Test #2
Communication Competence
"Appropriate use of language in social situations" Requires FLEXIBILITY Goes beyond linguistic competence The individual must also be able to successfully receive and process communication from others
D-structure
"deep structure" or underlying relationships between subject and object in a sentence
S-structure
"surface structure" or surface linear arrangements of words in a sentence
Government Binding Theory
(by Chomsky) is one prominent version of universal grammar
Piaget's Cognitive Approach: Contrary Evidence
A definitive, positive causal relationship between new cognitive abilities and language development has not been made. Studies have shown that language and cognition may be separable e.g., children with Turner's Syndrome score poorly on cognitive tasks but exhibit normal language skills Some linguistic achievements may occur BEFORE their cognitive counterparts e.g., children learning sign language from deaf parents may begin combining signs before full object permanence Co-development of cognitive and linguistic skills may occur, and the causal agent could be a third variable
Model Adequacy
Achieved when a finite number of unifying principles are identified which account for the appearance of language behaviors Includes predictability but does not include the actual rules for child language acquisition
Theoretical Adequacy
Achieved when a finite set of principles is discovered that accounts for all language behaviors AND includes the actual mechanisms used by developing children to learn language
Language Variety Example: African-American English
African American English (AAE) is a variety of English spoken by many African Americans It is characterized by several linguistic features (see Table 6.1 on p. 202): Phonological- such as consonant reversals ("aks" for "ask"), final consonant cluster reduction (e.g., "des" for "desk") and /d/ for initial "th" substitutions (e.g., "dis" for "this") Syntax- such as multiple negation (e.g., "ain't got no" for "doesn't have") or deletion of auxiliary (e.g., "How you do this?" for "How do you do this?") Pragmatic- use of signifying (a type of sarcastic or witty language also called "playing the dozens" and "sounding"), topic-associating instead of topic-focused.
Competition Model (Bates and MacWhinney)
All possible syntactic forms, words, and phonetic patterns compete simultaneously to represent any particular meaning Which one to use depends upon the current level of activation of each. The critical matching function takes place when children's responses are matched against the criteria of adult speech that children hear. Cue availability: Children learn the forms and words most often directed towards them first. This explains why children learn such things as highly frequent verb forms more quickly than rarer forms. Language learning is empirical and depends on an innate PDP learning mechanism
Measuring Syntactic Growth
As children get older, their sentences get longer Children begin combining words into two word utterances when they reach the 50 word stage which is usually around 18 months When this occurs we can begin measuring the length of their utterances as a of syntactic growth
Information Processing Approach
Assumes that the human information system is a mechanism that: encodes stimuli from the environment stores representations of them in memory allows information retrieval Begins with mature language use and considers how such a system might develop. This approach views children as qualitatively similar to adults Children are information processors in transition from novice to skilled status.
Different Sentence Modalities
Beyond Stage II, as grammatical morphemes appear, major changes in language development involves sentence forms Sentence modality refers to the basic forms sentences may take Children begin to master morphosyntactic devices that signal the type of sentence modality These sentence modalities begin to develop during Stage III
Two-word Utterances
Brown's Stage 1 as child's MLU grows from 1.0-2.0 first attempt at multi-word utterances(occasionally 3 words) Creativity with unique novel/word combos
Later developments in Preschoolers
By early Stage IV, a child is using more complex grammatical constructions, including simple sentences, questions, negatives, and imperatives But their acquisition is still not yet complete Still to appear: Passives Coordinations Relative Clauses
Descriptive Adequacy
Cataloging all language behaviors Differentiate language from nonlanguage behaviors
Sources of Variation
Child Factors Input Factors Linguistic Factors
Nature of Syntactic Rules
Child grammar eventually becomes adult grammar. Important to understand adult syntactical system as a mean to compare to child's developing language Linguists give is a linguistic framework for adult syntactic rules(Noam Chompsky)
Individual Differences in Early Sentences
Children also differ in the early stages of multiword speech Children using a nominal strategy combine more content words. E.g., "Get ball" "Nama juice" Children using a pronominal strategy incorporate more pronouns into their utterances. E.g., "My ball" "I did it" Around an MLU of 2.5, the nominal children begin to use more pronouns, while the pronominal children begin to use more content words. E.g., "I want that duck" "I got pee pee" Global measures such a MLU may obscure the differences in how children lengthen their utterances: some may put together sentences that emphasize semantic content, while others may focus on grammatical morphology
Later Developments in Preschoolers: Relative Clauses
Children begin to understand and produce embedded relative clauses when they are about 3 (Stage IV) Relative clauses are dependent clauses that immediately follow the noun or pronoun they modify in an independent clause and are typically introduced by a relative pronoun Ease at which children can vary the position of the relative clause in the sentence (at the end modifying the object or in the middle modifying the subject) depends on the complexity of the sentence to which the relative clause is attached Processing limitations also hinder children's understanding and production of relative clauses
Productivity of Children's Morphology
Children cannot and do not learn the morphology of a language by repeating specific examples they've heard Their development of these forms is creative and productive...they are learning the rules! Overregulation refers to when children apply a morphological rule in a case where should not be applied Examples: plural -s added to "mans" "foots" "childrens" Past tense -ed to irregular verbs like "goed" "falled" "bringed" Mastering irregular forms (e.g., broke, women) appears to involve lexical recall, as opposed to applying rules for regular forms (e.g., walked, blocks).
