status (over-regularization occurs with main verbs, but not auxiliaries in the case of DO or HAVE) 2 The patterns of over-regularization are different for children as opposed to connectionist models (e.g. more over-regularization of vowel-change verbs, sing-singed) - patterns of over-regularization in real children differ from lab models, maybe models don't imitate reality well 3 Connectionist models cease over-regularization only after abrupt change in training input, for children there is no change in input 4 Linguistic constraints (abstract aspects of linguistic knowledge) 5 Ambiguity (I shot an elephant in my pajamas. Whose pajamas did you shoot an elephant in?) 6 Degenerate/incomplete input (Creole languages: children expand on rudimentary linguistic input) mb more to story than wgts btwn input and output
problems with connectionist models (association theory)
children learn gradually children's production is variable children use rules/grammars/etc. they've never heard children learn rules at different speeds more evidence = faster less evidence = slower
properties of language learning by unlearning
One hypothesis suggests that parents actually help kids along (though not consciously). It's well known that people seem to instinctively talk to little kids in kind of a weird way; exaggerated intonation, simpler words, more repetition. "Baby talk" or as it is sometimes known, "Parentese", "Motherese". This simpler, more carefully articulated, speech might guide kids along the path of language acquisition. Common assumption: the way parents speak to their children is crucial Problems: not clear why this would help learning past a certain stage (but positive effects were noticed for the very early stages of language acquisition) Other cultures don't use baby talk; e.g. Kaluli (Papua New Guinea), Mohawk (North America), Inuit (North America) Does "Motherese" drive acquisition? Initially tempting, perhaps, but no. If "Motherese" were crucial for acquisition, it must be available to all language acquirers, universally. Does "Motherese" drive acquisition? If you give a 4-month old the choice of whether to listen to "Motherese" or to normal adult-directed speech, the kid will choose to listen to "Motherese"... ...so it is quite likely that "Motherese" is a significant part of the language acquisition experience of many kids, but it can't be necessary for successful language acquisition.
reinforcement theory and problems
Parents respond differently (CHILDES corpus) Eve and Sarah's parents ask clarification questions after ill-formed wh-questions. Adam's parents ask clarification after well-formed wh-questions and after past tense errors. Are kids able to figure out what correlates with grammaticality in their situation? And if so, how? Piedmont Carolinas: Heath (1983): Trackton adults do not see babies or young children as suitable partners for regular conversation...Unless they wish to issue a warning, give a command, provide a recommendation, or engage the child in a teasing exchange, adults rarely address speech specifically to young children. Linguistic input (environment, type and number of speakers available to interact with the child, time spent talking to child, number of languages in environment) varies greatly Nevertheless, all children attain the same competence in a limited amount of time (by age 4)
varying circumstances in language acquisition
Syllabic/Vocalic nucleus: universal unit of representation of speech The vowel: universal unit used by infants to organize speech. Experimental evidence: - 4-day old French babies detect change from bisyllabic to trisyllabic (but not change in number of phonemes) - 4-day old French babies detect change from bisyllabic to trisyllabic items in Japanese, but not change from bimoraic to trimoraic - Newborns did not detect new consonants, but they did detect new vowels after habituation with a given set of stimuli (Bertoncini et al. 1988)
what is the universal unit used by infants to organize speech and how do we know