READINGS: Radford.et.al (2009) Fromkin & Rodman (1988) ch. 12 Hudson , ch. 8, pag. 120-134

1. Week 5:Psycholinguistics: L1 acquisition (Phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics)Dr. Louriz READINGS: Radford.et.al (2009) Fromkin & Rodman (1988) ch. 12 Hudson, ch. 8, pag. 120-134 Yule, ch. 16, pag. 175-189 Gass & Selinker, ch. 4, sect. 4.1-4.2., pag. 92-100 Lightbown & Spada, ch. 1, pag. 1-3 and 15-19 Weisler & Milekic, ch. 1, sect. 1.13-1.16, pag. 13-15

3. 0.Facts and questions Some facts We develop unconscious linguistic knowledge Somehow speakers of the same language agree on what their knowledge is Language development is absent only in extreme circumstances Question 1: do you think that the newborn baby’s mind is a “blank slate”? Question 2: do you think that L1 is acquired… … via imitation and repetition? … via analogy? … via reinforcement? … via constructing and refining grammars?

4. 1. Major controversies in L1 Acquisition • Nativist-generativist position • The human capacity for language is the product of a mental language learning faculty => Language Acquisition Device LAD) • Empiricist-functionalist position • Language acquisition is the product of general learning capacities • Each position might be tenable for different aspects of language

5. Parameter setting: the language acquisition process involves the (unconscious) fixing of the parameters provided by UG in response to the linguistic input that the child receives during the first years of his life • *

6. 2. General features of L1 acquisition • Similar route of development across languages: 5 stages • Cooing: 0-6 months • Babbling: around 6 months • First words: about 1 year • First grammatical morphemes: about 2 years • Basic mastery of language: by about 4 years • Speed of acquisition • Before age 4 years, the child has acquired language (phonology, morphology, syntax). s/he attains an adult-like profeciency. • No instruction • Children learn language spontaneously, without instruction (=without teaching them grammatical rules, etc) • Irrespective of: social class, cultural background, etc  ALL children end up acquiring language • No imitation, creativity • Children across language create new words and expressions that they haven’t heard in the input: • goed (=went), mans (=men), • They can express new thoughts in new sentences that they have never heard before. • So, what has to be acquired is open-ended.

7. But, if children do not know anything about grammar, how do they acquire it given that • Adults do not teach them grammar • They do not always speak to them correctly • And they do not correct child’s form. • CONCLUSION: • Innate mechanisms determine L1 acquisition • Biological program: all children follow the same stages • Apes tutored in many years in sign language do not approach the achievements of 3 year child.

8. 3. Universal Grammar • Universal Grammar (UG) • Some knowledge of language is innate • Exposure to language molds that basic knowledge into fully-formed adult language • Language universals • There are certain characteristics that all human languages share • Some are obvious. Every language has: • consonants and vowels • subject, object, verb • some form of verb tense • different verb argument structures

9. Others not so obvious • order of phonological production (some sounds always produced before others) • stops (b, d, g) produced first • fricatives develop later • certain sounds tend to be produced very early • "universal" words like mama • there exists a minimal vowel system (i / a / u) • all languages have coronal sounds

10. 4. Why Language as an instinct? • Evidence of other biological "language" instincts • Song sparrow • Song sparrows have distinctive songs which must be learned • Roughly similar to dialects in human language • Young sparrows seem to be endowed with a basic song template (a default tune) • Mature songs are built on this basic template (specific syllables) • The form of the mature song depends on the input a young sparrow hears • Sparrows from the same area share a dialect • If input is not received within approximately 50 days, they will not develop a mature song • This span of time is called the critical period • Critical Period Hypothesis: • Language input must be received within a certain time window • If input is denied during this time, then language will not develop properly

11. 5- Stages of development • 1. Cooing • Period: 0~ 8 months approx. • Velar consonant sounds: coo [ku:], ga-ga [gaga], goo [gu:] • 2. Babbling: • Period: 6 ~ 12 months approx. • The child produces… • …some English phonemes: [mu], [da] • …BUT some non-English phonemes (some are ‘universal’ phonemes belonging to other languages) • The babbling period is a period of practice

