Language development in childhood and bilingualism

Question 1

Nature vs nurture?

Answer 1

• Nature: Language-specific areas of the brain
  
  • how much is hard-wired is subject to debate
• Nurture: Early exposure to language is critical
  
  • how much and what type of language is subject to debate

Question 2

what is Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device?

Answer 2

• Learning/experience cannot account for all aspects of language acquisition.
• Children must have innate knowledge of language: AKA Universal Grammar
• This is a nativist theory of language acquisition.
• Two key arguments:
  
  • Speed and uniformity of development
  • Poverty of the stimulus

Question 3

Speed and uniformity of development?

Answer 3

• Children acquire language quickly
• Early comprehension suggests early knowledge
• Children’s early language follows rules
• Universal stages of development
  
  • Even though input differs between individuals

Question 4

Poverty of the stimulus?

Answer 4

• Input language is not always grammatical
• Input language does not provide sufficient information
• Parents do not correct errors or explain language

Question 5

Experience-based language development?

Answer 5

• Language is a behaviour learned entirely from the environment, there is no innate knowledge/abilities
  
  • Interaction-based – learning from social interactions, learning closely matches the input
  • Connectionist/statistical-based – language is learnt by tracking the nature of the input, finding patterns in the language
• Language is learned through cognitive and social processes:
  
  • Statistical learning
  • Infant-directed speech
  • Interaction and implicit correction

Question 6

Interaction and implicit correction?

Answer 6

• Parent’s rarely explicitly correct their child’s errors
  Correction is rarely successful:
  Theo: Hold this robot very carefully as it doesn’t have to [mustn’t] be breaked

  Me: Broken

  Theo: Or breaked! (with emphasis)
• But parents provides indirect feedback to correct errors: recasting:
  Alex: I had all my breakfast and I drinked up all the milk
  Dad: You drank the whole bowl?

Question 7

How do children learn to combine words?

Answer 7

• Languages have structure and sentences have structure
• Which sentence sounds better?
  
  • Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
  • Sleep green furiously ideas colourless
• We can represent these structures in ‘tree’ diagrams.
• Speakers acquire and store representations of structure based on abstract categories.
• These structures have ‘rules’ – syntax.

Question 8

what are the difference hypotheses on How do children learn to combine words?

Answer 8

• Different hypotheses:
  
  • Children are born with innate knowledge of basic language rules or basic processes to support language acquisition.
  • This allows them to acquire abstract syntax rules very early
  • Children have to learn the language rules from their experience with language.
  • This takes time and is a gradual process, thought to be linked to words early on and gradually extended to abstract rules.

Question 9

Combining words in comprehension?

Answer 9

• Preferential looking methods:
  
  • Children watch two videos of different events.
  • Children hear sentences that match one video – they have to use the sentence structure to understand which video is referred to.
  • Preferential-looking measures looking time – people tend to look at the stimuli that best matches what they think they’re hearing.

Question 10

what did Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon study?

Answer 10

• The eyes have it: Lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm.
• Tested toddlers aged 2 years 4 months
• Preferential looking task
• Toddlers look reliably longer at matching video
• 17-month-olds also pass the same test

Question 11

what did Naigles 1990 study?

Answer 11

• Children use syntax to learn verb meanings.
• Tested toddlers aged 2 years 1 months
• Preferential looking task
• Toddles looked longer at the matching video even when the sentence had a made-up word.
• 19-month-olds pass the same kind of test too

Question 12

what did Akhtar 1999 study?

Answer 12

• Acquiring basic word order: Evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure
• Tested 2- to 4-year-olds in ‘Weird Word Order’ tasks.
• Children are taught a new verb in a ‘weird’ word order (e.g. VSO)
  
  • “Tams[V] Elmo[S] the car[O]” meaning ‘Elmo ‘catapulted’ the car’
• Test – when prompted, do children use the new word as they have experienced it (VSO)?
• Nurture: Early exposure to language is critical
  
  • “Tams Elmo the car”
• Or, do children use the new word with English word order (SVO)
  
  • “Elmo tams the car”
• Results:
  
  • 4-year-olds used English not ‘weird’ word order
  • 2-/3-year-olds copied weird word order with new word but not familiar words.

