STUDY GUIDE

INTRODUCTION Induction ? Language acquisition is an induction problem because there are an infinite number of possible hypotheses consistent with a finite amount of data. Nature vs. nurture ? Nativism/Innateness ? The view that knowledge is innate, as opposed to being learned from experience. Rapid, effortless, without instruction. Universal Grammar ? The set of principals and parameters that describes the structure of all languages of the world; hypothesized by some to be part of the child?s innate knowledge. Empiricism ? A view of development that asserts the mind is like a blank slate a birth and all knowledge and reason come from experience. (Behaviorism) Interactionism/Emergentism ? Something is innat, but it isn?t language specific and environment matters a lot. The child ?constructs? language. The view that new knowledge can arise from the interaction of biologically based learning processes and input from the environment. **Differs from constructivism in its explicit claim that what emerges from the process of innate structure operating on environmental input can be more than was provided in either the innate structure of the input. Language Acquisition Device (LAD) vs. domain general learning - LAD refers to the mental functionality that underlies the human ability to acquire language. Domain general learning is abilities that are used for many different tasks and domains. For example, if the ability to detect patterns in input is used for acquiring language and for learning about the physical properties of the world, then pattern detection would be a domain general capacity. Statistical learning vs. rule learning- Statistical learning is learning of co-occurrence probabilities of experienced stimuli. For example, babies presented with sequences of sounds appear to learn the conditional probability of one sound following another in the sequence they heard. This is one mechanism for learning the patterns in input that could contribute to learning language. Learning statistical patterns in their language lexical item by lexical item. Eventually rules may emerge from these patterns. Rule learning is the learning of relationships among abstract entities for which different items may be substituted such as learning the pattern x.y.x where any item can be substituted for x and for y. In contrast, statistical learning is learning patterns among the items actually experienced, as opposed to patterns among abstract variables. Formalism vs. Functionalism- Formulism is the nature of language and how it is acquire, has nothing to do with the fact that language is used to communicate. Functionalism ? language is not an arbitrary or autonomous system but rather a system shaped by the communicative function it serves. Goodluck1 HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Goodluck1.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Goodluck1.pdf Professor Stromswold?s Introduction to Language Acquisition Lecture Notes HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/IntroLangAcq_notes.p" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/IntroLangAcq_notes.p LEARNABILITY THEORY Chomsky's Poverty of the Stimulus argument ? Two parts (1) The input is lousy (Inconsistent, messy, ungrammatical) Not true 99.44% ?Pure? (2) Infinite number of hypotheses consistent with a finite amount of data ? True. Language acquisition as an induction problem ? because there are an infinite number of possible hypotheses consistent with a finite amount of data Positive evidence ? information about what is in the language Negative evidence ? information about what is NOT in the string of language. Text presentation ? Positive evidence only Informant presentation ? positive and negative evidence Subset and superset languages - Subset ? the child?s language is ?smaller? or a proper subset og the adult language or target language. Superset ? the child?s language is ?larger? than the adult language (i.e. the adult language is a proper subset of the child?s language. Productivity vs conservativism - Productivity ? the characteristics of all human languages such that they make use of a finite repertoire of sounds to produce a potentially infinite number of sentences. Language acquisition as parameter setting - Innate constraints - Non-occuring errors - The 'no-negative evidence' problem:  unrecoverable errors ? If the child guesses a superset language (the language is larger than the target language) unless the child gets negative evidence, the child will never know he made a mistake and his error will be unrecoverable. The role of cognitive development on syntactic development The role of input on language acquisition Motherese (= infant directed speech) ? often high-pitched, exaggerated, simplified and here-and-now Cross-cultural differences in input ? not all cultures use motherese and yet the children learn language.                                                   Questions and aux acquisition ? Parents who ask a lot of questions have children who learn aux verbs earlier, presumably because the auxiliary verb is more salient at the beginning of questions (CAN she eat?) than in the middle of declarative sentences (she CAN eat) Competence vs. performance:  comprehension vs. production - Goodluck 6 HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Goodluck6.