Lecture 3 - Language
• Doherty-Sneddon (2008) The Great Baby Signing Debate
o 'baby-singing' is an augmentative communication approach that teaches babies keyword signing that they can use to communicate before they can talk o Acredolo (1999) infants taught to sign reap rewards like: larger expressive and receptive spoken language vocabularies; I more advanced mental development; I a reduction in problematic behaviours like tantrums resulting from frustration; and I improved parent-child relationships.
• Tomasello (1996) Differential Productivity in Young Children's Use of Nouns and Verbs
o Children combined novel nouns productively with already known words much often than they did the novel verbs o Several children pluralised a newly learned noun, none formed a past tense with a newly learnt verb o Thus, asymmetry in early use of nouns and verbs
• McDonough (2011) An Image is Worth a Thousand Words: Why Nouns Tend to Dominate Verbs in Early Word Learning
o Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (Bornstein, 2005) but verbs still appear in children's earliest vocabularies o The advantage nouns have may be related to a word's imageability, not a function of grammatical form class o A word's imageability contributes to the variance of the word's age of acquisition above form class, suggesting that at the beginning of word learning, imageability might be a driving factor in word learning
• Tomasello (1999) Do Young Children have Adult Syntactic Competence?
o Young children use adult-like grammar o Most of children's early linguistic competence is item based, and therefore their language development proceeds in a piecemeal fashion with virtually no evidence of any system-wide syntactic categories, schemas, or parameters.
multi-word speech
• 18 months 2-word utterances o Combine single words into two-word sentences o Telegraphic speech = speech in which the highly condensed meaning is transmitted from the child to another person, e.g. 'Ben shoe' means 'That is Ben's shoe' or 'Put on my shoe' o Importance of scaffolding in facilitating children's syntax development o Nelson (1973) importance of adult's expansion (putting a child's incomplete sentence in complete form) and recasting (= keeping the topic the same but giving the child a new way of talking about it) e.g. Child's incomplete sentence 'doggy eat' Adult expansion 'doggy is eating' Adult recasting 'what is doggy eating?' Children's whose utterances were recast used more complex grammatical forms in their spontaneous speech than those whose sentences were simply expanded The experience recasting and hearing complex questions and verbs pointed the child's attention to a more complex form that was still close to the child's existing language use but made immediate sense to the child • Tomasello (2000) most of children's early language is 'grammatical' from the adult point of view o Children learn to use specific linguistic items and structures (i.e. specific words and phrases) in way that adults use them • Ingram (1999) proposes that children begin to use properties of phonological organization that are part of those that underlie the adult language, though in a less complex form o Children's phonological systems develop parallel to adult languages • 24-27 months 3-4-word utterances o Start to see evidence of grammatical rules o E.g. logical errors: "mouses" instead of "mice", yet they've learnt plural rules of adding 's' o Prepositions ('in', 'on', 'above') and irregular verb endings appear (e.g. 'written', 'fought') o Re-order words of a sentence to make wh-questions and negative statements (e.g. 'not shut door') o Idiosyncratic words are common e.g. calling a chocolate biscuit a 'choskit', a word invented by themselves • By 3yrs. speech understandable to even unfamiliar adults o Vocabulary ~ 1,000 words o Complex sentences with relative clauses o Can carry on reasonable conversations but still rooted in present tense o E.g. My sister, who has four cats, is more of a crazy cat-lady than I am o Still perfecting some linguistic systems like pronouns, auxiliary verbs ('I am dancing'), passive verbs ('the door was opened) and irregular verbs ('he thought' or 'I knew') • By 5 yrs language similar to that of adult o Still perfecting some tenses and constructions o E.g. passive tense (the food is eaten by the cat); conditional tense (if Bess makes one more reference to cats, her students will be annoyed)
cognitive-functional linguistics
• A child's competence in language consists of their mastery of its various linguistic symbols and constructions, each of which has one or more linguistic forms (signifier) each with a communicative function (signified) o E.g. Chomskian theory would interpret phrase 'allgone sticky' as evidence the child has an abstract category of nominal (naming word or 'noun', 'sticky' being defined as a noun) o Cognitive-functional interpretation would be that young children's capacity to generate novel utterances is still quite limited • Tomasello's verb island hypothesis suggests that children's early language is structured around individual verbs i.e. it is specific to each particular verb rather than an abstract construct o Children around 2 develop their repertoire of verbs to apply to specific scenes in their everyday life, only after they'd heard them in specific adult discourse • No universal, innate grammar • Acquire language gradually, beginning with concrete linguistic structures based on words and morphemes, building up to more abstract structures based on linguistic schemas o Gradual building up of grammatical structures • Children's early one-word utterances have semantic and pragmatic dimensions e.g. 