Question 13

Combining words in production?

Answer 13

• Syntactic priming is the (unconscious) repetition of syntactic structure (but not lexical content) across successive utterances (and speakers).
• Syntactic priming is related to activation of abstract representations of syntactic structures

Question 14

what did Branigan & Messenger, (2016) study?

Answer 14

• Consistent and cumulative effects of syntactic experience in children’s sentence production.
• Tested 3- to 4-year-olds
• Syntactic priming picture description task
• Results:
  
  • Children produced more passive structures when they heard passive primes than when they heard active primes

Question 15

How do children learn to use language?

Answer 15

• What do the following mean (literally)? How does this compare to what we mean we say them?
  
  • Can you pass the salt?
  • (after something bad happens) Oh great! That’s just what I need!
  • What do you get if you cross a kangaroo with a sheep? A woolly jumper

Question 16

Referring expressions?

Answer 16

• What’s the difference in meaning between these two sentences?
  
  • “Look, there’s a cat” “Look, there’s the cat”
• 14-month-old children understand distinctions in reference
  
  • Where is the other toy?
  • Can you give it to me?
• 7-year-old children make mistakes producing reference:
  
  • There’s the cat (a new cat)
  • Look at the cat. The cat is having some milk.

Question 17

Bi- (Multi-) lingualism?

Answer 17

• Simultaneous bi- (multi-) lingualism: two languages at the same time.
• Sequential bi- (multi-) lingualism: one language first, a second added later
• Balanced bi- (multi-) lingualism: equal competence in both
• Heritage language speaker: heritage (minority) language is first language, societal (majority) language as second language.
• Bilingual vocabulary may lag behind vocabulary in monolingual speakers.
• Bilingual (total) vocabularies do not differ when both languages are combined. (Hoff et al., 2011)

Question 18

what is the Unitary language hypothesis (Volterra & Taeschner, 1978)?

Answer 18

• bilingual children do not distinguish their two languages at early stages of development:
  
  • Children have one language system, including lexicon.
  • Children have two lexicons but one syntax system.
  • Children have two separate lexicons and two separate syntax systems.

Question 19

what is Language mixing?

Answer 19

• evidence for unitary language hypothesis:
• Bilingual children mix languages
• Some studies suggest mixing decreases with age
• Mixing languages could be evidence that children do not separate their two languages.

Question 20

Bilingualism: one system or two?

Answer 20

• Language mixing is not evidence of confusion
  
  • Bilingual children mix languages because they are still acquiring the vocabulary in both languages (Genesee & Nicoladis, 2006).
  • Mixing languages is common amongst bilinguals, including adults (code switching)
    
    • Children do it because adults do.
    • Children do it because it serves important communicative functions.

Question 21

what are the systems theories?

Answer 21

• Autonomous systems theory / separate development hypothesis
  
  • Children learn two languages independently.
  • The two languages have limited influence on each other.
• Interdependent systems theory
  
  • Children’s development of one language influences the development of the other.
  • The two language systems interact.

Question 22

what is the Crosslinguistic influence?

Answer 22

• Where languages differ in some way (particularly syntax, morphology and pragmatics), children’s language production in one language resembles elements of the other language.
• Italian is a pro-drop language – pronouns are not expressed.
  
  • “Mangia la torta” – ‘eats cake”
• In English, pronouns are obligatory.
  
  • “He eats cake”
• Italian bilingual children produce more pronouns in Italian than Italian monolingual children.

Question 23

what is Crosslinguistic syntactic priming

Answer 23

• The repetition of syntactic structures across utterances and across languages.
• Vasilyeva et al., 2013: Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children.
  
  • Tested 65 English-Spanish bilingual 5-year-olds.
  • Crosslinguistic priming of passives – have overlapping syntax in English and Spanish.