Beyond the preschool years
Children continue to develop morphology and syntax well into the school years Anaphora how different pronoun forms link up with their referents in a sentence E.g., "John said that Robert hurt him." WHO is "him?" Subject of study for GB theory researchers Interpreting "empty" subjects in infinitive clauses When the subject of an embedded clause is unspecified E.g., "The wolf is easy to bite" WHO is doing the biting? Again, the issue pertains to referencing
Cross-Linguistic Data
Children learning Polish, Hebrew, and Spanish also exhibit overgeneralization errors The optional infinitive stage is observed in children learning French, Danish, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Russian HOWEVER, language with a richer inflectional system, such as Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew do not exhibit an optional infinitive stage Conclusion? Richer inflectional systems may help children learn the obligatory nature of tense markers, including children with Specific Language Impairments
Language Variety Example: Role
Children start playing cooperatively around age 4 During role-playing, they speak differently to enact their roles Children mark different roles Prosodically (usually pitch) Lexically (use specific language) Syntactically As they get older,they use more linguistic devices to differentiate various roles
Knowledge vs. Processing
Children's ability to comprehend and produce sentences develops as they acquire grammar More than grammatical knowledge is required to comprehend or produce a particular sentence Language processing allows the child to Transform a linear string of words that he/she hears onto a hierarchical structure that cannot be heard in the speech signal, and from this, compute the speaker's intended message Map an idea onto a sentence structure , insert lexical items into the appropriate parts of the structure, and utter the lexical items in a left-to-right order Both knowledge and processing are required for a child to develop language.
Piaget's Cognitive Approach: Semantic Relations and First Words
Children's first word combinations depend on the child's perception of semantic relations among objects and people They realize, for instance, that animate beings typically act upon inanimate objects and they combine the symbols for these things in similar fashion. Language is assumed to be only one expression of a more general set of human cognitive activities Proper cognitive development is considered a necessary precursor to linguistic expression
Language in Social Context
Communicative behaviors are contextually sensitive Therefore it is difficult to study communicative competence and chart its developmental progression Three domains do provide relatively clear information about pragmatic language development during the preschool years: Non-egocentric Language Requests Conversational Skills Language Varieties
Choices Among Language Varieties
Communicative competence also requires that the speaker chose the appropriate language variety in which to speak with a communication partner Language Varieties: Registers- "speech codes" or "styles" are forms of language that vary according to participants, settings, and topics. Dialects- mutually intelligible forms of language associated with particular regions or defined groups of people Languages- forms that are typically not intelligible across groups No one language variety is inherently more appropriate or "correct" than another Choice of language variety depends on the context in which it is used
Competence vs. Performance
Competence refers to the individual's knowledge of language The underlying rules that may be deduced from language behavior Focus area for Structuralists Performance refers to Actual instances of language use Focus area for Functionalists
Simple Sentences
Consist of one independent clause with no dependent clauses. Independent clause alone = Simple sentence Contain only one predicate May contain phrases Examples: "The boy brought his lunch" "The boy with blond hair brought his lunch" "The boy with blond hair brought his lunch to school today"
Compound Sentences
Contain two simple sentences (two independent clauses) conjoined via coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so), semicolon, or a conjunctive adverb (e.g., also, however, further, otherwise, among others) Examples "He felt sick so he went home." "The test is for babies; it should not be used with older kids" "We left early for the game; nevertheless, we were still late."
Features of early sentences
Creativity with unique/novel word combinations Simple yet systematic arrangement of words Primarily include content ( open-class) words (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives) Function (closed-content) words are typically lacking at this stage (e.g., prepositions, conjunctions, articles, pronouns, auxiliaries, inflections) Certain topics are very common (e.g., possession, location, recurrence)
Different Sentence Modalities via function
Declaratives make a statement of assertion E.g., "I like ice cream" Negatives make a statement of negation E.g., "I no like it" or "I don't like ice cream" Interrogatives refer to questions E.g., "Want ice cream?" or "Do you like ice cream?" Imperatives refer to statements that make a request or give an order E.g., "Gimme ice cream" or "Get me some chocolate ice cream" Exclamatory sentences express strong emotions E.g., "It's yucky!" or "Ice cream is horrible!"
Referential vs. Expressive Orientation
Differences in children's prelinguistic conceptual organization Nelson suggested that some children may focus more on objects (referential), others on people (expressive). Children's differing hypotheses about what language is for may derive from these preexisting cognitive differences. Studies of children's language and play have not found consistent support for these differences However, children with more expressive speech do tend to orient more towards adults and engage in more social play Whereas those with more referential speech tend to be more attentive to toys and have higher levels of performance on object categorization tasks Use of objects to mediate social interactions may contribute more to the acquisition of referential language than the sheer quantity of object-oriented behavior Children with more nominals (referential focus) more often initiated episodes of joint attention focused on objects Children with more expressive speech were more likely to interrupt or leave a toy to seek social attention, rather than show/share a toy.