'Da!' meaning 'That is a dog!', but at this stage they're only able to communicate in a condensed, 'telegraphic' way without detailing the scene or marking the various participant roles of the other people involved in the conversation • By 18 months, children begin to combine words, initially to talk in more detail about the same kinds of scenes as they did through their holophrases • Tomasello (2000) before the age of 3, children do not possess the abstract structures that would enable them to generate verb combinations they've not actually heard • Children move through specific steps in their language development: holophrases, word combinations, verb island combinations and adult-like construction • They have constructed some kind of schema/ category based on the specific utterances they've heard from adult speakers, but children are creative their language in different ways at different development points o When given novel object labels 'Look! A wug!', 18-mont-old children were able to use the new label in combination with words they already knew (e.g. 'wug gone') o At the same age, they had difficult in being creative in their use of verbs • Syntax develops out of experience and social interaction o No 'general category of verb', but rather specific on a verb-by-verb basis can't generate verb combinations haven't already heard (Tomasello, 2000) o Verbs are difficult for infants to learn, learn on a 'verb-by-verb' basis o Adult discourse and feedback is key for infant's verb learning
role of adult feedback
• Adult-child speech distinctively different than adult-adult speech o A-C higher in pitch, greater range of pitch, simpler meaning o More nouns, concrete words o Adjusts to cognitive level of child o Babies prefer A-C speech o Used to be called motherease • Scaffolding meaning • Expansion and re-casting (Nelson et al, 1987) o Better at sentence imitation, and used more complex grammar • SES has a large impact on language development o Because of limited resources and time so children hear less words as are read to less o Language processing and vocabulary lower in lower SES children (Fernald et al. 2012) o Children in the top SES 60% higher scores than those in the lowest quintile (Lee and Burkman, 2002) • Why? o Lower SES children hear fewer words per hour than in higher SES? (Hart and Risley, 1995) o Lower SES caregivers talk to child less, use less complex sentences, read to them less • Vocabulary at age 3 predicts language competence at 9 and 10
shared rhythms
• Babies pass on vital information about their needs to parents through different patterns of crying • From 1 month, babies produce the vowel 'ooo', a sound that grows out of pleasurable social interactions • This is the period of 'shared rhythms and regulations' (Kaye, 1982) where parents build upon the biological rhythms of the baby to develop a mutual 'dialogue' that forms the basis for the communication patterns that characterize the adult worlds • Stern (1990) when adults interact with infants there is close proximity, an emphasis on exaggerated facial expressions, much repetition and more eye contact o These exchanges are rhythmic and both partners contribute to the rhythm • Stern (1990) attempted to recreate the world of baby Joey from 6 weeks by describing the events from an adult's perspective and the infant's point of view o Exchanges between the parent and Joey involve a communication of effect: during the pre-linguistic stage, mother and child show a sensitive attunement to each other's emotional state o 'gaze-coupling' in which caregiver and baby appear to take different roles in their 'dialogue' may anticipate later turn-taking and speaker-listener roles that are at the heart of conversation
nativist theories
• Born with basic language production/ comprehension capacity • Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device (LAD) o Humans have an innate LAD that without, language couldn't develop o LAD 'perceives' regularities in the utterances the child hears o LAD generates hypotheses about these regularities (e.g. the plural is formed by adding -s to the noun), these are then tested against new utterances and come to be rejected or accepted as appropriate o LAD can acquire any language and, faced with utterances of a particular language, develops a grammar • Human languages have universal features and language occurs in all human cultures o Phonology - every language has consonants, vowels and syllabic structure o Syntax - all languages have sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases and grammatical structure underling them • Must distinguish between the surface structure of the language and its deep structure between the arrangement of words in the utterance and the logical, grammatical relationships among the elements in that utterance o Two are connected by the transformational rules of grammar o Different languages use different transformational rules, but the universal features are to be found in deep structure o Surface structure (ordering of the words in a sentence) can vary but still reflect the same deep structure (underlying meaning) e.g. 'the dog bit the man' and 'the man was bitten by the dog' • Innate knowledge of basic grammar rules • LAD perceives regularities in heard utterances o LAD generates hypotheses about regularities o Hypotheses are tested against new utterances • Generative grammar = the application of rules generates actual sentences • In criticism of language being purely innate, Chomsky added Principles and parameters theory (PPT) = processes which the child must pass in order to achieve grammatical utterances o Humans still have an innate capacity for language, but puts more emphasis on the psychological processes of learning different kinds of grammatical structures
