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6: Language Acquisition

2. How does language develop? . 2 categories of theories:Nativist theories: children are born with innate KNOWLEDGE that helps them make sense of the worldConstructivist/emergent/empiricist theories:language is LEARNED by building up knowledge from the environmentGrammatical acquisitionLearni

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6: Language Acquisition

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    1. 1 6: Language Acquisition Outline How does language develop? Grammar Sequence of acquisition Issues Nativist theories Constructivist theories Learning outcomes

    2. 2 How does language develop? 2 categories of theories: Nativist theories: children are born with innate KNOWLEDGE that helps them make sense of the world Constructivist/emergent/empiricist theories: language is LEARNED by building up knowledge from the environment Grammatical acquisition Learning how to fit words together into meaningful sentences

    3. 3 Syntax What grammatical categories do words fit into? Noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, determiner What grammatical relations exist between these categories (subjects, verbs, objects) e.g. John kissed Mary = SUBJECT VERB OBJECT

    4. 4 Morphology Refers to inflections (bits of words): e.g. add -ed to make past tense add -s to make plural Sometimes refers to ‘little’ or ‘function words’ - e.g. on, a, the, are, up

    5. 5 Sequence of acquisition At end of ‘1 word stage’ children start to put words together into 2 word utterances ‘telegraphic speech stage’ (NB often called Stage 1 speech (Brown, 1973) similar meaning to words used in 1 word stage: negation, nonexistence, call attention soon branches out to other meanings (Brown, 1973)

    6. 6 Children in telegraphic speech stage are said to leave out the ‘little words’ and inflections: e.g. Mummy shoe NOT Mummy’s shoe Two cat NOT two cats But: individual variation - analytic vs. gestalt cross-cultural variation e.g. Spanish Sequence of acquisition

    7. 7 Addition of grammatical morphemes: children add little words and inflections e.g. daddy shoe -> daddy’s shoe two cat -> two cats occurs over long period of time More complex constructions: passives, compound sentences, negatives, questions Sequence of acquisition

    8. 8 Issues in grammatical acquisition Modularity Domain specific? Domain general? Learning & Innateness How much is innate? Learnability theory

    9. 9 Nativist solutions Children cannot learn language without innate principles/knowledge to guide them (Chomsky, 1957; Gold, 1967; Pinker, 1979): Poverty of the stimulus (Berwick & Weinberg, 1984) Overregularisation errors (e.g. runned) No negative evidence Goal: find the universal knowledge and specify how children use this to learn their language

    10. 10 Chomksy (1959,1965, 1981 etc). Language is ‘a distinct piece of the biological make-up of our brains … distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently’ (Pinker, 1994, p. 18) Language acquisition device (LAD) - a mechanism with access to the grammatical rules of all human languages (Universal grammar - UG) Some features of language are universal across the world’s languages - PRINCIPLES (e.g. noun category) Others vary PARAMETRIC VARIATION (e.g. English requires a subject - John kissed Sarah, Italian doesn’t)

    11. 11 Chomsky’s theory Good points: explains why language is learned relatively quickly explains how language is learnt despite poverty of the stimulus, no negative evidence etc Bad points: very little evidence for adultlike grammatical knowledge in young children (Braine, 1976) young children make errors Chomsky would not predict (e.g. omit obligatory constituents such as determiners, possessives) cannot explain why children make grammatical errors (e.g. doggie go walkies) even after extensive language exposure

    12. 12 New Nativist theories Children are prevented from making use of their full knowledge Continuity theories (e.g. Valian, 1986, 1991): children have UG children have performance limits that restrict the number and type of words they can PRODUCE

    13. 13 Continuity theories Good points: explains why children’s speech is different to adult speech explains how language is learnt despite poverty of the stimulus, no negative evidence etc Bad points: cannot really explain the restricted nature of very early speech: e.g. children should treat ‘me’ and ‘I’ equally - as both belong to nominative pronoun category BUT, children make many more errors with ‘me’ than with ‘I’ (Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1998)

    14. 14 Competence theories Some aspects of innate knowledge are not available to the child until later in development These aspects MATURE at a later stage e.g. Radford’s small clause hypothesis (1990): Until 24 months, children have access only to lexical categories (noun, verb, preposition, adjective) At 24 months, ‘functional categories’ come online (determiner, inflection, complementizer)

    15. 15 Radford’s theory Good points: explains why children’s speech is different to that of adults explains how language is learnt despite poverty of the stimulus, no negative evidence etc Bad points: doesn’t fit the data young children produce functional categories (e.g. a doggie), older children still make errors (Gathercole & Williams, 1994; Rowland, 2000)

    16. 16 Constructivist ideas speech to children is not impoverished (Snow, 1977) Children do not need innate knowledge to learn grammar Semantic accounts (e.g. Bates, 1979) children learn grammar by mapping semantic roles (agent, action, patient) onto grammatical categories (subject, verb, object)

    17. 17 Cognitive accounts Children learn grammar by mapping cognitive categories onto grammatical ones: e.g. disappearance words such as gone would be learnt after the child learnt object permanence (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1987)

    18. 18 Semantic and cognitive accounts Good points: explained acquisition of grammar without having to resort to innate knowledge Bad points: does not fit the evidence. Children seem to learn grammar without going through semantic routes (i.e. don’t start off with agent and patient, Maratsos, 1979). Cognitive accounts cannot explain how some grammatical relations (e.g. the passive) were learnt

    19. 19 Semantic-distributional accounts Positional and semantic commonalities in the language guide the learning of grammatical rules: e.g. a dog, a cat, a bird, a car -> ‘a + noun’ Theory is often implemented as a computer program – a ‘cognitive model’

    20. 20 Good points demonstrate that lots of information about language is present in the statistical distribution of language (e.g. Finch & Chater, 1992). Bad points Criticised by nativists: Cannot handle long-distance dependencies? BUT Elman (1993) demonstrates that connectionist models can learn long-distance dependencies Unrealistic assumptions Semantic-distributional accounts

    21. 21 Learning Outcomes So much to learn that you may get lost - so concentrate on the theories! Outline the sequence of acquisition of grammar Critically compare and evaluate the nativist and constructivist views of language acquisition

    22. 22 Reading Essential Reading (on Digital Resources): Thornton, S. (2002). Growing minds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ch 3. pp.42-73 Further Reading: See pdf handout

    23. 23 Questions to ask Why do nativists argue that we need innate grammatical knowledge? Why do constuctivists argue that we don’t need innate knowledge? Can constructivist accounts answer all the criticisms from nativists? What is the evidence for/against these different types of theory?

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