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Goodluck6.pdf Professor Stromswold?s Learnability Lecture Notes HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Learnability_notes.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Learnability_notes.pdf PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT (Learning the sound system of language) Phonology - study of the way sounds in a language combine and interact with one another Articulatory phonetics ? how sounds are made by the articulatory system Phonetic/distinctive features ? Voiced/Unvoiced, Manner of articulation, Fricatives, Affricatives, Glides, Liquid, Place of Articulation Minimal pairs ? Words that differ by a single sound phoneme Prelinguistic stages of speech ? Before children begin to say words. Canonical (reduplicated) babbling ? 36-48 weeks. Repeat the same set of CV: BABA BABA. Not necessarily communicative (crib speak) All babies with normal vocal tracts babble between 6-9 months of age. **Deaf babies rarely produce canonical babbling. They DO produce sounds, and these sounds don?t differ from sounds of hearing children. BUT, the don?t combine them. Nonreduplicated babbling ? 48+ weeks. Patterns of CVs vary Ba, da, ga, be, do, ba, de. Prosody: intonation contour Jargon Babies: those who use intonation with babbling instead of single real words. Prerepresentational phonology ? Children say words in a consistent way, but the produce the same phoneme differently in different words. There is no system Representational phonology ? The system that describes how children say phonemes across words. Children say phonemes wrong, but they say them wrong in consistent ways. Substitution processes:  stopping, fronting, gliding Assimilation processes: - a sound becomes more similar to an adjacent word. Voicing ? Word initial unvoiced consonants become voiced (Pick -> Bick) Word Final Voiced consonants become unvoiced (Big -> Bick) Consonant Harmony ? consonants end to assimilate in words with structure C1VC2 (Duck -> Guck) (Tub -> Bub) Vowel assimilation ? an unstressed V will assimilate to a preceding V ? Flower -> Fawa Syllabic structure processes: Cluster Reduction ? A CC is reduced to a single C: (Play -> Pay) Final Consonant Deletion ? A CVC is reduced to a CV (More -> Mo)                   Weak syllable deletion (Banana -. Nana) Reduplication ? In a multi-syllabic word the initial CV syllable is repeated (TV -> DiDi) Super segmental phonology: Stress, Intonation, Tone Syllable structure: Onset, Rime, Nucleus, Coda ? SEE DRINK IN NOTES Sonority hierarchy ? Stops < Fricatives < Nasals and Liquids < Vowel Phoneme boundary ? The location on a continuum of change in some acoustic property of a sound where the listener?s perception of the sound changes from one phoneme to another. Categorical perception ? The perception of stimuli that vary along a physical continuum as belonging to discrete categories. Voice onset time (VOT) ? The time lag in the production of a consonant between the release of air and the beginning of vocal cord vibration. Consonants with a VOT greater than 25 milliseconds are perceived as voiceless. (Such as P) and VOTs less than 25 milliseconds are perceived as voiced (such as B) Goodluck 2 HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Goodluck2.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Goodluck2.pdf Professor Stromswold?s Phonology Development Lecture Notes http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/PhonolAcq_notesLEXICAL DEVELOPMENT (Learning words) Segmentation problem - Lexicon ? The dictionary of words and associated knowledge that speakers have. Context bound word ? Word use that is tied to particular contexts. Duck only rubber ducky in the bathtub. Become decontexualized over time. Referential word ? Words whose use is not bound to one particular context. Usually phonological approximates of the adult words. Ostensive definition ? Usually accompanied with a gesture such as pointing. Nominals ? A word that labels things Noun bias ?Nominals overrepresented. Specific Nominals ? Mommy, Daddy General Nominals ? Kitty, Bottle, and some Pronouns such as this Vocabulary spurt ? Once a child knows about 50 words the rate of word learning increases to 22-40 words/month. The rate especially increases for nominals. Fast mapping- Learn meanings of words from single exposure. Children who fast map have larger vocabularies Naming insight ? All things have names Holistic vs. analytic acquisition ? Analytic ? some children have more referential words (more analytic, break down words) Holistic ? Don?t break down words. More likely to be situally dependent. Don?t do that. Referential vs. expressive language users ? Referential: Many N?s Expressive: Fewer object labels, more social terms. Sex differences ? Tiny difference but female > male (2% of variance) Girls mature faster, Structural difference in the brain, Mom talks to girls more Overextension ? A type of error in children?s early word usage that seems to reflect an overly inclusive meaning in the mind of the child ( Such as referring to all 4 legged animals as Doggie) Underextension ? Using words with a range of meanings narrower than the meanings of the word in the target language (such as using car to refer only to cars seen from a window) Prototype ? Learn features for words. Whole Object constraint ? Words refer to an entire object and