support for LAD
• Children learn quickly, and learning governed by rules o Sequence of language acquisition is similar • Brown and Fraser (1963) studying telegraphic speech in children concluded that utterances could be classified as grammatical sentences from which certain words had been omitted o E.g. 'mummy hair' only omitted the possessive inflection 'mummy's hair' • Systematic mistakes (logical errors) o Brown and Bellugi (1964) analyzed the early speech of two children and noted the overgeneralization of inflections e.g. the use of -s to form plurals was observed as 'knifes' and 'tooths', the use of -ed to form past tense was observed as 'comed', 'doed' o The child's innate propensity to use rules leads to 'errors' from which the linguist can infer the grammar being used o The incorrect grammatical constructions didn't come from adult models; it seemed the children had produced them themselves on the basis of simple grammatical 'hypotheses' o There's a hardwired understanding of these deep structures • Correct order early on, even though it was not in direct imitation of the order of adult langyafe o E.g. "me want that coat"; NOT: "want that coat me", but an adult would say 'I want that coat' (McNeill, 1966)
Genie
• Extreme deprivation: 20 months - 13 years restrained, alone in room o No one spoke to her, and she was beaten for making any attempt at communication • Recovery: First few months started recognizing words o Then 1 and 2-word utterances, few multi-word • Deficits o Never learned to use pronouns o Never mastered questions o Never developed complex sentences o Relied more on gestures • Suggests a critical period of language development
support for cognitive theories
• First words about familiar objects and activities o Usually dynamic objects child can hold, that are in the child's environment • First words appear around same time as object permanence o Also around time symbolic play emerges • Words about present emerge before words about future and past o Appear around the time children understand time concepts o 4-5-year-old children are poor at imaging future scenarios: live in the present • But: effect of social environment is ignored, leading to cognitive-functional linguistics o E.g. effect of scaffolding
first words
• First words ~ 9-12 months o First words can be considered words and not sounds if the child uses them consistently as labels e.g. 'oof' whenever seeing an animal o "holophrases" units that condense meaning where one word can be interpreted as expressing a whole idea e.g. "up" meaning "pick me up" • 3-4 months later: Word explosion! o Roughly 20 words at 18m to 200 words at 21m o Mainly nouns - labels of objects, people o Some action, state, function words • Combinations of gesture + word around 10 months o Hand gestures and spoken language are linked in evolutionary terms i.e. babies can be taught to sign their intentions to their parents or make combinations of first words and gestures to form two-item strings o E.g. give + point to a cup = 'give cup' o Comes before word + word o Gesture + gesture -> baby signing o Nursery's now teach babies sign language, tends to lead to infants speaking sooner: allows caregivers to be more intuitive to the baby's communication which in turn, develops their communication
sequence of language development: production
• From 1-2 months: cooing and laughing • Canonical Babbling - 6-10 months o Include more vowels and consonants o Combine these in ways that start to sound like words o Echolalia = frequent repetition of sounds e.g. dadadad o Scream for attention or out of anger but spends most time making noises when alone o Specific gestures/ sounds and facial expression reserved for primary caregiver or other familiar individuals o Shared memory (Kaye, 1984) = capacity of the infant to share the adult's intentions based on the attributions of intentionality on the part of the adult in the baby's utterances o Fogel (2007) alive communication = each expression and gesture is new and meaningful e.g. a tickling game forming intimacy and a dynamic process o Fogel (1993) identified complex micro-intentions during the communication process between adult and child Process of co-regulation is a form of ongoing elaboration of actions and intentions in response to the other's actions • Modulated babbling - 10+ months o Add stress and intonation patterns o Overlaps with meaningful speech period
sequence of language development: speech perception
• Great similarities in all human societies for the sequence of language development: o Children progressively master the rules of sound (phonology), of meaning (semantics) and of grammar (syntax), and learn to combine words in ways that are acceptable and understandable (pragmatics) within their linguistic community • Before birth o Fetal reactions to sounds from 20 weeks (Shahidullah & Hepper, 1993) o Distinguish between male & female voices near term Prefer female voices o Measured by perceived movement, ultrasound, or changes in heart rate o Preference for "uterine" version of mother's voice after birth What the mother's voice sounds like from inside the womb o Environmental exposure before birth • Neonates: o Prefer speech over nonspeech (Vouloumanos & Werker, 2007) o Prefer native language (Moon et al. 1993) o Prefer sounds produced by mother (De Casper & Fifer, 1980) o Discriminate word types (content versus function) (Shi et al., 1999) • Tested with HAS procedure o Condition the infant to suck on a dummy that measures sucking rate
how do children acquire language?
