Lecture 10 Flashcards
ambiguous language
attachment ambiguity
the policeman hit the thief with the stick
the policeman hit the thief with the wart
temporary ambiguity because you don’t know how you’re going to attach the prepositional phrase until you get to the end of the sentence
chomskian grammar positive attribute
provide a falsifiable hypothesis: something you can figure out whether it is true or not: it’s testable
do we study production or comprehension?
some study one or the other and the data is consistent across the two
best approaches: naturalistic observation AND controlled laboratory studies
comprehension research
comprehension studies in controlled lab: try to get kids to talk about particular things or get them to produce specific kinds of sounds
production research
combo of both naturalistic and lab studies
characterizing production
Brown: mean length of utterance (MLU)
MLU: how many morphemes does the kid produce per speech event?
morpheme examples
- squeeze kitty = 2 morphemes
- dogs = 2 morphemes
- squeezING kittIES = 4 morphemes (because of the suffixes)
- must show evidence of productivity:
- stages in development with syntax
evidence of productivity
- kitty for one cat and kitties for multiple cats NOT kitties for one or multiple cats
- misterrogers: are there other Misters?
MLU stage I
telegraphic speech
sometimes “two word” stage
between 1-2 morphemes
problems with MLU
may not work for certain languages that have diff structure than english
ex: synthetic language: where a single morpheme is actually multiple pieces of meaning
- ex in english: her: I gave her the example (two pieces of info in one word: telling you female person and object case)
- polish: the same word form carries different pieces of meaning (hard to say what piece of meaninig the kid knows and is using)
Scarborough’s index of productive syntax
newer alternative to MLU
telegraphic speech
1) novel utterances, things that the kids are drawing from their own heads, not a mimic of adult form: never hear adults say these things
- sort of like text messaging: “Abby down!” instead of “I would like to get down from this chair”
2) built around schemas (templates, formulas)
- fixed order, but one word changes (ex: “Gimme X”, or something built around “no”)
3) more open class than closed class
- CC sooner in more morphologically complex language
4) small range of “semantic relations” (small range of meanings that they can express)
5) limited scope formulae
open class words
content words
nouns, verbs, adj, adverbs
types of words that are “open” to introduction of new words: you can introduce new nouns/verbs no problem
you can add them and add them: we keep learning them are entire lives
closed class words
function words
articles (a, on, the), prepositions (with, on, around), auxiliary verbs (was/were)
types of words that are “closed” to introduction of new members (when’s the last time you learned a preposition? - betwixt)
get used a lot more than open class words - maybe that makes them more resistant to change
Bloom’s semantic relations
- Agent + action: “Hulk smash!”
- Action +object “Smash table!”
- Agent+object “Abby food!”
- Acton+ location “Put table” (put the sunglasses on the table
- Entity + location “Sunglasses table” (put the sunglasses on the table)
- Possessor + possession”Abby toy!”
- Entity + attribute”Sunglasses black”
- Demonstrative + entity”that sunglasses” (Those are sunglasses)
Brown’s first 14 morphemes
- ing
- prepositions (in, on)
- plural -s
- irregular past tense (lent went)
- possessive’s
Why? It has to do with syntactic and semantic complexity = number of meanings, number of rules acquired
can kids generalize the use of a morpheme?
Berko’s “wug test”
passing the test means you have learn what the morphemes mean for particular things
show kids a drawing of a little creature that was a “wug” and then show them two of these novel items
“This is a wug. These are two ____” (plural s)
“This man like to rick. He is ____” (prog. ing)
kids produce the plural “s” = they are productively using morphemes
overregularization
blowed up, mouses
extended morpheme to unheard contexts
they aren’t repeating what they’ve heard from adults, they know that adding “s” pluralizes a word
kids are intrinsically rule learners? = nativist views of language
is overregularization evidence for the primacy of rule learning?
nativist views of language
Irregular verbs and evidence for overregularization as nativist (specific language module)
- Ullman ‘01 Pinker:
- Ullman’s “declarative procedural model”:
- regulars: form by rules (walk+ed, don’t store walked just stored the rule)
- irregulars: must store past tense individually (run and ran)
Stage II
grammatical morphemes start appearing
later stages
various types of sentences (sentence modalities)
- before this, kids use intonation to indicate questions: “ that hurt Mommy’s feelings?” (intonation) - Later: “ Did that hurt Mommy’s feelings” (grammatical
sentence modalities
- negatives
- single clause questions
- negative questions
- long distance questions
at what point do they achieve adult like grammar in these constructions?
focus is on achieving adult-like grammar in these constructions, not just being able to communicate the underlying idea
negatives
Bellugi
1) initially the marker “no” is outside the sentence (outside clause)
2) then, inside sentence but no auxiliary verb : Abby no eat!
3) Finally, (~Stage V) different aux’s – adult! “Abby will not eat” or “Abby does not eat”