not a part (Tree refers to TREE and not branches, leaf, etc.) Taxonomic constraint ? Word refers to thing of same kind. Mutual Exclusivity constraint ? Different words refer to things of different kind (innate constraint that is basically the same thing as principle constraint) Principle of Contrast ? Pragmatically speaking, words contrast in meaning. So children and adults assume 2 words can?t refer to the same thing. (not true: synonyms) Count nouns vs. mass nouns ? Show 3-4 year old child an odd shaped bowl with stuff in it. Show me siv ? Child chooses stuff. Show me siv ? child chooses bowl. (Intro phrase This is the siv, This is my siv) Proper nouns (names) vs. common nouns (labels) - Professor Stromswold?s Lexical Development Lecture Notes HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/LexicalAcq_notes.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/LexicalAcq_notes.pdf MORPHOLOGY DEVELOPMENT Morphology ? A system of rules for combining the smallest units of language into words. Morpheme ? The smallest element in a language that carries meaning. Bound morphemes ? Prefixes and Suffixes Free morphemes - words Derivational morphology ? The process that creates new words by adding certain suffixes or prefixes to existing words (Such as dance+er=dancer) Inflectional morphology ? The structure of words that results from combining word roos with endings that mark grammatical relations, such as the ?s at the end of verbs to mark the agreement with the third person subject (he runs) or the ?ed at the end of verbs to mark the past tense. Semantic predictability ? Can figure out meanings from components. Productivity of morphemes ? Extent to which it is possible to ass to any member of class can do with novel words (e.g. frindle) Allomorphs (also known as allomorphemes) ? Version of a morpheme that depend on phonological environment (Plural/Past tense) Acquisition of inflections in inflectionally rich vs. inflectionally impoverished languages Kiparsky's Level Order Model of Morphology Acquisitional predictions of Kiparsky's model Berko Wug test U-shaped developmental curve Overregularization:  rule-based vs. connectionist accounts Goodluck 3 HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Goodluck3.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Goodluck3.pdf Goodluck 4:   HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Goodluck_4.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Goodluck_4.pdf Professor Stromswold?s Morphological Development Lecture Notes HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/MorphAcq_notes.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/MorphAcq_notes.pdf SYNTAX DEVELOPMENT (Grammar learning) Transition from 1 -> 2 word utterances ? 1. Vertical constructions: successive, semantically related one word utterances Child: Want Child: Cookie Want and Cookie separated by a pause. Intonational contours of 2 utterances 2. Unanalyzed routines: ?Iwanna? ?Idunno? ?Somemore? 3. Word + jargon: mmm+cookies 2 word acquisitional stage Pivot grammars (= lexically based 'grammars') ? All + ____. All Broke, All Buttoned, All Done, All Dry/ More + ____. More Car, More Cookie, More Hot, More Read Semantic (thematic) relations grammars ? Combine words, but the meanings of the words that can combine are limited. Agent+Action ?Daddy sit, Kitty bite Action+Object - Drive car, Eat Cookie Agent+Object - Mommy sock Action+Location ? Sit Floor Entity+Location ? Toy Floor Possesor+Possession ? My Tedy, Mommy dress Entity+Atrribute ? Crayon big Demonstrative+Entity ? That Cookie, This ball Acquisition of syntactic categories Semantic bootstrapping ? The theory that the correspondence between semantic and syntactic categories provides the language-learning child entry into grammatical systems. Learn the privileges and restrictions of nouns by learning them for semantically clear cases Phonological/prosodic bootstrapping ? Language learning children find and use clues to the syntactic structure of language in phonological properties of the speech they hear. Nouns ? first syllable stressed, Verbs ? second syllable stressed.                   Correlational learner Telegraphic speech ? typical of two year old children that includes primary content words and omits such grammatical morphemes as determiners and endings on nouns and verbs. So named because the result sounds like sentences adults use in writing telegrams. Open (lexical) vs. closed class (functional) morphemes Brown's 14 grammatical morphemes ? SEE NOTES MLU (= mean length of utterance) ? Better than chronological age for predicting how developed a child?s grammar is (i.e. if we know the average length of a child?s sentences in words, we can guess fairly well what types of things the child will be doing in terms of syntax) Syntactic stages (as measured by MLU)   Syntactic categories ? Formal categories, A word is a member of a particular syntactic category if it has the grammatical privileges and restrictions associated with that syntactic category. Member in a category is not determined by meaning of a word. Noun, verb, adjective, preposition, article, sentence Phrases ?The identity of a phrase is determined by the syntactic category of its head (ie a NP is NP because it?s head is a N) NP VP PP S Rewrite rules ? S=> NP VP VP=>V (NP) (PP) PP=> P NP NP=> (D) (ADJ)* N Grammatical trees ? Like a family tree see book. Predicates - a function that requires a certain number of phrases. Arguments ? A phrase that is an argument is required by its predicates Adjuncts ? A phrase that is an argument is optional D-structure ? Deep structure. The underlying form of a sentence S-structure ? Surface Structure. The actual sentence that is said. Transformations ? A series of actions by which the deep structure is transformed into the surface structure. Acquisition of questions in English                   Intonational questions ? Questions lack auxiliary verbs, but have intonation of questions.                   