Normal Language Development Exam 3
26. What is discourse? What features are important to successful discourse?
- sequences of connected speech, conversations, and narratives - language in units larger than a sentence, and discourse skill is the abili 4 rules of effective discourse - 1. quantity - amount 2. quality - accurate 3. relation - relevant 4. manner: clear, brief, orderly, unambiguous
29. What are the two basic findings about how communication and intention interact in young children? About how many pre-linguistic communications do children have before they have the language to express those communications?
2 basic findings 1. kids have a range of communicate intentions before the language to express them. 2. These develop quickly over the first few years There are 8-9 different communications in prelinguistic
Abstract syntax vs. Semantic syntax
ABSTRACT SYNTAX: - one set of rules about nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, etc. - basically what we learned in grammar school - most theories think this is what adults use SEMANTIC SYNTAX: - many rules to create sentences - many theories: this is what kids use
6. What's the difference between prescriptive and descriptive rules? Give examples of sentences that are descriptively correct but prescriptively wrong. Which one do linguists study and why?
DESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGE (the grammar used to communicate in one's environment) is more important than PRESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGE (grammar class, academic language) Me and him ain't never been there - if it is in your surroundings, this is ok if it is following those rules. Linguists study Descriptive language we are more concerned with the acquisition of the descriptive rules that DISALLOW "mall the to went me Tiffany and", not the prescriptive rules that deem "me and Tiffany went to the mall" "bad grammar"
8. What are "transitional forms"? What is the importance of transitional forms for syntactic development. List and define the 3 we talked about in class. Give examples of each of these.
Development of syntax production starts after the one word phase. TRANSITIONAL FORMS: not quite multiword; blur the distinction between the one-word and the two-word stages of language production. some children utter 2 single-word utterances that seem to be related like a two-word utterance (but they are not—each have intonation as if said by itself. they are even transcribed on a new line because they are considered a new utterance, whereas a two-word utterance would be transcribed all on the same line) 3 kinds of transitional forms 1. Vertical constructions - a single-word utterance that builds on someone else's (or their own) previous utterance and seem to be related i.e. "ow" "eye" for an eye infection. There is a pause between each word word and each has intonation of an isolated word. 2. Unanalyzed combinations - Chunk together words to have one meaning i.e. "Idunno" "elemeno" not 3 words with distinct meanings "I don't know" or 4 " L M N O" 3. word+jargon combos - "mumble mumble mumble cookie?" for "can I please have a cookie?" communicating that they want a cooking by following the intonation of a sentence and using jargon and the word "cookie" at the end, but no other words.
*semantically based syntax
I have a particular meaning to get across and it requires a set of rules a different meaning = a different set of rules. examples: MEANING: someone did something to someone/something RULE: agent + action + recipient sentences: John ate the sandwich NOT Psychology is a science MEANING: describing someone or something RULE: Object + IS + descriptive Sam is Smart MEANING: someone performed an action (not to an object) RULE: Agent + intransitive action He ran The dog barked
13. In what way does the use of declaratives, imperatives and questions shift during early development?
Imperatives (commands) - gimme juice! declaratives (Statements): - I like juice Questions: got juice? imperatives are most frequent at first, declaratives become the most frequent by 30 months, questions are ALWAYS the least frequent, but they become more frequent at children get older.* *English require auxiliary verbs to form questions or negative sentences, and auxiliaries are relatively late acquisitions.
linguistic competence vs. communication competence
LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE - produce and understand well formed meaningful sentences (being able to use language) vs. using language appropriately
7. How is productive syntactic development normally studied? What does MLU stand for? What does MLU reflect? What is it used for? What advantages does it have over counting words? Create an example with an MLU of 4 but a word count of 2.
Most research on children's production is done through diaries and transcripts. Mean Length Utterance (MLU) - by word - by morpheme Length in morphemes is a good index of the grammatical complexity of an utterance, and children tend to follow similar courses of development in adding complexity to their utterances, so the average length of children's utterances in morphemes is used to measure children's syntactic development. "she walk two dog" vs "she walked two dogs" the second sentence is more advanced: 4 words but 6 morphemes. - MLU by morpheme = more predictive of grammatical ability than age or words.