inflectional morphemes
Do not change root of words meaning Modifies root word Indicates; tense, person,number, case and gender play+ed
Cognitive Developmental Theory (Piaget, 1926)
Egocentrism- the inability to take another person's perspective to recognize and take into account that others have different knowledge, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. Also referred to as Theory of Mind by contemporary scholars (more on this in Chapter 9 when we discuss autism) Piaget conducted multiple observational and experimental studies and concluded that Preschoolers are egocentric and unable to take their listener's perspective When communicating, young children tend to exclude referential information (e.g., "she" means Mary), leave out important information, and use incorrect temporal order when explaining sequences. Children do not begin to understand others and communicate their thoughts objectively before age 7 or 7:6
Information Processing Approach: Competition Model
Emphasizes both structure and function in learning language Functions are involved in communication (e.g., establishing topics, making a request, identifying a location. Structures are language mechanisms that encode the communicative functions. Focuses on language performance BUT since the structures that produce performance are assumed to be the same as those underlying competence, this model may also account for competence Serial processing operations are performed one at a time (linguistic models) Parallel processing operations occur simultaneously (information processing models) PDP (parallel distributed processing) models are designed to imitate the neural structure of the brain A PDP network consists of a series of activation nodes connected to other nodes which receive information and "decide" whether or not to "fire" and send the information on to the next node
Empiricists
Environment is responsible for the majority of language acquisition Language is subject to the same laws and principles of learning that govern all behavior Very restricted linguistic input results in little or no language acquisition
Piaget's Cognitive Approach:Object Permeance
Established during the second year of life Refers to the understanding that objects out of sight continue to exist Once established, children begin to need language to symbolize objects that are no longer present. A vocabulary spurt is found to accompany the mastery of object permanence
Two-Word Utterances Children's Early Comprehension of Syntax
Even before they are producing two-word utterances, studies suggest that even during the one-word stage, young children may use word order to understand multi-word utterances This suggest that comprehension of multi-word utterances precedes production of two-word utterances Children may use a variety of cues to understand multi-word utterances, including prosody, semantics, syntax, and environmental/social contexts
Requests
Exemplify the distinctions between the three components of speech acts (i.e., locutionary act, illocutionary function, and perlocutionary effect) EXAMPLES? Preschoolers can understand indirect requests, which require that the listener consider both form and context Preschoolers are able to consider form and function in order to make requests in different situations. For example, they use: Direct requests with semantic aggravators to intensify their request (e.g., "Give it to me or else") more frequently with peers or those they consider "inferior" to them Indirect requests with semantic mitigators to soften their request (e.g., "Can you give me the juice please?") more often with adults
Preschooler' cognition and efforts to achieve communicative competence
Families and schools influence acquisition because they support and build on children's cognitive abilities and social dispositions. Competence requires a great deal of knowledge, some aspects of which are probably based upon particular cognitive skills such as spatial perspective, which is thought to underlie the understanding of deictic terms. Children also may rely on scripts, abstract knowledge about everyday events. The more familiar the event, the more likely children are to have a script for it. Hypothesis testing- Young children seem to develop hypotheses about what is preferred and expected, which are then tested through trial and error and by asking questions about communicative behavior. Just as they overextend vocabulary and overregularize grammatical rules, they sometimes misapply communicative conventions. e.g., They may use "thank you" both when giving and receiving gifts
Influences on the acquisition of Communicative competence
Family influences Schools' and peers influences Preschoolers' cognition and effort
Behavioral Approaches: General Assumptions
Focus on observable and measurable aspects of language behavior Search for observable environmental conditions (stimuli) that co-occur and predict specific verbal behaviors (responses) Overt behavior is based in the brain, and research can look for neurological processes that control behavior Avoid mentalistic constructs such as internal "grammatical rules" that cannot be easily defined or measured Emphasis on LEARNING because language is viewed as a behavior
Piaget's Cognitive Approach:Sensorimotor Period
From birth to 18-24 months Infants can only understand the world insofar as they can physically interact with it They have no need for symbols (language) since they are unable to think about objects that are not physically present. They must complete or almost complete this phase before they begin learning language. They need to master object permanence to do so.
Behavioral Approaches: Distinguishing Features
Functionalism Emphasis on prediction and control of behavior NOTE: even though Watson's stimulus-response is thought to exemplify "structures" Performance emphasized over competence Empiricism Speaking is a learned behavior that is brought about and shaped by the environment through Reinforcement Imitation successive approximation The child is a passive recipient of the process The course of development is determined by training, not maturation
Language Variety Example: Gender
Gender differences in language use : stereotypes, gender roles, or true gender differences Gender differences incommunicative competence in young children girls: more collaborative, supportive, and indirect speech style with peers boys:more controlling and direct speech style with peers Children's use of gender-related speech styles varies according to context, such as gender distribution of the peers. Gender differences become more pronounced with age
Conversational Skills: Giving/Responding to Feedback
Giving/Responding to Feedback For a conversation to flow smoothly, listeners must provide feedback to signal confusion and speakers must respond appropriately to feedback Preschoolers' ability to give/respond to feedback is inconsistent They can issue/respond to queries for specific responses Have difficulty asking for clarification when the other's communication is unclear Difficulty repairing their own speech, especially when the feedback is not explicit During the school years, children are better able to give back-channel feedback ("uh-huh," head nod)
Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1975)
Go beyond describing or reporting information. They help speakers accomplish things in the world. Include: naming, bets, requests, warnings, verdicts, promises, and apologies. Provides researchers with ideas about which aspects of children's communication (which speech acts) to study
Brown's 14 Morphemes
Grammatical morphemes AKA inflectional, bound morphemes do not carry independent meaning do modify the root word they are attached to thus, they subtly influence the meaning of sentences Roger Brown (1970s) studied and tracked the development of 14 morphemes for 3 children examined the context of the child's spontaneous utterances (including the adult's utterances) to determine if a grammatical form was obligatory or not
Entering Complex Linguistic System
How do young children break up steady stream of sounds they hear into basic units (words & morphemes)?(i.e) the sky/this guys parents around the world provide prosodic cues about word/phrase boundaries when speaking to young children. Once the child has broken the stream of speech into words, he/she may use "bootstraps"(unaided effort to better oneself) to further his/her own syntax development SEMANTIC BOOTSTRAPPING PRAGMATIC BOOTSTRAPPING GRAMMATICAL BOOTSTRAPPING
LAD and Development
Humans are born with a language acquisition device (LAD) that enables them to extract the grammar of their native tongue from the raw linguistic data to which they are exposed. The LAD is assumed to be a physiological part of the brain that is a special language processor. Children are viewed as "little cryptographers" who employ their innate understanding of language to decipher their mother tongue. The LAD takes care of many of the difficult processes such as segmenting the speech stream and recognizing grammatical classes of words. Hypothesis-testing: Children move from the one-word to the two-word stage by testing their evolving grammars against data provided by the environment.