Auxiliary-less questions                   Do-support                   Subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI)                   SAI in yes/no questions                   SAI in wh-questions                   SAI in argument vs adjunct wh-questions                   SAI in embedded questions  (won?t be tested on 2nd hourly)                   SAI in how come questions (won?t be tested on 2nd hourly)                   Structure dependence of SAI (won?t be tested on 2nd hourly)                   Bellugi's stages in question acquisition                   Problems with Bellugi?s theory                   no vs. not Continuity (iceberg) acquisitional theories ? Childrens grammars are fundamentally the same as adults, their competence is the same Discontinuity (tadpole) acquisitional theories ? Children?s grammars mature or unfold over time based on a genetically pre-specific, linguistically-specific biological program. Maturational theories of language acquisition Principles & Parameters Theory of Syntax Acquisition Optimality Theory & Syntax Acquisition Goodluck 4:   HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Goodluck_4.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Goodluck_4.pdf Goodluck 5:   HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/Goodluck_5.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/Goodluck_5.pdf Professor Stromswold?s Syntax Development Lecture Notes HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/SyntaxAcq_notes.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/SyntaxAcq_notes.pdf Professor Stromswold?s Discourse/Pragmatics Development Lecture Notes HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/DiscoursePrag_notes.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/DiscoursePrag_notes.pdf SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISTION (SLA) & BILINGUALISM Second language acquisition vs. bilingualism ? Second language Acquisition ? Someone learns one language (L1) and then learns a second language (L2). Bilingualism ? Learning 2 languages at the same time. Critical period ? biologically determined period during which language acquisition must occur. SLA & phonology ? Age of exposure is critical, number of years of exposure has little effect. SLA & syntax ? Johnson and Newport Study Contrastive analysis hypothesis ? L2 learners will have trouble learning exactly those aspects of L2 that are different from L1 Markedness account ? Languages differ in the values they have for different aspects of language. Some of these values are more ?marked? than others typologically. There is an implicational hierarchy such that languages that have the marked value will also have unmarked value. Cognitive accounts - Interlanguage Aculturation ? People who are learning an L2 because they want to fit in do better than those learning for pragmatic reasons such as getting a job Pedagogy (teaching) of SLA ? Places little emphasis on the role of explicit instruction Natural order Bilingualism Do bilinguals have 1 language or 2? ? 2 distinct languages. Language mixing & codeswitching Bilingualism & the rate of acquisition ? 1. at the same age, bilingual children?s vocabularies in both languages are the same as children who are monolingual speakers of each of the two languages. 2. at the same age, bilingual children?s vocabularies in each of their two languages are about half that of monolingual speakers of the two languages. TRUTH somewhere in between Blingualism & cognitive development ? 1. It hurts 2. It has great cognitive benefits. TRUTH being bilingual promotes children?s met linguistic development, their ability to consciously think about language. Professor Stromswold?s Bilingualism Development Lecture Notes HYPERLINK "http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/%7Ekarin/BilingSLA_notes.pdf" http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/BilingSLA_notes.pdf LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN OLDER CHILDREN - NOTES Late phonological acquisition:                   accents & dialects                   phonological awareness                   phonemic awareness ? very important for literacy and a good predictor of future reading skills                   reading & phonemic awareness Late lexical learning                   Quick Incidental Learning                   Explicit learning vs. learning from context Late morphological learning                   derivational morphology is later than inflectional morphology                   compounding  Late syntactic learning: complex sentence & ?Control? sentences Late pragmatic/discourse learning:  coherence & cohesion Reading & Literacy Professor Stromswold?s Language Development in Older Children Lecture Notes