14. Describe the developmental patterns found in expressing negation and in asking questions. What is difficult about passive forms for children? How do yes/no and Wh- questions differ? What makes yes/no questions easier?
NEGATION negatives need auxiliaries (I did not, I should not) developmental progression of negation: 1. shake head with positive statement (Gesture) 2. marker before a positive, then embedded - "no you go" —> "you no go" 3. single morpheme constructions - can't and don't before can and do - don't is used as a single meaning not "do" and "not" 4. last step: full meaning: I do NOT want that" as children acquire auxiliaries, their negative expressions take adult form. QUESTIONS also effected by late acquisition of auxiliaries two types: yes/no & wh- 1. yes/no - can be answered with yes or no - first one's are only marked by intonation - creation: mommy is scared —> is mommy scared - yes/no questions are easier because you don't need to invert the subject/auxiliary 2. wh- - begin with who, what, when, where, why, and how - at early stage, are affirmative statements marked by wh- word at the beginning i.e. "what that is?" - at this stage, wh- questions are still not adult like because children do not invert the subject and auxiliary i.e. "what a doctor can do?" once they are inverted, wh- questions are in adult form. PASSIVES - the plate was broken, the tree was hit - between 3.5 - 5 yrs - rare even in speech among adults - i.e. "my cat got run over by the bus" (get passives tend to be used to describe something negative) " It can be put on your foot" (be passives tend to be about inanimate things) COMPLEX SENTENCES (included in passive) - contain more than one clause - I.e. I want this bike because it's red - between 2 and 4: after 4 word stage
24. How do overgeneralizations and negative evidence relate to children's grammar acquisition? What is the difference between asking if grammar CAN be innate compared to if it is necessary? What is the evidence for and against innate syntax?
OVERREGULARIZATIONS - making an irregular part of language regular. - even if they have already correctly produced a word once, they may revert to the pattern anyway. - "goed" instead of "went" - "footses"instead of "feet" OVERGENERALIZATIONS - - using verbs with arguments that are not allowed in word combinations they clearly did not hear. "I said her no" "shall I whisper you something?" these errors in production disappear as time goes on, and just how those errors disappear is an area of active study YES innate grammar is necessary, because: 1. poverty of stimulus: the input that kids get is too limited and quality is too poor (complicated)
28. What is pragmatic knowledge? What is pragmatic development? Describe and provide examples of the three phases of intentional communication. Describe how protoimparatives and protodeclaratives fit in. At about what age would you expect to see these behaviors?
PRAGMATIC KNOWLEDGE - communicative functions of language and conventions that govern its use. PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT - the development of the use of language to serve communicative functions 3 phases of intentional communication: 1. prelocutionary (birth - 10months): no intention of communicating, no effects i.e. crying, fussing, reaching. even if the child ends up getting what they want, there was no intention to communicate with the mother. 2. Illocutionary (10 months): intentions without language, the child is aware that behavior can = communication i.e. joint attention a. protoimperatives (commands) - using an adults to obtain something b. protodeclaratives - use objects to direct adults' attention, satisfied when the adult acknowledges it. 3. Locution: (12 months) - using language to communicate their intentions (not necessarily a word, can be a sound that always goes with pointing like "mm"
23. Describe the principles and parameters theory and the constuctionist theory of grammar? How are these different?
PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS THEORY -most famous argument for generative approach (nativist/Chomsky) -children's innate UG consists of a set of principles true of all languages and a set of parameters that define the range of possible differences among languages. CONSTRUCTIONIST THEORY OF GRAMMAR - children build grammatical knowledge from their experience. -different kinds focus on different kinds of experience: - statistical learning - regularities of the language - social properties of comm. interaction How they differ:
19. What are the arguments for children having abstract grammar? Productivity in grammar?
PRODUCTIVITY - apply grammatical rules to new words and situations EVIDENCE: a. overregularization: goed, feets, etc. b. Applying rules to completely new sentences: example: I have one bug, now I have two ___________. (correct by age 2) study of diary of 8 kids have found that children probably do have a productive system, and are able to use lexically based formulas to produce sentences (or do children just repeat what they hear?) Wug test: proof that children have productive knowledge: 4 y/o knew that plural of wug was wugs and pastense of of blick was blicked syntactic productivity: 4 y/o told "the pig is pilking the horse" can later say "the horse is being pilked by the pig" DEBATE: Tomasello said children don't use verbs in a productive way, but Naigles (2009) said they do (the diary of 8 kids)
9. Two-word speech normally follows a standard pattern for children learning English. What are some of the common features of this two-word speech? Make sure you fully understand what these mean and how you know that children have these features in their production.
