Learning Language

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Learning Language
"That's one small step for a man one giant leap
for mankind".
learning language a universal process
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Learning a Language Involves...

• Learning the languages sounds and sound
  patterns, its specific words, and the ways in
  which the language allows words to be combined
• Using the finite set of words in our vocabulary,
  we can put together an infinite number of
  sentences and express an infinite number of
  ideas generativity
• To learn language, children must also be exposed
  to other people using languagespoken or signed

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Required Competencies for Learning Language

• Phonological development The acquisition of
  knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of
  sound that distinguish meaning
• Semantic development Learning the system for
  expressing meaning in a language, beginning with
  morphemes, the smallest unit of meaning in a
  language
• Syntactic development Learning the syntax or
  rules for combining words
• Pragmatic development Acquiring knowledge of how
  language is used, which includes understanding a
  variety of conversational conventions

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Children develop and mature simultaneously in
four inter-related areas

1. Physically
2. Cognitively
3. Linguistically
4. Socially

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Tabula Rasa
How does a child develop physically, cognitively,
linguistically and socially during the first two
years of life
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The growing child

• Gains an awareness of its environment
• becomes aware of distinctions between self and
  others
• Begins to interact with the things and people in
  his or her environment.
• Grasps the idea that the behaviours and noises
  that people make have meaning
• Deciphers the code used by his or her parents
• Realizes that language is meaningful and can be
  used to get what he or she wants, i.e. has
  purpose
• Learns to become a social person

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Children basically begin with a blank slate, and
in a non-conscious way, have to decipher the
rules of how the sounds of an unknown language
are put together to create meaning.
How do they do it? Short answer children
develop knowledge of their language through
unfolding and maturing cognitive and linguistic
abilities internal to themselves while helped by
their parents And how do their parents help?
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Cognitive Abilities

• The acquisition of linguistic ability is linked
  to the maturation of cognitive processes

• What does the ability to use language imply
  about cognitive abilities?

• growth of capacity for symbolic representation
  - grasping that sounds are arbitrary and
  represent things and activities (have names or
  labels) (i.e. are symbolic)
• Increasing ability to remember things and
  experiences and to associate them with past and
  future events
• an understanding of causality that people can
  affect other people and objects
• That relationships exist between objects, people
  and activities
• that language can be used to express personal
  attitudes, emotions, and goals

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Behaviourism
STIMULUS   gt  RESPONSE   gt  REINFORCEMENT

• B. F Skinner 1957
• argued that children learn to speak by copying
  the utterances heard around them and by having
  their responses strengthened by the repetitions,
  corrections and other reactions that adults
  provide.
• through positive reinforcement
• Teacher  What time is it?
• Student  Half past ten.
• Teacher  Very good

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Noam Chomsky Universal Grammar

• Fundamental question is how to account for a
  speakers ability to produce and instantly
  understand new sentences that are not similar to
  those previously heard
• Chomsky suggests that language is an innate
  faculty - i.e. we are born with a set of rules
  about language in our heads - a 'Universal
  Grammar'

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Universal Grammar

• Requires no direct intervention from parents or
  teachers.
• The universal grammar is the basis upon which
  all human languages build.
• All languages are simply local variants of one
  universal language

How can this be? What evidence is there to
suggest this is the case?
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• children acquire their mother tongue with ease,
  even though parents language contains
  performance errors (grammatical mistakes, false
  starts, slips of the tongue, etc.) children
  manage to learn their language all the same.
• Also hear different dialects, different grammars
• Children do not simply copy the language that
  they hear around them, but deduce rules from it,
  which they can then use to produce sentences that
  they have never heard before.
• In other words they do not memorize a
  repertoire of phrases and sayings but learn a
  grammar that generates an infinity of new
  sentences.
• What other abilities are innate?