12. 3. One-word stage/ holophrases: • Period: around 1;0 ~ 1;6 (=1 year ~ 1 year 6 months): • Nouns (dog, cat, milk, cookie) are more common than Verbs • First verbs are ‘action’ verbs (go, eat) • First adjectives have ‘vivid’ meanings (dirty, funny) • Interestingly: frequent grammatical morphemes (the, of, …) are initially absent • Overextension and underextensionof meaning: • Overextension: one word has a general meaning • ‘dog’ = any animal (dog, cat, horse) • ‘ball’ = any round object (ball, moon, lampshade) • ‘daddy’ = any human male • Underextension: one word has a specific meaning • ‘dog’ = the dog that the family has at home

13. 4. Two-word stage: • Period: 1;6 ~ 2;0 • Lack of morphemes (are, a, and, that, we …) • “There rabbit” (=There isa rabbit) • “Doggy gone” (=The doggy is gone) • Semantics (meaning) depends on context: • “Baby chair” (=This is the baby’s chair / Put the baby in the chair / The baby is in the chair)

14. 5. Multiple-word stage: • Period: 2;0 ~ 3;0 • “Telegraphic speech”: • “Andrew want ball” • “Cat drink milk” • “This shoe all wet” • Inflectional morphemes start to appear: • Progressive –ing • Prepositions in, on • Plural –s • Etc • Development after this stage includes lexical learning and the acquisition of subtle pragmatic usage

15. 1. Development of Phonology • Perception precedes production • The stages of acquisition typically reflect stages in production, which explains the mismatch of perception and production. • Perception of speech sounds develops before birth. • Careful (and innovative) research has revealed that infants know more than they are telling us • What do kids know that they are not telling us?

16. Phonemic contrasts

18. Child perception • speech discrimination • Research into speech perception: what sounds mean to infants? • The goal: discover what types of information infants can use to decode speech. • Figure out how kids can use this information to segment the speech stream. • Somehow infants have to get from a jumble of unsegmented sounds to perceiving words.

19. Categorical Perception • Categorical perception describes the phenomenon of allophonic perception • Slight differences in the signal can result in abrupt changes in perception. • Very early on (around 8 months), infants can perceive all manners of contrasts. • Around 10-12 months, only native contrasts can be perceived • Adult English voicing ([ta] vs. [da])

20. Speech Perception Experiments • The task: infants are played speech contrasts which are in the native language or some other language • Sucking rates (on a special pacifier) are used to determine when discrimination has occurred • Young infants (around 8 months) can perceive any phonemic contrast, even if the contrast is not present in their native language: • Hindi [t] vs. [retroflex t] • Thompson [k'] vs. [q'] • English [r] vs. [l] (for Japanese infants) • Infants' sucking rate increases when the stimulus changes [ ta ta ta ta ta ta | da da da da da da ] • At around 10-12 months, sucking rate increases only when the change involves a contrastive pair in the infant's native language • This is a perceptual shift; the same distinctions that were perceived only weeks before are no longer perceived.

22. Child’s phonological production • Cluster simplification • Children will often simplify consonant clusters • "truck" -> [tUk] ([tr] -> [t]) • "fast" -> [faes] ([st] -> [s]) • Consonant Harmony • Sounds are changed to become more like another similar sound in the word (assimilation) • "boots" -> [bups] (alveolar [t] -> bilabial [p]) • "dog" -> [gawg] (alveolar [d] -> velar [g]) • The above changes are not random; the sounds which are substituted are similar to other sounds in the word • Children don't hear words like this, they just produce them! • Voicing/Devoicing • Children tend to devoice final consonants: "bug" -> [bUk] • and voice initial consonants: "pin" -> [bIn]

23. A child: Amahl (Smith,1973) • R1: A nasal consonant is deleted before any voiceless consonant: • stamp: deb (<dep) bump: bUb • drink: gig (<gik) tent: ded • uncle: Ugu empty: ebi: • R2: A voiced consonant is deleted after a nasal consonant: • window: winu: hand: en • mend: men band: ben • round: daun finger: winge • R6: l is deleted finally and before a consonant • ball: bO: milk: mik • R7: s is deleted before a consonant • skin: gin spoon: bu:n • R25: All consonants are voiced