PRODUCTIVITY - not just a repetition i.e. "mommy sit" —> "Dolly sit" —> "dolly eat" - not in random order i.e. "wash teddy" means something different than "teddy wash" and word order matters in meaning RELATIONAL MEANING - the order of words provides meaning beyond the words themselves - Owner + object - Daddy shoe, mama hat its not just the definition of daddy and shoe, its how the shoe relates to daddy, in this case, the relational meaning is possession.
1. What is meant by the productivity or generativity of language? What is syntax how does it differ from semantics?
Productivity/generativity of language - speakers and hearers have the capacity to produce and understand an infinite number of novel sentences. syntax - gives us the power of language. the component of grammar that governs the ordering of words in sentences. g i.e. "John kissed Mary" means something different than "Mary kissed John". rules of syntax: sentence —> agent of action + action + recipient of action. syntax is the order, semantics is the meaning. morphology - a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has meaning (bound morpheme cannot stand alone i.e. -s, -ed) inflectional morpheme do not change to meaning of the word (cat —> cats = just more cats) derivational morphemes (the er in dancer or runner, ish in pinkish or smallish) which actually forms a new word grammar= syntax +morphology
27. What is sociolinguistics? What is language socialization? Define and give examples of different registers.
SOCIOLINGUISTICS - - concerns how language use varies as a function of sociological variables such as status, culture, and gender. i.e. the way students can be different in different situations and with different people. - how language varies in relation to social situations, cultures, gender, etc. - REGISTERS - different speech styles of one person ( something children must accomplish in acquiring communicative competence) - i.e. using a different voice with your boss than you would with your parents, and a different one for your friends. LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION - the process of learning to use language in a manner consistent with the norms of your social group
11. What is telegraphic speech? At what age is it commonly used? What features are lacking? What are possible reasons for dropping grammatical morphemes?
TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH - contains the bare minimum of content words and drops everything else. missing GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES - carry less meaning than do the nouns and verbs in the utterance. what's missing: articles (the), verb endings (-ing), prepositions (of), etc.... reasons for telegraphic speech: 1. don't realize that you need them? NO: at 18months, notice when incorrect in others 2. not stressed by adults i.e. adults put emphasis on "I WANT a COOKIE" 3. not needed for meaning-they are able to communicate without articles, etc. 4. memory load - too much to learn at once
12. How do grammatical morphemes develop in terms of RATE and ORDER? What differences are found cross-linguistically in morphological development?
The order is SIMILAR across children but rate DIFFERS Children differ in their RATE of syntactic development - i.e. some start 2 word utterance before 18 months while others don't until after 24 months children differ in their STYLE of acquisition - holistic (use chunking) vs Analytic - "thank you you're welcome" "bye bye see you tomorrow" 1. the 1st grammatical morphemes typically appear with the first three-word utterances, but most grammatical morphemes are not reliably used until more than a year later when children are speaking in long complex sentences (for the first year, used in some words and not others). 2. different morphemes appear at different times ( a long period of time passes between when a morpheme is used for the first time and the time when it is reliably used in the right contexts) 3. the order in which the 14 different morphemes are acquired is very similar across children, even though rates of development are quite different.
10. What is relational meaning? What are the advances that are made to transition between 2 and 3 word phrases?
The relation between the referents of the words in a word combination. when children start to put three words together, many of the meanings expressed are combinations of the relational meanings in two-word combinations actions: "mommy go" + "go bye-bye" —> "mommy go bye-bye" 2 characteristics of early word multisentences: 1. early sentences tend to be imperatives and affirmative, declaratives statements, as opposed to negations or questions 2. certain types of words and bound morphemes consistently missing TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH - contains the bare minimum of content words and drops everything else. missing GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES - carry less meaning than do the nouns and verbs in the utterance. what's missing: articles (the), verb endings (-ing), prepositions (of), etc....