Other forms of input
Hypothetical situation- pose a hypothetical situation for didactic purposes Retroactive evaluation- comment on child's appropriateness well after the fact Address child's comment- respond to child's question, statement, or prompt about communicative competence Evaluate another- Seek child's evaluation of another person's behavior
Developing Grammatical Morphemes
Important changes beyond Stage I Sentences get longer as children begin combining two or more basic semantic relations E.g., agent + action and action + object become agent + action + object "Mommy close" + "close door" = "Mommy close door" Grammatical morphemes (inflections) begin to emerge gradually when the MLU approaches 2.0
Individual Differences in Early Words
In the early 70s, Nelson's study of the first words of a group of children categorized the children in terms of what they chose to talk about. Referential children were those whose early lexicons were composed primarily of object labels Expressive (pronominal) children were those who had more personal-social expressions, pronouns and function words. Nelson argued that these differences reflected children's differing hypotheses about how language is used: referential children were learning to talk about objects in their environment expressive children were learning to talk about themselves and others. Other studies have looked into functional differences in children's early speech. Dore classified children as message-oriented (using language to manipulate the social situation) or code-oriented (using language to represent things in the environment.) [Consider Asher & Ashley] There is no consistent support for the notion that children with relatively more nouns in their lexicon use language in more naming and fewer social contexts. Most early words serve a variety of functions and word use can shift over time Distribution, function, and frequency of word usage are related but separable aspects of early lexical development. The referential-expressive dimension is not a dichotomy, but a continuum along which children vary.
Individual Differences in Child Language Research: Research Questions
In what ways does language learning vary? What factors contribute to individual differences? What are the implications of individual differences for: Understanding the process of acquisition? Devising an adequate theory of language development? Clarifying the complex interdependence of cognitive, social, and linguistic factors in development?
Compound Complex Sentences
Include elements of both compound and complex sentences Include two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses The two independent clauses are connected via coordinating conjunction, a semicolon, or conjunctive adverb Often the dependent clause is conjoined to the independent clause by a subordinating conjunction or a relative pronoun
Complex Sentences
Include one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses The dependent clause(s) may be embedded within the sentence or occur at the beginning/end of the sentence along with a subordinating conjunction (e.g., after, when, before) or a relative pronoun (e.g., that, which, who) Examples (with dependent clauses underlined): Mary, (the girl I mentioned yesterday), asked me to study with her She asked me to tell you (when we are leaving.)
Later Developments in Preschoolers:passives
Is used to highlight the object of a sentence or the recipient of an action "The window was broken by the kids playing baseball." (passive) "The kids playing baseball broke the window." (active) Extremely rare in children's spontaneous speech Because agent/object are reversed, this form can tell us how children acquire word-order rules Most research has focused on children's comprehension of these forms and have found that children Develop the basic active S+V+O order by 3-4 years and treat passive sequences as active sequences Develop passives with "action verbs" by age 4 or 5 years Develop passives with "psychological verbs" (e.g., see, like) later, such as 7-9 years
Cross-Linguistic Research
It is important to include data from languages other than English, which has relatively impoverished morphology and limited opportunity to explore word-order variation. Studies of English learners emphasize nouns, while cross-linguistic studies have found that non-nominals figure more prominently in the speech of children learning some other languages. In some places (such as North America) naming is considered an appropriate and intelligent way to use language. In other cultures, this is not always the case. In some cultures, too, imitation is more highly valued than in English. Cultural variation in the language-learning environment is a fact that must be understood as evidence that children have many mechanisms for the acquisition of language that are differentially exploited in different contexts
Behavioral Approaches: Contrary Evidence
Laboratory studies demonstrating that children can learn through imitation are not relevant to the real world if the same learning conditions do not exist outside of the laboratory. Parents in the real world have not been shown to selectively reinforce grammatically correct utterances, nor does such reinforcement necessarily produce correct speech in a natural setting. Parents are more likely to respond positively to a child's utterance if the content is true than if the grammatical form is correct There is evidence from neonate research that humans are uniquely wired for language, which undermines the assumptions of learning theory
Linguistic Approaches : General Assumptions
Language has a structure or grammar that is somewhat independent of language use. Language acquisition is the process of deducing the rules of one's language Grammar is seen as a finite set of rules shared by all speakers of a language The brain houses a language faculty, which is genetically determined and similar across all humans
Nativism
Language is too complex and acquired too rapidly to have been learned via imitation Critical aspects of the language system are innate The invariance of early language development across many languages and contexts supports this
Linguistic Factors
Languages differ from each other in the problems they pose the language learner These differences may interact with learner and input factors to exaggerate individual differences. Highly inflected languages (e.g., Hebrew or Inuktitut) may encourage children to take more risks since it is virtually impossible for them to learn the appropriate grammatical forms immediately. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbALwMc6saA Cross-linguistic analyses have yielded more diversified patterns than those identified for English speakers. Languages also differ in how easy it is for children to extract specific parts of speech from the speech stream. In English, for instance, nouns may be more salient than verbs because children hear them at the beginning and the end of sentences. Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin highlight verbs, which are positioned at the ends of sentences; children learning these languages typically start with more verbs in their vocabularies.
3 Components of Speech Acts
Locutionary Act- the act of saying a sentence that makes sense and refers to something Illocutionary Act- the speaker's purpose in saying the sentence Perlocutionary Act- the effect of the sentence on the listener
Social Interaction Approach: Contrary Evidence
Many of its explanations for language development rest on untested intuitions and assumptions. Researchers have questioned the importance of CDS, as well as whether CDS is truly a simple subset of speech questions and imperatives, which dominate in CDS, are more complex than active declarative sentences Some studies have found that the complexity of maternal speech is unrelated to a child's language gains. Baker and Nelson argue that it is impossible to determine who is leading whom in language development perhaps neglected children are neglected because they have language delays and not the other way around.
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
Measure Syntactic Growth Commonly used index of morpho-syntactic development in early childhood Average length of child's utterance based on a transcript of spontaneous speech Specifically, it is the avg. # of morphemes per utterance Child's chronological age will typically corrolate closely to their MLU until about 4.0
Communicative Competence and Popularity
Nature of relationship is complex. Some communication skills such as the ability to make relevant comments contribute to a child's initial popularity Then further differences in communication skills emerge after children's reputations have been established Unpopular children may avoid communicating and their poor skills may serve to maintain their lower status and preclude their involvement in positive interactions that would help them learn better skills.
