4: Constructivist Approach to Early Multi-Word Speech

Question 1

What is the other common phrase used to describe the constructivist approach?

Answer 1

usage-based

Question 2

define: syntax

Answer 2

The ways in which a language allows words to be combined to be understood

Question 3

How does syntax allow for productivity?

Answer 3

with a finite set of words we can produce an infinite number of possible sentences.

Question 4

Is language species specific?

Answer 4

yes, there is little evidence other primates can acquire syntax even with intensive training.

Question 5

is language species universal?

Answer 5

yes, virtually all children have acquired the majority of the grammar of their language by 5yrs

Question 6

what are early word combinations like?

Answer 6

Mainly content words, easily understood in context, creative, and observe adult word-order

Question 7

define: schema

Answer 7

patterns of thinking and behaviour that people use to interpret the world

Question 8

In what way is early speech productive?

Answer 8

children say multi-word combinations they have never heard before in that order

Question 9

What are the 3 ain ways children learn words in the constructivist approach?

Answer 9

Communicative intention-reading
Drawing analogies/ seeing similarities
Distributional learning/ pattern finding

Question 10

What is the role of routines in the constructivist approach to word learning?

Answer 10

Routines allow children to predict what happens next and therefore what the language they are hearing might refer to.

Question 11

what is the verb-island hypothesis?

Answer 11

Knowledge of grammar tied to individual verbs until 2½- 3yrs.
Child initially unable to generalise between verbs with similar meanings or used in similar sentence types.

Question 12

what is structure combining?

Answer 12

How children’s utterances build on what they have previously said

Question 13

what are the 3 ways children change past utterances to form new ones

Answer 13

substitution, addition or drop (removal) of words

Question 14

define: semantic analogy

Answer 14

Children need to learn a number of verbs before they can recognise similarities between them and begin to build more general schemas.

Question 15

How do overlap in meaning help with word construction?

Answer 15

similarity helps children link new phrases to old ones so the know how to use new words

Question 16

define: distributional learning

Answer 16

The ability to learn the co-occurrence characteristics of the input, i.e. which words occur together or in similar contexts (eg noun and verb endings)

Question 17

What role do pronouns have in distributional learning?

Answer 17

Pronouns helped children extract a more abstract representation of the Subject Verb-Object sentence structure for use with novel (unfamiliar) verbs

Question 18

At what age do children start to combine words together?

Answer 18

18-24 month