Language Development- Multi Word Utternces Flashcards
Children’s first sentences
-children’s early multi word combinations are shorter, simpler sentences
-tend to omit obligatory words/ word endings eg cow ear instead of the cow is eating
-inflections eg producing he like instead of he likes
Nature
-some of the linguistic knowledge of human beings is not acquired or learned form sensory experience
-learning is only a process of recollection
Nurture
-human beings acquire all of most of their linguistic knowledge in a sense based way
-what we do know is that there is no doubt innate biases but not necessarily linguistic knowledge. Similar pattern detection mechanisms for visual and linguistic processing
Constructivist theories- usage based theory
The role of distributional analysis/ statistical learning and semantic analogy
Generative linguistic theory
-what is claimed to be innate?
The logical problem of language acquisition
-the knowledge acquired is complex
What data is available to show the knowledge acquired for language acquisition is complex
-children received impoverished inputs
-they dont hear every possible sentence
-they get very little feedback about grammar- parents mostly correct what is untrue rather than ungrammatical
-children often ignore feedback and correction
The nativist solution
-innate linguistic knowledge
-the universal knowledge is said to guide the child in constructing the language from the input
-information from environment> language acquisition device (unconscious process inside child’s mind used only for learning language) language acquisition
Linguistic nativist/ generative assumptions
Children approach the language learning problem with significant innate language specific knowledge- a universal grammar
Negative evidence
Different ways to discover a sentence is ungrammatical
Directly - someone tells you
Pragmatically- you try to use it and no one understands you
Indirectly- you never observe that sentence
How are children’s errors explained
-children do have a full set of principles form birth but errors are caused by performance limitations eg smaller working memory or limited attention span
-also that children’s competence is underestimated
Usage based/ émergentsit approaches
-an empiricist approach: children’s input contains information of sufficient quality and quantity to support acquisition
-children apply general learning mechanisms to linguistic input
-children have access to indirect feedback and distributional evidence in correcting errors
-so humans are born with innate biases to communicate and have innate learning mechanisms for extracting patterns and generalist
Usage based theories
- communicative intention reading
-statistical/ distributional learning
-semantic analogy
-schema combination
Communicative intention reading
The ability to understand intention
Important for correct interpretation and to learn the correct meaning of a sentence
Statistica/ distributional learning
Children analyse the distributions of words in the sentence. Use the distributional patterns from the input in their learning
Semantic analogy
The ability to compare (analogies) across different construction. Work out what commonalities they share
Schéma combination
After analysing the words in a sentence. Linking words that behave in similar ways. Then extracting the patterns and creating schémas. A model/ outline of the structures of our language and how they fit together
Learning syntactic patterns
-the child begins by learning a number of phrases directly from the input
-these phrases share a similar meaning so they are linked (eg want)
This lexicale specific schema is then used with any item
Nativism : universal grammar
-language is too complicated to be learned solely from input
-a lot os innate within the language acquisition device
-learning mechanisms are domain specific
-linguistic representation: rules, generative grammar
-the role of input: minimal, serves to set the parameters
Child directed speech
-exaggerated intonation contours
-higher than usual pitch
-in talking to their children, mothers paused at the ends of sentences
-adults repeat themselves a lot when talking to children
CDS of mothers vs fathers
-both modify their speech prosodically when speaking to infants
-men/ fathers may make less prosodic modifications
-fathers may use more rare vocabulary
Can children learn from tv and radio?
-speech isn’t tailored to children
-no joint focus of attention
-little speech focuses on objects that are physically present
-little hope to children in mapping meanings onto forms
-may be harder to segment- rapid speech
What id CDS good for
-getting and maintaining attention
-highlighting structure
-acoustic properties of CDS make it easier to recognise in noisy environment
-infants more able to discriminate vowels and attend to statistical properties of speech when presented in CDS
-single word utterances may help segmentation and word learning
Characteristics of CDS (child directed speech)
-phonology
-lexicon
-morpho syntax
-pragmatics
