Lecture 3 & 4 Flashcards
(67 cards)
Williams Syndrome
- Spontaneous deletion of
small segment of 7th chromosome - average IQ = 55
- poor coordination
- hoarse voice
- “Pixie” or “elfin” face, heart and aorta problems,
hyperacute hearing. - Extremely friendly, “affinity” for music.
- Low intelligence, high linguistic capacity
Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
- Normal intelligence, specific linguistic issues
- Apparently affecting 8-9% of the population
Why does Eric Lenneberg claim that language happens to everybody?
- No conscious decision is involved
- All human communities have language
- Little direct instruction needed
- Language emerges in spite of many deficits
- independent of general intelligence
What is tense development in SLI?
- Typically developing
children use tense
consistently by age 4 - Children with SLI lag
up to age 8
Who is Christopher? What is his story?
- A language savant studied by Neil Smith and Ianthi Tsimpli
- Brain damaged but with remarkable gift for language
- Unable to pass the false belief task (traditionally used for diagnosis of autistic children)
- Unable to learn logically possible artificial languages that violate principles of natural language
Emerges at the
same rate and end up with the same result
regardless of teaching or intensive practice
Biologically determined behaviors
If Language acquisition is a biologically determined behavior, what does this mean?
It shouldn’t be
much affected by correction. Nor should it reduce
to simple imitation.
What is evidence for language acquisition being a biologically determined behavior?
- Quantity/quality of correction varies but children
get to the same place anyway - Children are pretty impervious to direct
correction.
What is motherese?
slower, exaggerated pitch, hyperarticulated, more
“careful”
- children may prefer it
- it is not needed for acquisition
- grammatically complex
What does linguistic knowledge comprise?
- units (phonemes, morphemes, words…)
- rules for combining them
Rules of language are
what?
generalizations about patterns
How do children acquire a language?
by hypothesizing rules
and then trying them out.
A human child’s brain does what?
- Follows its own agenda in acquiring language.
- observes adult language, but pays little attention to
correction and it does not simply imitate.
When do you need environmental input in regards to critical periods?
You need environmental input at the right age,
within the critical period.
What are the steps in acquisition?
Step 1: Hear adult language.
Step 2: Hypothesize a rule R 0 to account for some
aspect of adult language.
Step 3: Speak using rule R 0.
Step 4: Go back to Step 1, but this time try to
improve rule R 0, replacing it by R 1, to better fit adult language
What is the wug experiment?
A test designed to investigate the acquisition of plural-formation and other rules of grammar. A child is presented with an imaginary object and is told, ‘This is a wug’. Then a second instance is presented, and the child is asked what the two are called. The correct answer is wugs, pronounced with a voiced /z/ sound, as in dogs, because the plural-forming letter follows a voiced consonant /g/. After a voiceless consonant such as /t/, the plural-forming letter should be a voiceless /s/, as in cats, and after a sibilant, an additional syllable should have a voiced /z/, as in verses.
What does it mean by “two steps forward, one step back” in regards to children’s language acquisition?
Sometimes the child seems to
have things right,
but later gets them wrong,
and later gets them right
again. The correction parabola shows this.
What does NOT facilitate language acquisition for all human children?
imitation and correction
What does language consist of?
units (phonemes, morphemes,
words etc.) and rules for combining them
How do children infer rules?
by generalizing from data
Language acquisition happens to all human children under _______________.
normal circumstances
When does language acquisition start?
extremely early; in the womb
How does language acquisition start in the womb?
unborn children hear their mother’s language
and notice general properties
What happens to language acquisition after birth?
After birth, children rapidly develop a sense for what distinctions
matter for the language(s) they’re exposed to