Walking, running, eating
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• According to Chomsky then, children are born
  with the Universal Grammar wired into their
  brains.
• A child knows intuitively that there are some
  words that behave like verbs, and others like
  nouns, and that there is a limited set of
  possibilities as to their ordering within the
  phrase.
• For example, the word order of a typical
  sentence.
• 75 of the world's languages use either a SVO
  structure (English, French, Vietnamese) or SOV
  (Japanese, Tibetan, Korean)
• 10 - 15 prefer VSO (-Welsh) or VOS (Malagasy)
• Some languages, such as Latin, appear to have
  free word order, but even here, SOV is very
  common.
• OSV is very rare one example

Yoda Speaks
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• when they begin to listen to their parents, they
  will unconsciously recognise which kind of a
  language it is and will set their grammar to the
  correct one - this is known as 'setting the
  parameters'.
• he or she then matches with what is happening
  around him an innate ability
• This set of language learning tools, provided at
  birth, is referred to by Chomsky as the Language
  Acquisition Device.

But if language is innate 1. Why do we take so
long to learn it? 2. What are the universal
rules that allow us to learn so many different
languages
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Jean Piaget

• Piaget's focus was on cognitive development,
  rather than language acquisition per se.
• Language development is related to cognitive
  development, that is, the development of the
  childs thinking determines when the child can
  learn to speak and what the child can say.
• For example, before a child can say, This car
  is bigger than that one, s/he must have
  developed the ability to judge differences in
  size.
• In Piagets view, children learn to talk
  naturally when they are ready without any
  deliberate teaching by adults.

Jean Piaget 1896 -1980 Swiss Developmental
Psychologist
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Jean Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development

• theory concerns the emergence and construction
  of schema schemes of how one perceives the
  world in "developmental stages", times when
  children are acquiring new ways of mentally
  representing information.
• it asserts that we construct our cognitive
  abilities through self-motivated action in the
  world.

• In Piagets view language has a fundamentally
  goal-directed, instrumental function
• The child is egocentric and uses language to get
  what s/he wants by speaking with their caregivers

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• As children mature cognitively they begin to use
  more complex grammatical forms that encode
  politeness and forms that recognize the rights of
  others. i.e. They become moral and use morally
  encoded language
• Piaget divided schemes that children use to
  understand the world through four main periods,
  roughly correlated with and becoming increasingly
  sophisticated with age

1. sensorimotor stage
2. preoperational stage
3. concrete operations
4. formal operations

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• sensorimotor stage
• birth to about age 2
• marks the development of essential spatial
  abilities and understanding of the world
• childrens contact with the world around them
  depends entirely on the movements that they make
  and the sensations that they experience.
• Whenever they encounter a new object, they shake
  it, throw it, or put it in their mouth, so that
  they gradually come to understand its
  characteristics through trial and error.
• Around the middle of this stage (about age 1),
  children first understand the concept of object
  permanencethat an object continues to exist even
  when it moves beyond their field of vision.

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• preoperational stage
• age 2 to around age 6 or 7.
• marked by the acquisition of language
• children become able to think in symbolic terms,
  to form ideas from words and symbols.
• Children also begin to understand spatial and
  numerical concepts and the distinction between
  past and future.
• But they remain highly focused on the present and
  on concrete physical situations and have
  difficulty in dealing with abstract concepts.
• Childrens thinking is also very egocentric at
  this stage a child this age often assumes that
  other people see situations from his or her
  viewpoint.

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• concrete operations
• age 6 or 7 to age 11 or 12.
• With more experience of the world, children now
  become able to imagine events that occur outside
  their own lives.
• also begin to conceptualize and to create
  sequences of logical reasoning,
• Children also acquire a certain capacity for
  abstraction. Hence they can begin to study
  disciplines such as mathematics, in which they
  can solve problems with numbers and reverse
  previously performed operations, but only ones
  that involve observable phenomena.

• formal operations
• begins at age 11 or 12.
• abilities to reason hypothetically and
  deductively and to establish abstract
  relationships
• can use formal, abstract logic.
• They can also begin to think about moral issues
  such as justice

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Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

• investigated how child development was guided by
  the role of culture and interpersonal
  communication.
• Through interaction with parents and others a
  child comes to learn the habits of mind of
  her/his culture, including speech patterns,
  written language, and other symbolic knowledge.

