PSY2004 W6 Learning to use sentences & Atypical language development (L) Flashcards
What is Grammar?
most powerful tools of langauge. Enables us to combine the words of our langauge in different ways so that they can convey different meanings. No limit on the nb of different utterances we can produce. There are two key components to grammar syntax adn morphology.
What types deafness exist?
sensorineural deafness, auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, conductive deafness
What are developmental language disorder?
A language impairment that cannot be explained by hearing loss, other developmental disorders or brain injury and is causing a functional problem is classified as Developmental Language Disorder
What is syntax?
The branch of grammar dealing with the organisation of words into large structures.
How is syntactic development tested?
Novel words are used to test knowledge of syntax. Two years old, the child can already understand the role of word order in a sentence.
What is morphology?
The branch of grammar dealing with the analysis of word structure.
In English we use inflectional morphology to mark things like: tense, person, number, possession
How do you know when children understand the function of inflectional morphemes?
Eliciting natural speech that calls for different morphemes and to notice if they are using those.
What is the usual developmental trajectory of morphological productivity?
- discover an inflection (before which time they make errors of omission)
- begin to over apply the inflection (He blewed it up, I like mouses – overregularalisations)
- manage to balance applying inflections productively and remembering exceptions
Developmental trajectory reflects the statistical structure of the input (ring-rang, sing sang). Neural Network (connectionist) models capture this sequence.
What is the nativist appraoch?
Chomsky
Reacted against the ideas of Saussure, Skinner and Piaget.
Argued children cannot learn by creatively copying what they hear around them because of:
* The poverty of the stimulus problem
* The no negative evidence problem
What is universal grammar?
Nativist approach
Grammatical categories and principles (rules) used to generate the grammatical sentences of the world’s languages.
UG is constantly being revised but is still proposed to be innate and available to guide language acquisition from the start.
What are some problems of the unversial grammar concept?
what innate knowledge makes up UG (just recursion?)
how children could use it to learn the specific language(s) they are exposed to (out of >6,000 world languages).
Little consideration of possible learning algorithms or child as social being.
What does the contructivist appraoch argue for?
Argue there is no problem of the poverty of the stimulus nor of no negative evidence: grammar is learnable based on children’s considerable capacity for statistical learning from social interaction (therefore the proposal of an innate grammar is redundant)
Gained popularity as larger corpora (databases of transcribed speech) have become available along with the computational linguistic tools to analyse them
What does the constructivist appraoch emphasises on?
social context of development.
learning mechanisms: Intention reading, imitation, statistical learning, generalization, analogy making
What is the problem with the constructivist approach?
While increasingly popular, no fully worked out account of how different learning mechanisms interact to allow children to creatively produce language based on what they have previously heard.
What are pragrmatics?
That component of language whereby we vary the linguistic forms we use according to the people we are speaking with and the context we find ourselves.
Effective and appropriate language use with a social partner - using language in such a way that one’s communicative goals are achieved without giving offense or causing misunderstanding (Ninio & Snow, 1996)
What is morris’ semiotic triangle?
Real world condition <> Signs <pragmatics> Speaer/Listerner <></pragmatics>
What do pragmatic skills involve?
Context, intentions and information processing
How is context involved in pragmatic skills?
Tuning into the interlocutor’s state and aspects of the physical context relevant to our current endeavour and to what is in common ground
How is intention involved in pragmatic skills?
Being mutually aware of the effect our communicative acts have – understanding communicative intentions. Inferring what someone meant given what they said
How is human information processing involved in pragmatic skills?
Making multiple communicative moves in sequence as a conversation unfolds over time. The nature of human information processing is such that there are more or less efficient ways of talking about something and languages have even evolved special devices that help us to manage a steady information flow over the course of a conversation.
How do children respond to feedback?
Reference in context
Although children often refer to things ambiguously, they respond well to requests for clarification.
Repairing utterances helps them to learn (how) to be more explicit in future.
Might also help development of Theory of Mind
What are some evidence of querving intentions?
5-year-olds query why someone said what they did if it does not fit their predictive model of language (Morisseau et al. 2013 – see video example). Children are able to make inferences from what is being said.
Why does atypical language development appear?
Some problems arise due to sensory impairment, such as hearing loss
or difficulty in producing speech sounds (e.g., due to a cleft palate)
Sometimes language delays can be the result of a learning disability, e.g., Down Syndrome
Difficulty with social communication (pragmatics) is one of the diagnostic features of Autism
How many children have DLD?
2 in 30
hidden but common, support makes a difference, difficulties with taking and or understanding
