Title: Chap 12. Process of Language Acquisition
1Chap 12. Process of Language Acquisition
2Main Points
- How Language is acquired?
- Linguistic Environment
- Gross environmental neglect (feral isolated
children) ?Retard language acquisition - Cognitive Processes
- Cognitive process are correlated with language
development - Innate Mechanisms
- Children given poor linguistic input ? Create
communication systems similar to early child
language
3The Linguistic Environment
- Feral and Isolated Children
- The Critical Period Hypothesis
- Motherese
4Feral and Isolated Children (1/3)
- Feral children
- Grown up in the wild
- Ex) Victor case
- Isolated children
- Grown up with extremely limited human contact
- Ex) Genie case
5Feral Children - Victor (2/3)
- Found in the woods of France in 1797, was
captured as a naked 12 (or 13)-year-old boy - No speech (normal hearing, utterance of some
sounds) - Itard (physician) tried to train him to be
socialized and to use language for 5 years - In general, Victors language progress was poor
- Able to comprehend language, but practically
unable to produce it - The only 2 pronounced words milk, oh my god
- The majority of his communication consisted of
grunts and howls
6Isolated Children - Genie (3/3)
- Rescued in 1970, at the age of 13 in California,
she could not stand erect and was unable to speak
except 2 words Stopit, Nomore - Very little exposure to language during her
imprisonment - From the age of 20 months, lived in nearly total
isolation and was attached to a potty by a
special harness for most of the day - Her father did not speak to her but communicated
through barking - By a program of language remediation
- 1970 one-word utterances, ex) No. No. Cat 13
y. - 1971 her language resembled that of a normal
18-20 months old child - Distinction between plural and singular nouns
- Tow-word utterances, ex) Want milk, Big teeth
14 y. - No vocabulary explosion after 18-20 months
- Incapable to produce questions (Ex. I where is
graham cracker on the top shelf?) - Semantic development rapid extensive,
Syntactic development slow - Ex) I like hear music ice cream truck (Curtiss,
1981) Little grammatical structure - Ex) Think about Mama love Genie (Curtiss, 1981)
- ? Cognitive development in advance of language
development
7The Linguistic Environment
- Feral and Isolated Children
- The Critical Period Hypothesis
- Motherese
8The Critical Period Hypothesis
(1/5)
- There is a period early in life in which we are
especially prepared to acquire a language - There are neurological changes in the brain that
leave a learner less able to acquire a language - Most commonly, these changes are assumed to occur
near puberty
9The Critical Period Hypothesis
(2/5)
- Johnson and Newport (1989)
- Examined Korean and Chinese who had immigrated to
the US at various ages between 3 and 39 years of
age - Grammatical Test (Figure 12.1)
- Correlated age of arrival and scores on the test
above - Strong negative correlation ( r-.87) arrived (0
16) - No correlation arrived (16 40)
- ? Concluded that fundamentally different
processes are involved in younger versus older
learners
10The Critical Period Hypothesis
(3/5)
Figure 12.1
11The Critical Period Hypothesis
(4/5)
- Criticism
- Bialystok and Hakuta (1994)
- Simply moved the boundary between the younger and
older groups from 16 to 20 years and found
significant negative correlations for each group - Hakuta, Bialystok and Wiley (2003)
- 1990 US Census from 2.3 million immigrants with
Spanish and Chinese language backgrounds - Self-reported language proficiency
- not at all, not well, well, very well,
speak only English - No sharp breaks before and after 15 years of age
(gradual decline)
12The Critical Period Hypothesis
(5/5)
- Criticism
- Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978)
- Tested all English-speaking family embers who
moved to Holland for one year and were learning
Dutch - Adolescents did best gt adults gt children
- Old learner seemed to do better initially but
they reach a plateau younger learners eventually
catch up and pass them - The evidence from second-language acquisition
research has not provided unequivocal evidence
for the critical period hypothesis - Young children generally learn L2 better than
older children and adults, at least in the long
run - Younger and older learners differ in cognitive
development and may bring somewhat different
cognitive strategies on the task of L2
acquisition
13The Linguistic Environment
- Feral and Isolated Children
- The Critical Period Hypothesis
- Motherese
14Motherese (1/4)
- The ways adults speak to young children
- (Adult-to-Child Language) see Table 12.1
- In general, speech to children learning language
is shorter, more concrete, more directive, and
more intonationally exaggerated than
adult-directed speech - Such properties would assist children in their
language development but data on this question
are relatively scarce, and widely different
opinions exist on the matter
15Motherese (2/4)
- Motherese Hypothesis
- There is a relationship between the speech
adjustments adult make and childrens language
development - Strong form of the motherese hypothesis
- Motherese features are necessary for language to
develop properly absence of features ? childs
language difficulty - Weak form of the motherese hypothesis
- Motherese features assist a childs development
- (1) Correlational Approach (2) Experimental
Approach
16Motherese (3/4)
- (1) Correlational studies
- Newport Gleitman, 1977
- Limited relationships between parental speech and
child language. Mothers who used more yes/no
questions had children who used more auxiliaries
but most aspects of child language were unrelated
17Motherese (4/4)
- (2) Experimental studies
- Nelson, Carskaddon, Bonvillian,1973
- Language development can be facilitated if
children are presented with new syntactic
information related to the childs previous
sentence. - (1) Recast-sentence group
- Received new sentences related to the childs
sentence - Child Allgone truck
- Experimenter Yes, the truck is all gone
- (2) New-sentence group
- Received relatively short, grammatical sentences
that excluded the content words of the childs
previous utterance - (3) Control group (received no special treatment)
- Recast-sentence group (gtgt Control, gt New-sentence)
18Cognitive Processes
- Operating Principles
- Sensorimotor Schemata
- Cognitive Constraints
- Impairments of Language Cognition
19Operating Principles
- Childrens preferred ways of taking in
information (See Table 12.2, p335) - Useful in explaining certain patterns in early
child grammar - Children use fixed word order to create meanings.