24. 2. Development of the lexicon • Vocabulary growth • Period: 2;0 ~ 4;0 approximately • BUT: comprehension>production Example: age 2;0 • Production: 200 words approx. • Comprehension: 1000 words

25. The child begins to produce recognisable words around the age of 1 (holophrastic stage), • children may understand more than 5 times as many words than they can produce. • The first 50 or so words typically include words for things that move or act, or which can be moved or acted upon (people, animals, vehicles, toys, etc.). • 18 months: ‘vocabulary spurt’ occurs, and new words are acquired at a much faster rate. A child may know about 200-300 words by age 2, around 1000 words by age 3, and may well have mastered 10,000+ words by age 6.

26. Children can be divided into two groups according to what type of words are more prevalent in their initial vocabulary: • - referential children emphasize objects (and will acquire vocabulary more quickly) • - expressive children emphasize people and feelings (and will be faster in their syntactic development). • According to Clark & Clark (1977), the child starts out with the assumptions that • (a) Language is for communication. • (b) Language makes sense in context.

27. Models of Semantic Development

28. A- The Ostensive Model • Also ‘look and name’ model: The parent points at an object and says ‘dog’, so that the child learns to associate the word with the object. • The cognitive system may provide a set of constraints or strategies that guide semantic development, such as the following (Berko & Bernstein 1998): • REFERENCE: Assume that words refer to objects, actions and attributes. • EXTENDIBILITY: Assume that words label more than just the original referent; assume that they label a class of objects or concepts.

29. OBJECT SCOPE: Assume that words that appear to map to objects map the whole object, not just portions of the object. • CATEGORIAL SCOPE: Assume that words can be extended to objects in the same basic level category as the original referent. • NOVEL NAME - NAMELESS CATEGORY: Assume that novel words map to concepts for which you do not yet have a name.

30. B- Learning through context • The words that a child learns first may also be the ones that are most frequent in adult speech. The child may learn the meaning of a word as the adult names and defines it, with the context helping to narrow down the meaning • e.g. Bring me the beige one, not the blue one. • Syntactic context will tell the child whether a new word is a noun, verb, etc., and the part of speech membership of a word will in turn provide some clues about its possible meaning.

31. Semantic bootstrapping: The idea that children use a word's semantic structure to make guesses about its syntactic properties. • Syntactic bootstrapping: The idea that children infer word meanings from syntactic cues.

32. Evidence: Brown (1957) showed three groups of children an identical picture which depicted a novel action done to a novel substance with a novel instrument, while presenting each group with a different sentence. The children's answer to the subsequent question What is a sib? was influenced by the syntactic context in which the non-word sib was presented. • a. In this picture you see sibbing • b. In this picture you can see a sib • c. In this picture you can see sib • --> 'What is a sib?' • a. an action • b.an object • c.a substance

33. C- Utility Learning • The child learns first those words and distinctions which are important in the society he or she is growing up in, assuming that things are so named as to categorise them in a maximally useful way. • Hence, kin systems, pronouns and terms relating to space and time are learned relatively early. • Less relevant terms and more subtle distinctions (e.g. between different breeds of dog) are acquired later.

34. Early errors in word-meaning association • Up until the age of about 2½, children typically overextend the meaning of words, e.g. • ‘doggie’ may be applied to various other four-legged animals as well. • It has been suggested that overextension allows the child to build large semantic categories by focussing on similarities between objects and overlooking differences. • Sometimes children also underextend meanings, i.e. they apply a given word to a smaller set of objects or events than what it actually refers to (e.g. using ‘round’ only for balls).

35. • Children often confuse the meaning of closely related word pairs or antonyms (e.g. more/less, big/little, tall/short). Usually the positive or unmarked form is acquired first, and is then overextended to cover both members of the pair. Also, an adjective like big may be used as a global term for things that are tall, high, fat, wide, old, etc. • Children are comparatively slow to acquire superordinate terms, and often misunderstand the ones they use (e.g. the abstract sense of animal as a superordinate for all actual types of animal). • • Children often do not recognise that their language contains ambiguous words, until the age of about 8-10.

36. (i) Semantic feature theory (Clark 1973): The child acquires meanings of words by adding specific semantic features, with more general features acquired before specific ones. • The first semantic features will be derived from the child’s immediate sensory perceptions, such as shape, size, sound, or taste (but not colour!).