• How do children acquire word meaning? Two example models: o Barrett's multi-route model o Gleitman's syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis • General theories of language development
What is language?
• Language = "a code in which spoken sound is used in order to encode meaning" (Barrett, 1999, p.1) • Tomasello (2000) To become a competent speaker must be: o Conventional - to use language the way other people use it and follow sets of rules to understand each other o Creative - to formulate novel utterances tailored to exigencies of particular communicative circumstances • Limitless i.e. say a sentence no-one has ever said before • What makes human language different? • Many communication systems across diverse species (e.g. bees, lions, dolphins) • None possess all of the characteristics found in human language
theories of language development
• Nativist Theories o Chomsky's "Innate Language Acquisition Device" (LAD) • Constructivist or Cognitive theories o Piaget and the "Cognition-hypothesis" • Cognitive-Functional Linguistics
support for cognitive-functional
• Observational and experimental studies o Early vocabularies include more nouns (enduring entities vs relational concepts) o Toddlers find creative use of verbs difficult, but not nouns • E.g. Tomasello et al 1997: tested children's capacity to make word combinations with new nouns and verbs o Taught 4 novel "verbs" and "nouns" with no context clues o 18-23 m children could produce plurals of nouns ("tams") o Could not produce past tense of verbs ("gopped") o Children of this age have pivot grammar on which children can 'hang' new nouns as they're learnt o They've learnt that a noun could be a subject ('the wug is kissing') and an object ('kissing the wug') o They had a construct of the order patterns characteristic of subject (the wug as kisser) going before the object (the wug as one being kissed) and could form plurals o Could not do the same for verbs thus, children between 18 and 24 months don't have a general schema of subject-verb-object
how do we test proposals?
• Observational studies of spontaneous speech o Look for particular patterns or structures ("sheeps") • Artificial, made-up language in experiments: o Look! Cookie Monster is "gorping" Big Bird o Look! Cookie Monster and Big Bird are "gorping" o Choose the video that corresponds to each sentence based on inferences of what the made-up word means o Measure looking times at 2 different videos o Children look longer at appropriate video
pragmatics
• Pan and Snow (1999) the ability to engage in extended discourse (a pragmatic skill where the child needs to combine their perspective with those of others and with outside events into a coherent account) emerges over time out of regular participation in conversation with peers and adults • Taking account of one's own and others' perspective o Children learn to make appropriate use of linguistic indicators to show they're aware of the listener's perspective o E.g. manipulating words like 'this' to 'that' or 'I' and 'you' to differentiate the speaker's from listener's stance • Adjust to different contexts that we're speaking in o Differences in communication to different listeners as young as 2 years o E.g. informal or formal; differences in speaking to friends or teachers o E.g. adjust language to speak to younger sibling • Take account of listener's perspective around 4-5 years o Distinguish what they know as speakers and what the listener may no know e.g. contextualising information or putting the listener into the picture ('Isabel - she's a girl in my class') o Coincides with the development of theory of mind - inferring other's mental states • Master convention of different genres around 3 years o E.g. "Once upon a time" = telling a story o By 3-4 years, move easily between reality and fantasy through appropriate use of gaze, gesture, tone of voice, position and posture o They can speculate hypothetically, using words like 'might' or 'if', about events that haven't yet taken place in their experience o Bruner (1990) we learn about the physical world by devising paragism that are logical and rule-bound, whereas we come to understand the cultural world in a more personal, dynamic way e.g. by telling stories
main areas of language
• Phonology = study of the system that governs particular sounds (phonemes) to convey meaning o "phonemes" = meaningless sound segments o E.g. in English, "l" and "r" are separate phonemes o Investigates the ways in which phonemes are combined into syllables, morphemes and words • Semantics = meanings encoded in language o Phonemes are combined to form morphemes o System of meaning - "morphemes" (smallest units of meanings) o They may be whole words or grammatical markers, e.g. '-ed' at the end of a verb to make it past tense o E.g. phonemes "d" + "o" + "g" forms the morphemes 'dog' o Child learns that morphemes, words and longer utterances • Syntax = form by which words/phrases are arranged to make grammatical sentences o The sequencing of the words conveys meaning e.g. Jane hit Sue vs. Sue hit Jane o Grammar = study of the rules that determine sequences of morphemes and words in any language o Grammatical rules determine how words and morphemes in language are combined and to produce meaningful sentences • Pragmatics = Knowledge about how to use language in different contexts or genres o E.g. a toddler shouting 'That man's greedy!' in a restaurant shows understanding of phonology, syntax and semantics but lacks sensitivity to others