(C) - Children often overregularize grammatical
morpheme. (F) - Useful in understanding childrens acquisition of
complex sentences - First attempting to form negatives and questions,
children often simply place the negative or
question marker at the front of a simple
declarative sentence (D)
20Cognitive Processes
- Operating Principles
- Sensorimotor Schemata
- Cognitive Constraints
- Impairments of Language Cognition
21Sensorimotor Schemata (1/2)
- Cognitive development Piaget
- Believed that intelligence was not random, but
was a set of organized cognitive structures that
the infant actively constructed through the
adaptation to the environment - Stages of Cognitive Development
- Sensorimotor period of development (02 y.)
- Child use body and senses banging, sucking,
throwing - Acquisition of object permanence (near end of
S.P.) - Notion that objects continue to exist even when
they cannot be perceived
22Sensorimotor Schemata (2/2)
- Cognitive development Childs language
development (two predictions) - Very young infant (not acquired object
permanence) - Should use words referring to concrete objects
- Large number of here and now words
- Infants (mastered object permanence)
- Should begin to use words referring to objects or
events that are not immediately present - Ex) allgone truck, more milk
- Specific language and cognitive achievements
occur with very short time lags or nearly
simultaneously - Little support for the notion that cognition
predates language by a significant period of time
23Cognitive Processes
- Operating Principles
- Sensorimotor Schemata
- Cognitive Constraints
- Impairments of Language Cognition
24Cognitive Constraints (1/2)
- Adult-to-Child language (a simplified and orderly
pattern of data) is sufficient for normal
language acquisition? - It seems unlikely that children explore every
possible meaning of a given word from adults - Child may have certain expectations about word
learning (Cognitive Constraint) - Three Possible Constraints
- Whole object bias
- A taxonomic bias
- Mutual exclusivity bias
25Cognitive Constraints (2/2)
- Whole object bias
- When children encounter a new label, they prefer
to attach the label to the entire object rather
than to part of the object - Ex) dog (a label for the entire object rather
than dogs tail) - A taxonomic bias
- Children will assume that the object label is a
taxonomic category rather than a name for a
individual dog - Ex) dog is a label for a group of animals not
just Fido - Mutual exclusivity bias
- It refers to the fact that a child who knows the
name of a particular object will then generally
reject applying a second name to that object - Ex) Show me the X (X was a nonsense syllable) ?
much more likely to select the novel object - ? Children have some clear biases or preferences
in learning new words
26Cognitive Processes
- Operating Principles
- Sensorimotor Schemata
- Cognitive Constraints
- Impairments of Language Cognition
27Impairments of Language and Cognition (1/3)
- The notion that a close relationship exists
between language and cognition has generally been
supported by studies of individuals with Down
syndrome - These individuals tend to have language delays
that are proportionate to the severity of their
cognitive disability - However, in certain individuals, there can be
significant discrepancies between the level of
cognitive functioning and the level of linguistic
functioning - Genie
- Williams Syndrome
- Chatterbox syndrome
28Impairments of Language and Cognition (2/3)
- Genie
- Advanced cognitive skills relative to linguistic
skills - Grammatically rudimentary but semantically more
advanced - Adult Why arent you singing?
- Genie Very sad
- Adult Why are you feeling sad?