Russian developmental psychologist 1896-1934
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• Vygotsky suggests that social interaction leads
  to continuous step-by-step changes in children's
  thought and behaviour that can vary greatly from
  culture to culture
• development depends on interaction with people
  and the tools that the culture provides to help
  form their own view of the world.
• There are three ways a cultural tool can be
  passed from one individual to another.
• imitative learning, where one person tries to
  imitate or copy another.
• instructed learning which involves remembering
  the instructions of the teacher and then using
  these instructions to self-regulate.

collaborative learning, which involves a group of
peers who strive to understand each other and
work together to learn a specific skill
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• The driving force motivating language
  acquisition are social needs of children as they
  expand their interactions with others.
• initially, linguistic and cognitive development
  is oriented toward obtaining objects and
  attaining other goals.
• An infant learns the meaning of signs through
  interaction with its main care-givers, e.g.,
  pointing, cries, and gurgles can express what is
  wanted.

• How verbal sounds can be used to conduct social
  interaction is learned through this activity, and
  the child begins to utilize/build/develop this
  faculty using names for objects, etc.

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• Language starts as a tool external to the child
  used for social interaction.
• The child guides personal behaviour by using this
  tool in a kind of self-talk or "thinking out
  loud."
• As a childs thoughts about their experiences
  become expressible primarily through these signs,
  the signs themselves affect the way in which a
  child thinks about him or herself and the world.
• That is, as signs (symbols) are internalized in
  the process of language acquisition, they come to
  mediate thought itself.
• thinking out loud becomes inner speech and
  is used more as a tool for self-directed and
  self-regulating behavior.

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• Speaking has thus developed along two lines, the
  line of social communication and the line of
  inner speech
• External speech is the process of turning thought
  into words and is used as a means of interaction
  with others
• Inner speech is the conversion of speech into
  inward thought and is a way of representing the
  world to oneself
• language and thought are therefore inextricably
  interdependent

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Learning Speech Sounds
learning language a universal process

• Step one
• learn how to differentiate and produce sounds in
  ones language
• learn that the stream of sounds is made up of
  discrete units
• that they are combined in a significant linear
  order
• learn to control muscular movements of their
  throat and mouth to produced sounds with
  consistency
• Babbling (0-4 months) consonant and vowel like
  sounds
• Not language specific
• After 1 year months focus on sounds in the
  language of their parents

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• Cross-linguistic studies suggest that some
  sequences in acquiring sound systems are universal

• The cause for these common forms is believed to
  be the ease of pronunciation of the sounds
  involved.
• children learning to speak master the open vowel
  sound a and the voiceless labial consonants
  (p, m and b ).
• Almost no languages lack labial consonants, and
  no language lacks an open vowel like a.

Mother
Romanian mama Hindi
mata Tulu (India) amma Mandarin
ma Kootenai (BC) ma Thai
me3e proto-Old Japanese papa

• These words are the first word-like sounds made
  by babbling babies
• and parents tend to associate the first sound
  babies make with themselves.
• there is no common ancestry.

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• explains why first words often like mama and papa
• may account for common worldwide occurrence of
  consonant m and p in words for mother and father
• especially so in forms of address since parents
  are the earliest significant people in a babys
  life
• Therefore linguistically and cognitively
  appropriate to name them with sounds that a baby
  can most easily produce

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• During first 4 months show a rapid increase in
  number of sounds that they produce
• After 4 months a drop in rate of new sounds
  added
• After one year, focus on sounds significant in
  the language of their parents
• controlling their production, make appropriate
  phonemic contrasts and follow allophonic
  patterning
• 5 months
• Learn tones specific to their language, e.g
  raising tone for questions
• Also begin to learn patterns of pitch and rhythm
  typical of their language

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Pre-Linguistic Behaviour

• Fetuses may not be able to hear individual
  words, but can hear intonation, durations,
  rhythm, stress
• Children can understand language before they can
  speak
• Passive language can respond to commands
  even in complex structures
• Similar to learning a second language
• By end of first year children can produce first
  words

• Many experiments confirmed that at 4 days
  infants can discriminate their native language
  from a foreign language!

