Recent Advances in the study of Language Development

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Recent Advances in the study of Language
Development

• Brian MacWhinney- CMU

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Topics

• Bases of SLI
• Assessment Methods
• Childhood bilingualism
• Emergentism and Brain Plasticity
• Multimedia Analysis

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A unitary account of SLI?

• Old unitary accounts
• Auditory STM deficit (Tallal)
• Weak syllable loss (Leonard)
• Processing capacity (Kail, Kirschner, Gathercole)
• New unitary accounts
• RDDR (van der Lely, Clahsen)
• Weak lexical storage (Chiat, Gupta)
• Item-based models of sentence production

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New models of the lexicon

• Sound -gt meaning
• Turtle
• Phonological loop
• Constructions
• X gives Y to Z
• What is X doing Z ?
• Making sentences
• My __ , X likes Y,
• My dog likes bones.

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Applications to Chinese

• No Problems in
• Wh-movement
• Agreement morphology
• Case marking
• Similar problems
• Complementation
• Reflexives
• Special Problems in ..
• Classifiers
• Aspect markers
• Lexicon
• Writing

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What is wrong with the lexicon?

• Period 1 phonological encoding
• Period 2 argument structure
• Period 3 sentence compilation
• Note this view tends to merge grammar and the
  lexicon (Bates and Goodman, 1999)

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Assessment Methods

• CDI Communicative Development Inventory
• Mandarin done, Cantonese in progress
• Issues in maternal report
• Computerized reaction-time methods
• Battery of 9 tasks. Reaction time and STM
• Transcript Methods
• Profiles
• Multimedia
• Web

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Childhood Bilingualism

• Early auditory development
• Separation by prosodic types (Chinese, English)
• Later separation within related languages
• Babbling differentiation
• Grammatical, lexical separation at age 2
• Parental responses to switching
• Trilingualism

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Research programs

• Yip and Matthews in Hong Kong
• LIDES Project in Europe
• German work on later interference, transfer
• Montreal work on pragmatic support

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Emergentism and Plasticity

• Nativism vs. Empiricism
• Emergentism vs. Stipulationism

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Stipulation by Rule
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GeneticstipulationModules from birth?
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Genetic stipulation A gene for thepast tense?
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Neurons dont send Morse code
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Neural Networks
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Hard-wired?
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Emergent structure in Honeycombs
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Structure in Ocular Dominance Columns
Emergence of Oriented On-Off Neurons by Coarse
Coding
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The Emergence of Language Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1999
Elman, J. et al (1996) Rethinking Innateness MIT
Press
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JUS Left parietal-frontal stroke
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RYB Left frontal stroke
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KAM Left temporal stroke
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Sagittal section of one subjects injured
hemisphere
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Z-score distributions
70
9
8
60
7
50
6
40
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Count
Count
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30
3
20
2
10
1
0
0
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
Control Group
Experimental Group
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16 regions of interest
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Sentence Interpretation

• Easy (Conjoined)-- The cat chased the rabbit and
  enjoyed the hunt in the yard
• Medium (SS) -- The principal that tripped the
  janitor used the phone to call home
• Difficult (SO) -- The pig that the dog scared ate
  the trash in the street

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(No Transcript)
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Sentence Processing -- Superior Temporal Gyrus
Adult, Child, SJ, BR, MK, MM, GM, DK
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Conclusions

• Prognosis is mostly optimistic, but status of
  late acquisitions (reading, math) is unclear
• Careful rt studies reveal subtle differences
• Plasticity rather than modularity --
  reorganization contralaterally and locally
• However, children with early strokes have some
  site-specific limitations in behavioral measures

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Computational Analysis

• SALT
• new versions, better interface
• fuller profile (only Spanish and English)
• CLAN
• New measures VOCD, DSS, MOR
• Profile facility coming soon
• Link to Praat
• SALT-like fast analysis

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Multimedia Analysis

• Use of F5 in CLAN for transcription
• Video examples linked to text
• PATSy (Edinburgh) case studies on the web
• CHILDES data on SLI children
• Norms for inclusion in SALT and CHILDES

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Research Methods
Systematic Description?
No
Yes
Introspection
Manipulating Environment?
Yes
No
Causation Determinable?
TalkBank/ CHILDES
No
Yes
Hypothesis Tested?
Correlational
No
Yes
Model Fitting
PsyScope E-Prime
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Introspection

• Mental models
• Grammaticality Judgments
• Native speaker intuitions
• Reflection- Hermeneutics
• Functional Grammar and the Perspective Hypothesis