- Gene Lisa sick
- ? This would provide evidence against the thesis
that cognition is sufficient for language
29Impairments of Language and Cognition (3/3)
- William Syndrome
- Elfinlike facial appearance, mental retardation,
cardiac defects - Despite their cognitive impairment, syntactic
skills were found to be largely intact - Chatterbox Syndrome
- Significant cognitive impairments unexpected
language abilities - ? If normal cognitive development is necessary
for normal language development, it should not
happen at all
30Innate Mechanisms
- The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis
- Parameter Setting
- The Issue of Negative Evidence
31The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (1/3)
- Language Bioprogram - Bickerton (1983, 1984)
- Children have an innate grammar that, in the
absence of proper environmental input, serves as
the childs language system ? a linguistic backup
system - Related studies
- Case 1 Pidgins and Creoles (Bickerton)
- Case 2 Studies of language development in
congenitally deaf children (Golden-Meadow) - Case 3 Sign language in Nicaragua
32The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (2/3)
- Case 1 Pidgins Creoles (refer to Table 12.3)
- Pidgin an auxiliary language that arises when
speakers of several mutually unintelligible
languages are in close contact (Bickrton, 1984) - Ex) Immigrant workers come to speak a simpler
form of the dominant language of the area-just
enough to get by - No recognizable syntax, often one word order, no
complex sentence - Creole when the children of these immigrants
acquire a pidgin as their native language - Relatively sophisticated, complex sentences
- Unlike pidgins, the creoles resembled the
structural rules of other languages - Case 2 Congenitally deaf children
- Children (13 months 4 years), every 2-4 months,
for 1.5 years - None of these children were exposed to
conventional sign language - Nevertheless, the children invented a form of
gestural language (Homesign) similar to the
language of children with normal hearing - One-sign utterances appeared (18 months),
followed by 2-3 sign utterances - ? When linguistic input is minimal, deaf
children may create a gestural language similar
to normal childrens language
33The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (3/3)
- Bioprogram might operate in the absence of
ordinary linguistic stimulation - What happen given appropriate linguistic input?
- Bioprogram is suppressed and children learn the
native language - Children use Preemption Principle If you hear
people using a form different from the one you
are using, and do not hear anyone using your
form, abandon yours and use theirs - Cognitive processes associated with language use
are not general purpose problem-solving processes
but are instead restricted to language
34Innate Mechanisms
- The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis
- Parameter Setting
- The Issue of Negative Evidence
35Parameter Setting (1/4)
- Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1981)
- Grammar ? a set of parameters corresponding to
each of the subsystems of the language - (Each parameter has a finite number of possible
settings) - Various combinations of parameter settings ? all
of the languages of the world - Children are born with the knowledge of the
parameters and their possible settings - Language Acquisition ? identifying which
parameter settings apply to ones native language
36Parameter Setting (2/4)
- Head Parameter (Cook, 1988)
- Each phrase in the language has one essential
element called head - Noun in noun phrases, verb in verb phrases
- The head parameter specifies the position of the
head within the phrase - English a head first language
- The man with the bow tie
- Liked him
- Nice to see
- To the bank
- Japanese a head last language
- Watashi wa nihongin desu (I Japanese am)
37Parameter Setting (3/4)
- Null-Subject Parameter (Hyams, 1986)
- Italian, Spanish grammatically acceptable
- English not permitted
- Children are born with this parameter set to the
null-subject value (default value) - Ex) Play it
- Ex) Eating cereal
- Ex) Shake hands
- Ex) See window
38Parameter Setting (4/4)
- Subset Principle (Berwick and Weinberg, 1984)
- Children begin to search through possible
languages by beginning with the smallest subset
available (that is, the most restrictive
language). If there is no evidence from their
linguistic input that this is their native
language, they proceed to the next largest subset
until they find a match
39Innate Mechanisms
- The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis
- Parameter Setting
- The Issue of Negative Evidence
40The Issue of Negative Evidence
- Positive Evidence
- Evidence that a particular utterance is
grammatical in the language that the child is
learning - Negative Evidence
- Evidence that a particular utterance is
ungrammatical - Pinker (1990)
- It would be very difficult to acquire a language
from positive evidence alone - Negative evidence, which could constrain the
problem space, is not generally available - Therefore, some constraints must be innate
- ? Although negative evidence is present and may
assist language development, research has not
shown that it is necessary - ? Justification for innate mechanisms
41Summary
- Three classes of variables are needed for a
complete account of language acquisition - Linguistic Environment
- Gross environmental neglect (feral isolated
children) ?Retard language acquisition - Cognitive Processes
- Cognitive process are correlated with language
development - Innate Mechanisms
- Children given poor linguistic input ? Create
communication systems similar to early child
language