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First words

• Important people
• Objects that move
• Objects that can be acted upon
• Familiar actions
• Nouns before verbs

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One-Word Utterances

• Each word expresses broad semantic and
  contextual meanings (holophrastic)
• Holophrase - A single word that seems to
  represent an entire sentence drink
• Can only be understood in context of childs
  experience
• Goals expressed through childrens speech
  emanate from the interaction with objects and
  persons in his environment

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• Children
• have desires for others to attend to their needs
  and wants (imperative function) apple give
  me the apple
• relate emotional states (expressive function) )
  apple Im hungry
• name objects or people with whom they interact
  (referential function) apple theres an
  apple
• One word can thus have several simultaneous
  functions
• The child has learned that speaking is a human
  strategy for achieving personal and social goals
• s/he can express desires that caregivers can
  fulfill e.g.

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Two Word Grammars

• Two word constructions appear about 18 months
  (see dogie)
• Marks the beginning of true grammatical
  constructions (syntax)
• Depends on cognitive growth.
• Emergence of two-word grammars and their
  continual expansion and refinement indicate a
  change in the character of a childs thinking
• Learning to differentiate words within classes
• recognizing that sequential ordering of words
  has meaning
• children at this age are learning to think
  syntactically
• Children grasp the critical meaning of word
  order and also understand meanings contained in
  words themselves
• They use this awareness in forming new words and
  constructions and in comprehending the speech of
  others.

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classes of two word combinations

• Pivot class
• a few words used with high frequency in
  combination with items from the open class
• ritualized greetings or comments (bye-bye,
  all-gone)
• demonstratives (this that) this doggie, that
  doggie
• locatives (here there), here doggie there cat
• possessives (my) and adjectives my car, red
  car
• Open class
• nouns and verbs with which a child communicates
  his or her referential, imperative, or expressive
  intentions

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• Two-word constructions consist of combining
  either two items from the open class or a pivot
  plus and open word
• Two pivot words do not occur together as a
  complete utterance
• This fact gives evidence of a childs developing
  grammar, involving notions of syntactic
  restrictions

• Functions of Two-word utterances
• Locate name there book, see dogie
• Demand desire more milk, give candy
• Negate no wet, not hungry
• Describe event/action bambi go, mail come, hit
  ball
• Indicate possession my shoe, mama dress
• Modify qualify pretty dress, big boat
• Question where ball

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• Although perhaps containing only one or two
  words children can express complex propositions
  and intentions
• giving and receiving involves several underlying
  meaning components and their interrelations
• an action
• an agent performing the act
• an object being transformed
• a recipient
• Action give (giving something to her mother)
• Object water (asking her mother for some water)
• Recipient To me (asking for something)
• Recipient plus object to me candies (asking for
  candies)
• Action plus object give ball (asking for a ball)
• Action plus actor Give mommy (asking for
  something from mother)
• Recipient plus action Mommy give (giving
  something to mother)

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Complex Grammars

•  As children develop cognitively they expand
  their linguistic abilities
• Child begins to express additional grammatical
  relations through expansion in the number of
  words in a sentence and through employment of
  morphological processes affecting the structure
  of individual words
• two word sentences grow to three word sentences
  and beyond because child observes the relative
  positions of words
• By learning that if a word is first in a phrase
  and that a phrase is first in a sentence, a child
  learns that the sentence is hierarchically
  organized sentence has a structure
• Word order is important
• There are rules according to which words may be
  placed in what order

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Morphological development

• Morphological processes are employed to express
  grammatical concepts such as person, gender
  number, case , tense, etc.
• Usually expressed using affixes
• In 1 and 2 word constructions affixes denoting
  these concepts are absent
• Using these affixes allows the child to speak
  about things in the past or future, or things out
  of sight
• In other words they allow the child to expression
  relations free of the immediate context
• This also allows the child to discuss his or her
  experiences thus expanding social possibilities
• Reflects both a maturing cognitive and social
  development

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• An important process in childrens acquisition of
  morphological features is their extension of
  rules learned in one context to others through
  analogy and generalization
• They add affixes to newly encountered words by
  recognizing sounds and applying appropriate
  morphological rules

Present progressive - ing Plural of nouns
s Past of verbs ed Possessive of nouns
s Third person on verbs s
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The Wug Test

• Classic experiment by Jean Berko Gleason in 1958
  as a way to investigate the acquisition of the
  plural and other inflectional morphemes in
  English-speaking children.
• Very young children are unable to answer
  correctly, sometimes responding with "Two wug."
• Preschoolers aged 4 to 5 answer wugs
• since they've never seen a wug before, and never
  had anyone model or reinforce the plural of wug
  they must be using a rule
• It was the first experimental proof that young
  children have extracted generalizable rules from
  the language around them.