Children's Development of AAE
Not much research to date on the developmental progression of AAE Earliest forms to appear involve verb phrase, deletion of the auxiliary, and negation), and the pragmatic feature of "signifying" (Wyatt's "Preschool Dozens") Later developing forms include invariant "be" and phonological features Use of AAE varies according to context, gender, and SES "Code-switching"- alternating one's use of different dialects (e.g., SAE and AAE), depending on the speaking context
Interactionist Approaches: General Assuptions
Occupy a middle ground between the extremes of the behaviorists and the linguists Assume that many factors affect the course of language development These factors are interactive and have reciprocal causal relationships.
Two word utterances: telegraphic speech
Omission of closed-class words makes Stage I utterances resemble telegrams The earlier acquisition of open-class words is due to their relevance or perceptual salience to the child Parent's use of prosody facilitates this development There is variability among languages regarding the acquisition of open and closed class words
Phrasal Language
One way to expand our view of language development is to examine data that have been previously ignored, such as from children who use phrasal language. Interest in phrasal language is particularly important since research had shown that a significant portion of adult speech may consist of phrases stored and retrieved as a whole. Some researchers argue that formulae (e.g., idioms, sentence frames, standard situational utterances) perform important sociological functions that ease the burden of constructing utterances from scratch. Research has yet to focus on them ways in which children acquire, store and produce such phrases.
3 Interactionist Approaches
Piaget's Cognitive Approach Information Processing Approach Social Interaction Approach
Linguistic Approaches: Contrary Evidence
Poverty of imagination: assuming that if something cannot be explained, it must be innate. Children do receive negative evidence about their poorly formed sentences and are likely to attempt to repeat an adult's correction after receiving it. Gopnik's claim of a grammar gene is highly questionable; the family studied actually has a whole host of other language disabilities. Language does not develop as rapidly as has been supposed: children are still learning complex aspects of grammar well into their school years and possibly into adulthood. No neurological basis for rapid early development and slower later development has yet been found. Evidence contrary to Chomsky's position on the fundamental nature of language has been uncovered
Conversational Skills: Maintaining Topics
Preschoolers begin to have discussions about and elaborate on a variety of topics and themes Long bouts of cooperative play facilitate conversations Cohesive devices are used to link the content of different parts of a conversation and include Pronouns (he/she, here/there, this/that) Ellipsis- the omission of redundant words from an utterance because they have already been stated e.g., "Did the car crash?" "No it didn't [crash]" Connectives (because, so, then) Anaphora- referring back to a previous discourse through the use of pronouns, definite articles, and other linguistic devices. e.g., "Did the car crash?" "No it didn't" Phone conversations are more difficult for preschoolers than face-to-face
Conversational Skills: Taking Turns
Preschoolers lack the precise timing of turns seen in older children and adults They rely on obvious cues that a speaker is finished talking Not yet relying on conversational boundaries May hear long pauses between turn or young children interrupt each other Especially difficult when > 2 speakers Older children use fillers "y'know" and sentence initial "and" to keep their turns more effectively
Family Influences on the Acquisition of Communicative Competence
Prompts- a verbal/visual/gestural command for a particular behavior Modeling- a demonstration of desired behavior Reinforcement- a consequence following a behavior intended to increase or decrease the likelihood of future occurrences of that behavior Other forms of input
Behavioral Approaches: Supporting Evidence
Recent studies have shown that networks of stimulus response associations are involved in semantic development. It is possible to cause adult subjects in an experiment to have an emotional reaction to certain words through classical conditioning. Shaping and reinforcement, have been particularly useful in teaching significant and long-lasting language skills to children with very limited speech abilities. Experiments using imitation training have proved effective in getting children to produce novel grammatical forms. There is also support for the view that an environment that is responsive to young children's utterances may foster language development.
Non-Egocentric Language
Referential communication- the ability to describe an item from a set of similar items so that a listener can identify it. Demonstration Research after Piaget, using referential communication, has found that young children can take other's perspectives in certain circumstances, depending on the context. Preschoolers speak differently to a 2-year-old than to an adult. Indicating what? Young children do better in common situations (e.g., play, eating) than experimental settings and with familiar items (e.g., toy animals) vs. unfamiliar (e.g., abstract shapes).
Piaget's Cognitive Approach:Symbolic Play
Refers to symbolic or dramatic play where a child substitutes one object for another The child may also pretend to do something (e.g., feed a doll) or be someone (e.g., mommy talking on the phone) Related to language development since the child is utilizing mental representational skills
Later Developments in Preschoolers: coordinations
Refers to the "conjoining" words, phrases, and clauses to express complex or compound propositions Studies of the development of "and" Around Stage IV, children begin to use and to link multiple clauses Sequential coordination refers to the conjoining of two independent clauses "I'm pushing the wagon, and I'm pulling the train." Phrasal coordination refers to the conjoining of phrases within sentences. "I'm pushing the wagon and the train."