2. How would an abstract syntactic representation of grammar differ from a semantic (lexical) representation? How would each of these differ from a sentence by sentence representation? Give examples of the types of grammatical rules that would be associated with each.
abstract syntax - a set of rules for how word classes (noun, verb prepositions, etc) go together to create sentences. - these rules related to word classes, not individual words. spectrum: on one end, abstract: the category of words on the other end: each sentence is a rule (doesn't make sense for human language, but how birds communicate i.e. one song for mating, another for get away from the nest, etc.)
16. How does comprehension of syntax compare with production? What are comprehension strategies? List and describe the 3 we discussed on class and give examples of each.
children don't fully understand but can appear to. comprehension of syntax is not as continuous as the picture that emerges from studies of production hard to track and test what children understand and precedes production preference for normal word order at 12 months The dog ran to the cat vs the cat ran to the dog - even when prosody was removed, the preferred the first English infants noticed word order in English, but not in Spanish and vice versa. 3 comprehension strategies 1. response strategies - respond with an action based on KEY WORDS that they know, not understanding syntax. - i..e. "where are your shoes" the child should probably get their shoes - they don't fully understand the sentence (getting a diaper example. the child only understood the word diaper and only knew one thing to do with a diaper) 2. word order - 12-14 months prefer to listen to normal word order vs scrambled - show sensitivity to meaning carried by word order by the age of 16 months - i.e. Anne hit Jim. - first person=agent Jim was hit by Anne = a problem -order of mention strategies - We will go to the playground and then to the store. 3. world knowledge - using common sense to determine meaning - i.e. put your shoes on after your socks. even though shoes are mentioned before socks, they can infer that this has nothing to do with the order in which you are supposed to put them on.
22. How would different theories (constructivist, generativist) explain children's grammar development? What is the verb island theory? How does it relate to constructivist theories? What support is there for the verb island theory? What evidence is there against it? What is the dual route theory?
constructivist - - children have very limited productivity, children do NOT initially have abstract rules/categories - when children first put words together in sentences, they do so using a system that allows only limited productivity evidence for constructivism: 1. all syntax is semantic (Brown) : (agent + action + object) 2. verb island (Tomasello) : nouns are used in abstract ways by kids but not verbs - verb understanding in adults: includes argument structure - how many arguments a verb takes - "laugh" takes one argument (Jim laughed) - "hit" takes two (Jim hit the ball) -"bounce"can be one or two (The ball bounced, I bounced the ball) - Verb Island - based on analysis of diary for one child from 1-2. she had one set of structures for run, one for eat, etc. - each verb is it's own grammatical island - kids learn each verb's argument individually, fail to extend argument structures to newly learned verbs: i.e. learn "she blicks the ball", only use black in that syntactic structure (as a verb) problem with verb island: how and when does it become abstract? - continuity vs discontinuity in language - tadpole to frog problem generativist - - opposite of constructivist - children DO have abstract categories and productive rules from a very early age - children are born with the capacity to learn UG using the LAD - anything they can do with one word they can do with another word in the same category dual-route- - children and adults use some abstract rules and some memorized forms (Pinker) i.e. regular past tense = rules: we memorize the irregular forms (go—>went) but generate the regulars using a rule that applies to all verbs (add -ed)
17. How do preferential looking studies investigate relation meanings in word combinations? Describe 2 studies using preferential looking that showed children's comprehension of word order and grammatical morphemes is much higher than their production.
even if a child is not doing this in production, they understand based word order by 12 MONTHS. 15 months - relational meaning 18 months - understand simple word order (agent vs direct object) 30 months - understand more complicated structures when children were told "here is a yellow bottle and here is another one" and shown a yellow and a blue bottle, they looked longer at the yellow one. ONE STUDY: two pictures, one of a girl kissing keys with a ball and another of her kissing the ball with the keys. child is asked: "which picture is she kissing the ball?" both pictures have "she" "kiss"and a "ball" the child must know the RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WORDS to answer correctly simple word order (18 months) correctly identify: - where is Cookie Monster washing big bird? vs where is big bird washing Cookie Monster? SECOND STUDY: complex object/action pairings (30 months) 1st video of CM and BB turning 2nd video of CM turning BB around Asked : where are CM and BB turning? Where is CM turning BB? answer this question requires more than just word order/order of mention—they have to understand what is asked because both questions and both images have BB, CM, and turning involved.
