16. Gleitman reading

two-word speaker

* function words are often said in low pitch in the middle of sentences -> does not stand out to children -> not learned. also memory is limited and learning complex sentences is hard. - telegraphic speech: two-word utterances that are often used in telegrams or newspaper headlines - appropriate word order: the two words seem to be ordered based on their propositional roles ("Throw ball", "Mommy throw") universal linguistic structure and parameters: language learners are programmed to expect all languages to a have specific syntactic organization. Only some details/parameters differ between languages.

Infants language acquisition

- at first, infants can discriminate all phonemes across languages but gradually lose irrelevant distinctions and only retain information about phonemes of their native language - motherese: the universal way that adults talk to infants (high pitch, slow rate, exaggerated intonation) -> help them recognize sentences (when one ends and another one starts). - infants prefer motherese > adult speech even though they understand neither. - infants prefer motherese that have pauses and falls in pitch that occur at the same time (adaptive bc those two cues usually indicate the end of sentences)

learning syntax

- children first learn the correct past tense form of verbs. then they learn the "-ed" rule and incorrectly overgeneralize the rule to irregular verbs - children use nouns as verbs (heard "John bats the ball" -> say "don't stick me" instead of "don't hit me with a stick") - they invent causative verbs: "daddy giggled me" instead of "daddy made me giggle".

The problem of language learning

- distinguishing speech sounds (which is a real word like "dog", which is just a sound like "woof") - relating sounds to meaning (different sounds can have the same meaning or one sound can have different meanings in different contexts)

Process of language learning

- more than imitation. children must generalize a label to objects they have never seen before. They also form sentences they have never heard before - children's grammatical/pronunciation errors are usually not corrected by parents. Parents usually only correct meanings and facts.

Learning word meanings

- part/whole cues: when parents talk to kids, they use simple sentences and point to the object to refer to whole objects ("This is a rabbit" to refer to the whole rabbit). They use more complex sentences to refer to a part of an object (" this is a rabbit. these are his ears"). - learn basic-level words (dog) before superordinate (animal) or subordinates (corgi) - importance of shape: children assume that the meaning of a word refers to a whole object and its shape rather than color, texture or material,... - assume that different words have different meanings (different words can't refer to the same thing). - believe that language classifies words according to categories (nouns, verbs,...) -> use the category of a new word in order to guess its meaning + use their knowledge of a word to predict its category

interaction of syntax and semantics

- propositions (who, whom,...) helps us understand sentences - non-reversible passive voice sentences can be comprehended just as fast as for active voice sentences due to the strong semantic cues "the flower is watered by the girl" can't be mistakenly understood as "the girl is watered by the water"

One-word speaker

- undergeneralization: thinks a word refers to a specific thing ("dog" as their dog only) - overgeneralization: thinks a word refers to many similar things and not just one ("daddy" as any man instead of just their dad) - understand simple propositions: although babies can only say one word, they understand simple propositions and sentence structures.

Bias toward doer, act, done-to (faster with active than passive)

our sentence analyzing machinery (SAM) assumes that the propositional roles in a sentence will appear in the order S + V + B (doer + act + done-to) because: - the active form of speech is more common than passive form (S is usually at the beginning of a sentence instead of O) -> SAM's bias fail when passive sentences occur -> recognize passive cues (is, by) -> reassign the first noun phrase as the O => slower to understand than with active sentences - when sentences don't follow simple S + V + B order, it is harder for SAM to understand