Input Factors
Research has revealed clear differences in caregiver speech that may have an effect on variation in language development. Mothers of referential or expressive children may be seeking out different opportunities for interaction. A good deal of children's referential language, for example, may originate in routinized naming games. Expressive children learn many conventional social expressions that typically mark social events. The extent to which input language influences the course of language development has received mixed empirical support and continues to provoke debate
Information Processing Approach: Supporting Evidence
Research on the priming effect in adults shows that words that have been activated either phonologically or semantically are more readily accessible. Computer simulations of the acquisition of past tense forms have revealed patterns of learning remarkably similar to those found in children. Damage to PDP networks produces performance deficits similar to those of brain-damaged humans. Networks have even been shown to be able to learn how to processes complex sentences with embedded clauses. Cross-cultural statistical analyses have supported the competition model's predictions about the more rapid learning of frequent forms
Theories of Language Acquistition: Summary
Researchers have yet to develop a simple, satisfactory, unified theory of language learning. There is so much pressure placed upon the child to communicate that there are probably many routes to the goal. Behaviorists have been criticized for relying too heavily on simple principles such as reinforcement to explain language development. However, many behavioral principles probably do apply to at least some aspects of language learning. Imitation, for instance, probably operates in many parts of the process. Linguistic theory has been criticized for its reliance on the nominalist fallacy (if you provide a name for something, you have explained it). a language acquisition device appears to be at odds with findings from the study of evolution and from what is known about the onset of human language Interactive approaches recognize the strengths of the earlier theoretical camps and borrow from each. By avoiding strict insistence on simple associations or strong innate mechanisms, they avoid many of the pitfalls of the linguistic and behavioral models.
Linguistic Complexity
Semantic complexity- the number of meanings encoded for the morpheme E.g., past-tense encodes "earliness" whereas 3rd person singular encodes "earliness" and "number" and is acquired later Syntactic complexity- the number of rules required for the morpheme E.g., morphemes involving content words are acquired before those involving function words
Child Factors
Sensitivity to prosodic intonations that unify whole phrases OR the syllables and segments than make up single words. Age - younger children have less memory capacity to approach language acquisition fewer analytical skills may produce forms they do not understand. Temperament Shy children may be more cautious and apprehensive about making mistakes. Differences in the rate of learning may be connected to a tendency to be cautious or to take more risks. Horgan suggested that slower, more cautious language learners have good receptive abilities but a more guarded approach to displaying their verbal skills, and a tendency to focus on the details of the language structure. Children who are more willing to take risks in their vocalizations make more errors, but learn to talk faster.
Information Processing Approach: Contrary Evdicence
Shares some of the drawbacks of the linguistic approach According to the law of parsimony, theorists should use the simplest of available alternative explanations. Thus, the internal processes described by information processing approache may be redundant or overly elaborate when we consider that the environment provides ample feedback to children learning language Operating outside of a social context, the PDP model is a simple sentence processor and thus does not reflect the real-world experience of a child learning a first language
Piaget's Cognitive Approach
Similar to a Linguistic Approach: emphasizes internal structures as determinants of behavior (i.e., Structuralism) considers language as the symbolic expression of intention. Differs from Linguistic Approach: sees language as one of several abilities that result from cognitive maturation the sequence of cognitive development determines the sequence of language development. Constructivism Piaget responded to Chomsky's statement that language must be innate by saying that the complex structures of language might be neither innate nor learned. Instead, they emerge as a result of the continuing interaction between the child's current level of cognitive functioning and her current environment. Therefore: not strictly nativism nor empiricism Competence/Performance Preserves the distinction between competence and performance, like linguists BUT Piagetians believe that performance limitations provide some of the most useful data. The child's cognitive capacities are assumed to be different from an adult's The different ways a child reasons about the world will affect the way she approaches language acquisition. Linguistic performance errors may thus reveal what she knows about the structure of language and facts about the structure of her knowledge (i.e., competence)
Linguistic Approaches: Distinguishing Approaches
Structuralism- the grammar of a language Competence- true grammar describes a speakers knowledge of permissible utterances rather than just the utterances produced (performance) Nativism- innate language faculty and universal grammar
Schools' and Peers' Influence on the acquisition of communicative competence
Teachers who encourage children to talk also help children learn to communicate effectively. Children need a variety of experiences to learn the functions of language, different forms of discourse, and conventions for using language appropriately. Effective teachers explicitly teach some rules governing communicative behavior: they announce both restrictive rules and prescriptive rules and attempt to correct children's violations of these rules. Some other rules (such as turn-taking) must be inferred from ongoing interaction. School offers children the opportunity to interact with peers, providing unique forms of communication. Effective teachers can foster communicative competence in preschoolers who have difficulty interacting with peers through explicit instruction as well as through socio-dramatic play.
Context: Interactions of Child, Caregiver, & Language
The context in which language is used determines its form and function. Episodes of joint object attention are associated with referential language learning. Book reading, as well as ritualized games and routines provide unique opportunities to learn some aspects of language (e.g., whole words & phrases, vocabulary, prosodic features). The interests of both the child and the caretaker will influence the kinds of contexts that arise in daily life
Piaget's Cognitive Approach: Supporting Edivdence
The growing body of evidence that early linguistic skills correlate with many nonlinguistic attainments: Object permanence Symbolic play with objects Tool use Evidence that grammatical development follows a child's understanding of key concepts begins using past tense -ed after demonstrating mastery of a perception of the past
Stability of Individual Differences
The individual differences observed in segmenting speech, expressing early meanings and introducing structure to language may represent different entry points into the language system, or may be signs of differences that persist across development. Lexical preferences and functional differences do appear to extend from single words to multi-word utterances and early sentences may derive from characteristics of single word speech. Some researchers have suggested that children with an analytic style (which includes high levels of comprehension and flexible noun production) at thirteen months have advanced development at 28 months. However, an early rote or holistic style appears unrelated to grammatical progress. The stability of individual differences during the acquisition process has raised questions about whether these differences persist later in life. For instance in the process of learning a second language or learning to read. Early readers can be split into two stylistic groups, those who are highly faithful to the text and those who use more meaning-driven strategies, often previewing texts and studying illustrations to get a sense of content before attempting to read the words themselves. Longitudinal studies may one day reveal whether these two styles are correlated with conservative and risk-taking primary language learning strategies.