constructivist/ cognitive theories
• Piaget - Cognitive and language development are interdependent • Language development reflects stages of cognitive development o Cognitive abilities enable understanding and use of language o Rules come from wider cognitive system not LAD o Focuses on precursors of early language e.g. gestures, facial expressions, actions • Similarities in language driven by similarities in experience and development • Cognitive hypothesis (Cromer, 1974) o We understand and use particular linguistic structures only when our cognitive abilities enable us to do so e.g. can gesture to an apple before using the holophrase 'apple' o Even once our cognitive abilities allow us to grasp an idea, we may say it in a less complex way because we have not yet acquired the grammatical rule for expressing it freely e.g. 'Did you look yet?' instead of 'Have you looked?' • Children form schemas to explain events in their lives and only then talk about them
Gleitman's (1990) Syntactic Boot-Strapping Hypothesis
• Syntactic boot-strapping = children's ability to infer meaning of words from cues • Young children use grammatical information from the structure of sentences to infer meanings of unfamiliar target words, thus improving their own performance by their own strenuous efforts • Syntax helps the young child to learn e.g. when the sentence structure around a new verb provides clues about its meaning • Sensitive to syntactic and semantic correspondences from early age o E.g. in one study, 27-month-old children were shown two videos o In one, Big Bird and Cookie Monster rotated next to each other, in the other, Big Bird rotated Cookie Monster o Children heard sentences, each using a novel verb: 'Big Bird is gorping with Cookie Montser' and 'Big Bird is gorping Monster Cookie' o First verb is intransitive (it has a subject but no object) and second verb is transitive (Big Bird is the subject and Cookie Monster is the object of the verb) o When hearing the intransitive verb form, children were more likely to look at the video with two puppets performing the same action o When hearing the transitive verb form, children looked at the video of Big Bird performing an action of Cookie Monster o Thus, young children bring the verb's meaning into alignment with the syntax and not the other way around • Extract meanings of new words from syntactic clues o Number of "noun phrase" arguments or participants o Mary kicked the ball (transitive: subject + object) o Tom is sleeping (intransitive: subject, no object)
Barrett's (1986) Multi-Route Model
• Takes account of the interactions observed among the timing of acquisition, the child's linguistic experience and the cognitive representational abilities • 2 classes of early words: context-bound and referential words • Referential words = used in variety of different behavioural contexts o "more" - request more food and "more" - request repetition of actions o Mapped on to mental representations of objects names or actions names • Context-bound words = used only in a specific behavioural context o E.g. says 'duck' when hitting a toy duck off the edge of the bath; duck is only used in this context o "duck" - hit duck off edge of the bath is extended to 'I hit the duck', 'the duck hit the floor' o Mapped onto holistic event representations (= child's global construction of the event) o Gradually analyzed into their constituent components (people, objects, actions, relations...) so the child eventually learns to sort them into logical categories • Agrees that maternal input has a critical role in helping the child establish the initial uses for words but argues that children also rely on their own cognitive processing to establish subsequent use of words • While the initial focus is on external stimuli, later children focus more on their own inner representations to form theories about the linguistic system
summary
• Theoretical debate: o Language is innate, built into the brain vs. o Language is learned using similar processes as other cognitive skills o Language development is largely affected by the social context and exposure to skilled models o ^ all these likely play a role • Universal similarities in structure of all languages o Children acquire language quickly o Follow similar developmental trajectory • Emergence of certain words around the same time as other key cognitive abilities • Impact of early environment on later language use and comprehension
how do children acquire word meaning?
• Word learning biases o Whole object constraint - Words refer to whole object rather than parts of object • Shape bias o Generalise to other objects that are the same shape, rather than other attributes (texture, colour, material etc) o Aids early noun learning