37. Over- and underextensions result from a mismatch between the features of a word assigned to it by the child compared with the complete adult representation. • Semantic development primarily consists of acquiring new features and restructuring the lexical representations until the features used by the child and the adult converge.

38. (ii) The prototype theory • The prototype hypothesis (Bowerman 1978) statesthat during semantic develoment, the child acquires a prototype representation that corresponds to the adult version. Words are less likely to be extended to less typical category members. • The contrastive hypothesis (Barrett 1978, 1982) claims that words are initially mapped onto prototypical representations; the most salient features are then used to group the word with words that have similar features, and contrastive features are used to distinguish between semantically similar words.

39. Other observations • Syntagmatic-to-paradigmatic shift: In word association tasks, younger children (<8) will typically give more responses from other syntactic classes than adults (e.g. chair-sit vs. chair-table). • Younger children have difficulities with free word association tasks as they are not meaningful tasks to them. • Older children’s responses gradually become more adult-like. In general, verbs are more syntagmatic than nouns, which are • paradigmatic at all ages. • •Children often create novel words for actions which are derived from the name of an object or entity that is involved in the action they want to talk about. In particular, children overapply the rule that allows nouns to be used as verbs (creating denominal verbs). Examples: • - instrument verbs: Won’t you hatchet this’? (asking for some sticks to be chopped) • - locatum verbs: Will you chocolate my milk? • - verbs of characteristic activity: It’s trucking (watching a truck pass by), I’m souping

40. Experiment: Lexical decision

41. English Vs Dutch Listeners

43. 3. Development of morphology • Interesting: • Similar order of acquisition for all English-speaking children • order of acquisition CANNOT be explained by frequency in the input (example: “the” is the most frequent word in English, but it is learnt very late)

44. Stages in morphological development • 1) Seemingly perfect use of morphemes (e.g. English plurals endings) • 2) Over-generalization: child uses the "-s" ending or past tense "-ed" too often • "I holded the baby rabbits" • "There were three mans on the train." • 3) Correct usage of regular and irregular forms • Pattern can be explained by rules • Children at first have no rule knowledge and imitate adult forms (stage 1) • As they develop rules, they over-generalize to all forms (stage 2) • Eventually they get it right and learn the exceptions (stage 3)

45. Overregularisation of morphological rules • U-shaped learning: • Observation: STAGE 1STAGE 2 STAGE 3 went goed / went went sang singed / sang sang men mans / men men feet foots / feet feet Memorised form Acquisition of rule: STEM+ “ed” Blocking of rule

46. Overregularisation • Noun plurals • I like mouses • Look at those mans marching • Leave my feets alone! • You hurt my foots • Funny footses • From Stilwell Peccei (1999)

47. Overregularisation • Verb morphology • “My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them” • “I finded Renee” • “I love cut-uped eggs” • “Once upon a time an alligator was eating a dinosaur and the dinosaur was eating the alligator and the dinosaur was eaten by the alligator and the alligator goed kerplunk” • From Pinker (1994)

48. Why should we be interested in children’s overregularisation errors? • Psycholinguists want to know how the human mind deals with language. • One central question has been whether or not linguistic rules are “psychologically real”. • Scholars in the behaviourist tradition claim that language learning is driven solely by statistical regularities in the input-no rules required. • To explain poverty of stimulus (Chomsky, 1986) • So, studying overregularisation errors allows us to test whether or not linguistic rules play any role in how we deal with morphologically complex words.

49. How do children acquire new words, affixes, and morphological processes? • Some general principles • A- U-shaped learning of inflection • Overregularisation phase is preceded by a phase of correct use of irregulars • B- Overextention • {dog, cat, sheep,…} = “doggie” • C- Principle of contrast • *comed -- came • D- Principle of conventionality • “they comed” BUT NOT “they comeds”

50. E- Principle of transparency • “tent-man” INSTEAD OF “camper” • F- Principle of simplicity • “wash-mashine” INSTEAD OF “washing machine” • Principle of Productivity • “bicycler” INSTEAD OF “bicyclist” • H- Comprehension precedes production • /fo/  /fwo/  /fwonk/  /frog/