Brown's 14 Morphemes Order of acquisition
The process of acquiring grammatical morphemes is gradual, with fluctuations in the appearance of morphemes during their acquisition Brown's order of acquisition is based on 90% production in obligatory contexts Brown found that the order of acquiring these morphemes was similar among all 3 children, WHY? Frequency of use in adult models- NO Linguistic complexity- YES
Behavioral Approaches: Classical Conditioning
The process of forming an association between a stimuli in the environment and a certain response of an organism Thought to explain associations between arbitrary verbal stimuli (word) and internal responses (meaning) Addresses receptive language acquisition
Individual Differences: Summary
The recognition that typically developing children differ on how they accomplish the task of language learning should help researchers think creatively about theory, research and educational practice and has implications for therapy, intervention, and education. The stylistic differences observed must be seen as reflecting tendencies or preferences, rather than as dichotomies. Where these differences come from is still a matter of investigation. Various research designs have been proposed to assess the contribution of such things as heredity and environment, as well as temperamental differences between children.
Implications of Individual Differences For a Theory of Language Acquisition
The study of individual differences in language acquisition has important implications both for: theory building application in teaching and intervention. Assessing the extent of individual differences helps construct a theory of how children learn.
Segmenting the Speech Stream
The tendency of some children to acquire longer, phrase-like utterances during the one-word stage suggests children may differ with respect to the length of linguistic units they segment from the speech stream. Although segmentation may be facilitated by certain features of child directed speech, the child still must build his lexicon from the raw material of connected speech The units he selects may be single words or longer phrases. A distinction that may be related to differing segmentation strategies occurs in children's early phonological systems. Children differ in terms of how orderly and rule-consistent their phonological systems are: Children with an "orderly" set of phonological rules apply their rule system consistently to imitated as well as spontaneous forms, or reject imitating forms that violate their rule system Children with "sloppy" systems are often more willing to incorporate imitated forms and are more likely to improve their production as a result of direct modeling. Plunkett suggests that articulatory fluency and articulatory precision are inversely related: Phrasal speech (representing segmentation that overshoots a target word) tends to be produced fluently but with less precise articulation of the individual segments. Children who focus on the production of sublexical units tend to be more precise, but produce shorter utterances
Linguistic Approaches: supporting Evidence
There appear to be certain universals in early language use across all known languages which are learned by children Infants' brains respond asymmetrically to language versus non language sounds, & infants have been shown to be able to differentiate between consonants and vowels within their first few months A longitudinal study of ten deaf children who were not taught to sign, but who developed their own gestural languages with invented signs that are structurally very similar to those used in standard sign languages. Evidence for a sensitive or critical period for language acquisition. Non-human animals are not able to create and understand true languages, lending support to the notion that language is indeed species specific. Study on feature-blind aphasia reported on a family with a grammatical deficit that appeared to follow Mendelian inheritance patterns thought to provide evidence of a genetic basis for the learnability of grammar. Results from text presentation studies suggest that grammar is must be largely innately programmed since adult overt correction of children's errors actually impeded their use of correct forms.
Difficulty of Acquiring Communicative Competence
There are not usually strict rules for pragmatics Rules regarding using or omitting a particular communicative behavior are context-dependent Many polite forms have no clear referents and may be used even when the speaker does not really mean it (e.g., "thank you" for the awful chartreuse sweater that Aunt Nellie made) Expectations regarding communicative competence varies from one setting to another
Behavioral Approaches: Role of Caregivers
Train children to perform verbal behaviors by using: Shaping- rewarding successive approximations to adult-like words and strings of words Imitation- children copy the adult model provides a short-cut to language learning without having to shape each and every possible verbal behavior This process starts with random verbalizations and continues until the child can produce adult-like language
Type Token Ratio
Type-token ratio (TTR) is a measure of functional expressive vocabulary skills. TTR = # different words total # words The ratio indicates the diversity of words used by a child during spontaneous speech. Normally developing children between age 3 and 8 years typically have a TTR of 0.45 to 0.50 (Shipley & McAffee, 2004) A TTR lower than 0.45 may suggest an expressive language delay or disorder and warrants further testing
Chomsky's Linguistic Framework
Universal Theory: theory of grammar that includes Universality:theory is comparable with grammar of all the world's languages Learnability: most children worldwide acquire the grammar of their language in just a few years without explicit training. Government Binding Theory: by Chompsky is one prominent version of universal grammar.
Universal Grammar includes what?
Universality and Learnability
Two- Words Utterances: Semantic relations
Universally, only a small group of meanings are expressed in children's language during Stage I These meanings are referred to as "Semantic Relations"
The History of Individual Differences in Child Language Research
Until recently, most research on language development paid little attention to individual differences Research focused instead on universal patterns of acquisition. Some of this emphasis grew out of a practical need for basic information about the nature and sequence of language development. Another contributing factor came from the linguistic focus in child language research (i.e., Chomsky's transformational syntax) to formulate a coherent structure to explain and codify the rules governing the development of language. Because of this universalist bias of language development researchers, primarily longitudinal studies were used, assuming that all normally developing construct similar rule systems Cross sectional studies looked for common structures in speech. Children with jargonlike strings in their early speech were often excluded from study Advanced, imitative or non-rule governed speech was often relegated to a miscellaneous category and disregarded. In the 1970s, interest in the semantic and pragmatic aspects of language led researchers to study individual variation in language acquisition. Investigators became interested in the meanings of early words and the way in which language was used. Using larger samples of children, they studied the meaning, form, and function of early language and discovered that children differ along all three dimensions. In addition, children with poor articulation, early jargon-like sentences, and idiosyncratic development are now included in research studies, as are children from diverse communities and varied cultural and socioeconomic groups.