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• Past tense.
• This is man who knows how to spow.
• He is _______.
• He did the same thing yesterday.
• What did he do yesterday? He _____
• children were able to correctly apply known
  affixes to new linguistic material although this
  ability varied with age
• another reflection of childrens drive to
  generalize rules is their tendency to over
  generalize affixes to nouns and verbs with
  irregular allomorphs
• Daddy comed home.
• I holded the baby rabbit

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Growth in Vocabulary

• Results from
• growing cognitive abilities for comprehension,
  memory and discrimination
• widening social environment that presents
  children with new objects and activities
• broadening or narrowing the sense of individual
  words
• e.g. At first the word apple may apply to all
  fruit but with experience to a particular kind of
  fruit
• Generating new words from pre-existing words to
  fill in gaps in their lexicon
• e.g. denominal verbs verbs derived from nouns
• cracker - crackering my soup
• creating new words based on the rules of their
  language

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• Comprehended words
• 12 months first words
• age 2 years 200 words
• age 6 years 15,000 words

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Syntactic Development

• Grammatical development involves the ability to
  understand and express concepts about people an
  objects and relations to states and activities
• Childrens grammars expand by introducing new
  propositions (statements about the world)
• Sentence length increases with additional words
  specifying aspects of an event e.g. adding
  modifiers or predicates and expressing more
  complex relations such as negation
• When negation is acquired in English first done
  by simply adding words such as no or not usually
  at beginning of a sentence
• No wipe finger
• Not a teddy bear
• Later negation within the internal structure of
  the sentence
• I no want envelope
• There no squirrels
• Later still more complex incorporation negation
• I not see you anymore
• You didnt caught me

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wh-questions

• what, who, where, why and when
• distinctions between declarative statements and
  questions indicated by rising intonation and
• who that, where mama boot
• requires cognitive maturation

• other advances
• e.g. deletion of redundancies
• Here is a brown brush and here is a comb
• Heres a brown brush and a comb

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A Creative process

•   Children do not mimic adults in acquiring
  language but develop their own grammars
• Discard some rules and altering applications of
  others until they finally arrive at appropriate
  constructions
• Language learning is a creative process of
  observation and production, consistent with
  maturing cognitive capacities
• In addition to acquiring the sounds words and
  grammatical rules of their language children also
  need to learn appropriate discourse patterns
• building relations among participants, goals of
  speakers, and cultural models or schema of
  communicative interactions

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Comparative Evidence

• Although children learn through growth of
  universal cognitive processes, each language
  presents its own specific structure to be
  deciphered and reproduced
• e.g. Differences between agglutinating and
  polysynthetic languages
• Studies of different languages confirm hypotheses
  about universal tendencies but also reveal
  significant differences in rates of acquisition
  of various surface phenomena
• Universal sequences
• Negation
• Wh-questions
• Locative concepts (location) - in/on/under/beside/
  between/back/
• front

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Instructional Strategies
Adults use various means to help children learn
language

• Frame the situations that are culturally
  appropriate for learning language
• Direct childs attention to learning language as
  a focus of interaction
• Teach the children the appropriate forms of
  communicative behaviour (e.g. Taking turns)
• Can be implicit or explicit (say thank you)

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Baby Talk, Motherese, Infant-Directed Speech or
Child-directed speech

• Simplified words
• Simplified grammatical structure
• Repetition of words
• Speak slowly
• Speak loudly
• Higher pitch
• Exaggerated intonation

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Instructional Strategies

• Expansion repeat childrens utterances with an
  expansion of the sentence
• Child baby high chair Mother baby is in the
  high chair
• Modelling commenting on the semantic content of
  the childs words
• Child his name is Tony, Mother Thats right

• Expansion and modelling are based on Western
  assumption that children are not competent
  speakers and need to be carefully instructed and
  socialized and that this is the job of the
  caregiver
• also includes a cultural model of gender since
  it is usually the mother who is the primary
  caregiver
• Other societies have different assumptions and
  strategies

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