15. Describe holistic and analytical children mastering grammatical development (your book covers this in more detail than the lectures).
holistic (top/down) - results in many unanalyzed chunks - impressively long utterances that require little combinatorial ability - i.e. "I don't want to go night night" is only two combined units "Idontwanna" and "gonightnight" analytical (bottom-up) - smaller units - "break into structure" - by starting with unanalyzed phrases and then identifying slots in phrases that can have different lexical terms - i.e. theres the x me got x wanna x most children use both top-down and bottom-up
18. What is the importance of understanding relational meaning in grammar? How is this tested - specifically, how do we know that there is grammatical comprehension beyond word meanings? Know the developmental progression of the types of sentences children comprehend at various ages (such as relational meanings, complex object/action pairings, etc). What is co-reference? Why is it hard for children? What does that reveal about the nature/nurture debate?
if you aren't able to understand how words relate to one another, no sentence will be comprehensible to you. coreference relations - determining who or what is being referred to in a complex sentence I.e. "the zebra touched the deer after jumping the fence". This is challenging for children because both agents come before the verb, and the child has to determine which is doing the action. Carol Chomsky (1969) countered the view that language acquisition is complete by age 5, and argued that it isn't fully mastered until age 9. She found that children often interpret the noun phrase that is closet to the verb as the subject of the verb (in the example: the deer, which would be wrong) This contradicts UG (language is innate and handles the interpretation of coreference relations) yet children are having trouble doing that.
5. What is morphology? What are bound and free-morphemes? Give examples of each. Write a sentence with 6 words and 9 morphemes. How does morphology differ cross-linguistically? What is the difference between derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes? Give examples of each.
morphology - morpheme - smallest element of language that carries meaning - one dog, two dogS - I walk, she walkED a morpheme is the smallest unit of language that has meaning (bound morpheme cannot stand alone i.e. -s, -ed) Bound morpheme: cannot stand alone, is bound to a stem (ex. -s, -ed, -ing, pre-, post-) Free morpheme: morpheme that stands alone and has meaning (cat, run, shoe, help) sentence with 6 words, 8 morphemes: The boyS playED catch on Friday. free morphemes = yellow bound morphemes = white English is a weak morpheme language example: I arrive, she arrives, you arrive, they arrived. Lakota: I arrive = wahi you arrive = yahi you (all) arrive = yahipi they arrive = hipi inflectional morpheme do not change to meaning of the word (cat —> cats = just more cats) walk vs. walked derivational morphemes (the er in dancer or runner, ish in pinkish or smallish) which actually forms a new word if they don't EACH mean something individually, it is not a morpheme (Friday: day may be a word, but FRI means nothing, so the morpheme is the whole word FRIDAY and it is only one)
3. What are open-class (or lexical categories) and closed-class (or functional) words? Give examples of each and how they differ developmentally.
open-classed words (lexical categories)- hold semantic meaning: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs "Texting" "hangry" "mansplaining" closed-class words (functional words)- serve grammatical functions rather than carry content. AKA functional categories; includes auxiliaries (can, will), prepositions (in, of), complementizers (that, who) Open classed words can always be invented i.e. "the blick gorped the fepish woog" is a perfectly grammatical sentence. closed class words cannot be invented
4. What is meant by the hierarchical structure of language? Give examples of how sentences build in hierarchical ways (word to phrase, phrase to sentence and so on).
sentence = noun phrase + verb phrase noun phrase = (article) + (adjective) + noun verb phrase = verb + (adverb) or (noun phrase) "The fat dog ate the pretty flowers"