Behavioral Approaches: Operant Conditioning
Used to explain the development of expressive language Changes in voluntary behavior due to environmental consequences contingent on that behavior (i.e., reinforcement) Verbal behaviors that frequently result in positive reinforcement are repeated Whereas verbal behaviors resulting in punishment do not tend to recur
Structuralism v. Functionalism
What this means for language development Structural descriptions of behavior attempt to discover invariant processes or mechanisms that underlie observable data E.g., Child says "I want popcorn" to mother at the movies Analysis: form consists of subject (I), main verb (want), object (popcorn) Functional descriptions aim to predict and control verbal behavior in different contexts and individuals. E.g., Child says "I want popcorn" to mother at the movies Analysis: the occurrence of the utterance is jointly determined by the presence of the context (presence of mother and movie setting) and its consequence (receiving popcorn)
Types of questions
Yes/No Begin as intonational questions (e.g., "Mommy tired?") Require yes/no answer only Wh- Questions Begin with a "wh" word Order of acquisition: what/where/who before when/how/why WHY? Negative Questions Include a negative (e.g., "What don't you want for lunch?") Inversion takes longer to acquire with these questions, which may have to do with the contracted negative Long-distance Longer question forms where the wh has moved farther away from it's target E.g., "What did she tell you that she wants for lunch?" Tag Questions A combination of a declarative sentence and a yes/no question E.g., "She's coming for lunch, isn't she?"
Optional Infinitives
Young children omit verb tense until it has been linguistically mastered e.g., "Max drink water" Sometimes children go through a phase where they intermittently use tense markers. e.g., "Max drink water. Mommy drinks milk." Your text refers to this as the "optional infinitive stage" because the base form of verbs (e.g., drink, play, walk) is referred to as the "bare infinitive" form (missing the "to") This phase usually declines by age 3, but children with a specific language impairment may continue in this phase longer
Frozen Phrases
are longer linguistic units that appear before true word combinations occur The appearance of such units in early speech raises a number of questions about the relationship between the lexicon and syntax to be addressed in a later section...
free morpheme
can stand alone
bound morpheme
cannot stand alone; always attached to a free morpheme
Social Interaction Approach
combines behavioral and linguistic positions posits that the structure of language may have arisen out of the socio-communicative functions that language plays in human relations sees children and their language environment as a dynamic system, each affecting the other agrees with the linguists that children must acquire grammatical skills and also searches for commonalities across children, languages, and cultures. but also stresses the importance of communicative functions Language development is seen as an orderly process in which social interaction assists language acquisition and language acquisition allows more mature social interaction. considers that some early language may be taught by parents and learned through rote acknowledges grammatical structure, but pays more attention to performance than to competence Parents may initially provide a "scaffold" for language development, making children appear more linguistically sophisticated than they actually are. Later, children use language to create their own structure: Language changes from being a social tool to being a private tool. adheres to both sides of the nature vs. nurture controversy. humans are physiologically specialized for language and some language abilities rely upon the maturation of physiological systems However, children cannot acquire language without the active participation of their caretakers these theorists pay particular attention to CDS (child directed speech) as both elicited by the child and critical to the child's understanding and production of language
Transitional rules
connect s-structure and the d-structure: dictate how one sentence can be transformed into another closely related sentence
Linguistic Approaches : Universal Grammar
contains the system of grammatical rules and categories common to all the world's speakers a network of principles and properties connected to a switch box whose switches are set by experience (i.e. the language the individual is exposed to) allow the language learner to derive a complete and accurate internal representation of the grammar of his native language. each human language is the product of a specific setting of the various switches.
Parent demonstrate
demonstrate prompts and behaviors as instructions
Social Interaction Approach: Supporting Evidence
infants have been shown to prefer CDS to adult-adult speech the response of the listener tends to have a significant impact on the speaker's language: a speaker will tend to simplify his language and use more CDS when a child does not appear to understand him parents tend to use grammatical forms relating to concepts that their child understands use of CDS may assist with "meaning mapping" young children have been shown to imitate novel sentences more successfully if the sentences are short and spoken slowly with exaggerated intonation children have slower speech gains if their mothers use longer and more complex speech. mothers who use more CDS have children that develop language more quickly Adult imitation plus expansions, extensions and recasts of errors are positively associated with language development. Neglected children tend to show significant language development delays, whereas children who are abused but not neglected do not necessarily have language development problems.
Studying Syntactic Development
longitudinal studies of a spontaneous child language in home setting provide vast quantities of spontaneous language transcription. Which provides a lot of info about child language development Ex. CHILDES data system They do not show child's comprehension Do not give us everything child is capable of producing Longitudinal studies must be paired with controlled experimental research
Oral Narrative skills
may provide a bridge to literacy promote the enjoyment of stories help children learn about conceptual organization and linguistic conventions
Teaching sibling
modeling for the preschooler by commenting on a younger sibling's behavior
The significance of communicative competence
predicts later literacy skills is it necessary for understanding and functioning in the classroom is associated with being more well-liked by peers and adults
Modeling
provide appropriate behavior before child had the opportunity to produce it
Copula
refers to the forms of be (except being and been) that can serve as a main verb (can stand alone)
Morphology
relates to internal structure of words
Subsequent research revealed three problems with the original referential-expressive categories:
researchers relied on parent diaries which are not always an accurate record of a child's lexicon The research focused on the number of words the children knew, rather than the frequency with which they were used (e.g., Type-Token Ratio) Nelson's classification scheme of action words and nominals was confusing.
Government Binding Theory is composed of what?
s-structure, d-structure and transformational rules In order to understand sentences, the child must be able to decode surface forms(s-structure)into underlying grammatical relations In order to form sentences child must be able to express grammatical relationships(d-structure) in surface form(s-structure)
Pine and Lieven's research found that
the proportion of frozen phrases used in early speech is positively correlated to productive word combinations Whereas the proportion of common nouns is unrelated to sentence construction. These studies and others along the same lines suggest that children may break down phrasal speech into words through fission, or build sentences by combining units, called fusion. Individual children may favor one strategy or the other. Other views identify the tendency to imitate adult speech as a central dimension of individual differences, suggesting that more imitative children acquire more phrasal units as well as single words in the one word stage and have messier phonological systems.
Morpheme
the smallest linguistic unit of language
derivational morphemes
used to derive new words Happy+ness changes meaning of root word
