Lecture 12 Flashcards
(45 cards)
why we didn’t know a whole lot about individual differences in language development
individual differences got swept under the rug to a degree
they focused on finding linguistic universals: overall patterns that held across cultures and SES
we didn’t know that much about language acquisition: had to characterized usual/typical patterns before looking at variability around those patterns
• If all kids acquire language similarly
(assumption), then studying one kid in depth
was a good method
• So they would pick a kid with clear articulation so you can study what they’re saying (‘jargon’ kids hard to transcribe)
• Advanced/imitative things kid said dismissed
as anomalous
then, child language become interested in more than just syntax
people starting looking at: learning meaning, sound patterns of words
researchers looked at more “jargon-y” kids
deviations from some “perfect universal pattern” became more evident
researchers looked at kids from varied languages and socioeconomic backgrounds: do we see patterns or differences?
referential vs. expressive style
clearly expressed (good single word, highly articulate) language vs. fluent language but not as intelligible utterances (more jargon-y)
segmentation
how they break up words
how they learn things as chunks: is “mrrogers” a single word? or are there other mrs?
early sentences
two word stage: fix noun and then another noun
formulas: pronoun, verb, noun, “me eat”, “Sarah eat.”
kids use slightly diff formulas but using formals is a common pattern across kids
referential vs. expressive
diary study from Nelson
17 kids in a diary study (where you give the parents a diary and have them write down all the things kids say over a period of time)
looked at the child’s first 50 words
divided into two general classes: referential and expressive
referential kids (who were origionally mostly focused on) who are more referential tend to talk about things using words to categorize the environment and expressive kids using language more as a tool for socialization (communicating with other people): the two types have diff hypothesis for what language is for
referential kids
n=10
mostly words for object
went from 1 to 2 word stage
spurt of words near 50 word level
spurt preceded syntactic combos
talked a lot about objects
language used to categorize the world!
problems with Nelson’s distinction conclusion drawn from the referential vs. expressive diary study
1) she was using parental report: parents are overly generous in the things kids are saying, they tend overreport nouns
2) composition of lexicon (mental dictionary) vs. word frequency (there could be words that they know but that they don’t use very much = difficult to detect those words that they know but don’t use often)
- likely to miss low frequency words (didn’t produce words within earshot)
- two kids could look the same, but use that word differently depending on who the kid is
3) criteria to decide type of word kid’s using
- Nelson’s criteria for ‘noun’ mixed form (‘dog’ = noun) and function (saying ‘dog’ to get a doggie-ride = verb)
- just because our understanding of what a noun is what it is, doesn’t mean that that’s the kid’s understanding of that word’s function
expressive kids
n=7
fewer object words, more pronouns and function words
social phrases (go away, stop it)
less clear transition to syntactic combos
no word spurt
using language for socializing and communicating with other people
different ways people characterize variation referential vs. expressive dimension
referential words…….expressive words
code-oriented (how language is used to mean particular things)…….message-oriented
more nouns……more phrases
analytic strategy (break things down into component parts)……..holistic strategy (try to produce overall forms)
noun combos (early word combos noun+noun) or…….pronominal combos (pronoun + noun)
segmentation
frozen phrases?
- what does the kid use as independent words?
- may say “little red wagon,” but to the kid it might be “littleredwagon”(expressive style) is one, solid object (frozen phrases): are they naming all the component parts or is it just one object?
• possibly related to ‘cautious’ vs. ‘risk-taking’ phonology
- cautious: use rule system religiously or avoid words that they can’t say (referential)
• you’re more accurate if you produce shorter words
- risk-taking: ‘sloppy’ phonology, less clear rule system, more likely to use imitated forms (less worried about getting it right) (expressive)
= neither strategy is faster for acquiring vocabulary
early sentences
bloom, lightbown, & hood
observed 4 kids doing 2 word combinations
found that all produced negation (“no socks” because they’re not wearing socks, or “no more beans” i don’t want any more beans) / nonexistence, recurrence (“more beans” because they want beans)
- no + X, no more + X - more + X -pivot word strategy (two word formula = function word (no, no more, more) +content (noun or verb))
different in expressing action and location
function words
fewer of them, they’re closed class
pronoun, preposition, article, negatition
early sentences
eric and peter pivot word strategy for location and possession
action, location, possession w/pivot word strategy
- articule I + X
e. g. “I eat” - location: X + here
e. g. sit here, eat here, sleep here - possession: My + X
e. g. “my Gijoe” - pronominal strategy: have a formula with one fixed value and one that you fill in
early sentences
Kathryn and Gia
combined content words that were not fixed
- “Gia push”, “Kathryn sock”
- nominal strategy: combining two content words (noun+noun)
early sentences
around MLU of 2.5….
…. the patterns converged (nominal and pronominal strategies became one)
maybe these early differences end up coming back to the same place later in language development
how stable are these individual differences?
or do they happen randomly and everyone ends up in the same place eventually
pronominal strategy-using kids end up also using nouns and vice versa
Stability
Nelson experiment
once kids hit 2-word speech:
- the referential kids started with lots of nouns (nominal strategy users)
- expressive kids mixed nouns and pronouns
(pronominal strategy users)
Stability
Starr - 1975
‘object’ kids do object-attribute relations more in 2-word speech
e.g. “Yummy cake”
Stability
Bates 1988
27 kids from 10-28 months: longitudinal study
- kids that were analytic at 13 mos –> advanced grammar @ 28 mos
- holistic style @ 13 months, their level of language development was uninformative as to their performance at 28 months
Pine and Lieven disagree with Bates
11 to 20 months: kids who start out with more frozen phrases at 11 months–> produce more productive word combos at 20 months
more consistent with words breaking down frozen phrases
Peters uniting: different strategies are useful
fission (if you start out doing frozen phrases you can break those down into individual words)
and fusion (if you start out with individual words you can put them together)
both useful!
in adult speech we do a little bit of both: we use chunks of over learned words/phrases and we also use word-word combos
Sources of variation
- the child itself (the nature part: individual differences that would show up reliably regardless of the environment)
- child’s input (the nurture part: if they get more complex input vs. less input that makes a difference)
- type of language being learned (structure of the particular language)
- variety of other people, social situations (most studied is maternal speech, though)
- mom-to-kid: direct, converse, instruct (stable differences across moms, related to child speech)
- directing: fewer nouns, more verbs, and social interaction (vs. routinized naming games)
- refer/describe, request objects: more nouns
sources of variation
variability in learning rate
- first word around 1st birthday to 18 months
- not related to referential/expressive dimension
