Language Development

1
Language Development

• Major Questions
• 1) What is language/what is involved in language?
• 2) What are the stages of language development?
• 3) Is language development driven by nurture or
  nature?

2
What is language?

• Language has no single definition, but Hockett's
  list of design features is a popular compromise.
  By this account, language has the following 9
  attributes
• 1) Mode of Communication (vocal-auditory, etc)
• 2) Semanticity (meaningfulness)
• 3) Pragmatic Function (usefulness)
• 4) Interchangeability (ability to function as
  speaker and listener)
• 5) Cultural Transmission (passed down)
• 6) Arbitrariness (no necessary relationship
  between sign and the signified)
• 7) Discreteness (made up of separable units)
• 8) Displacement (can refer to something in
  another place/time)
• 9) Productivity (can produce a theoretically
  infinite number of meaningful utterances)

3
Animal Communication (1)

• All animal communications have the following
• mode of communication, semanticity, and
  pragmatic function.
• Some have interchangeability, 'cultural'
  transmission, arbitrariness, and discreteness.
• Essentially none have displacement and
  productivity.
• But there is at least one known animal language
  that displays displacement can you guess which?

4
Animal Communication (2)

• The great and mighty Bee!
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v4NtegAOQpSs

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For our purposes, know that (human) language

• Involves using signs that are not innately
  related to the things they signify
• Allows communication of concepts
• Can be spoken, written, or signed (modes of
  communication)
• Can produce a theoretically infinite set of
  sentences
• Seems to be unique to humans

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Language learning involves (1)

• Phonological development
• Learn which sounds (phones) influence meaning.
• These special phones are called phonemes and are
  the smallest meaningful sound changes in a
  language.
• We are able to recognize all phonemes (around
  200) and eventually our phonemic inventory
  narrows to match that of languages we are exposed
  to (45 sounds for English)
• Semantic development
• Learn to manipulate minimal units of meaning,
  called morphemes. Stems and affixes (prefix,
  suffix, infix) are two kinds of morphemes.

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Language learning involves (2)

• Syntactic development
• Learn the impact that the ordering of meaningful
  elements has on meaning. This is called
  descriptive grammar.
• This is NOT what we learn in school, but rather
  how people actually speak. What we are taught in
  school is called prescriptive grammar.
• Descriptive grammar only describes the system of
  use prescriptive grammar imposes (prescribes) a
  particular system
• Pragmatic development
• Learn the rules of use, including social rules,
  etc.
• Meta-linguistic knowledge
• This is linguistic knowledge about language for
  instance, categorizing words a noun, verb, etc.
  This may not actually be necessary for language
  learning but is a common feature.

8
Language learning involves (3)

• Phonological development
• Semantic development
• Syntactic development
• Pragmatic development
• Meta-linguistic knowledge
• Know these!

9
Methods of word learning

• Fast mapping (an idea which has come under fire
  recently, but is still worth discussing)
• Whole object assumption ('chair' means whole, not
  part of the thing being referenced)
• Mutual exclusivity assumption (no thing has more
  than one name)
• Pragmatic cues
• Social context
• Attention
• Intentionality
• Linguistic context
• Syntactic bootstrapping (using syntactic rules to
  guess meaning in context)

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The stages of primary language acquisition

• There are five basic stages of language
  acquisition
• Cooing Appears at about 6 months or so. All
  infants coo using all the phonemes from every
  language. Even congenitally deaf children coo.
• Babbling Appears at around 9 months. Infants are
  starting to selectively use the phonemes from
  their native language.
• One-word utterances At around 12 months,
  children start using words.
• Telegraphic speech Children start making
  multi-word utterances that lack function words.
  (about 2 years old)
• Normal speech By about 5-6 years of age,
  children have almost normal speech

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Nature or Nurture (1)

• Skinner Behaviorism could define the way we
  learn language.
• Chomsky Human language learning appears to be
  innate in a way that violate behaviorist
  expectations. Called Nativism.

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Nature or Nurture (2)

• What about language could behaviorism not
  explain?
• 1) Novel utterances
• 2) Poverty of stimulus
• 3) Speed of learning
• 4) Creolization
• 5) Language creation

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Further evidence for Nativism

• 1) Neurological evidence for dedicated processing
• 2) Inability of other species to create
  linguistic utterances even when exposed to
  language
• 3) Critical periods for language development
• 4) Preferential perception for speech sounds (we
  pay more attention to the differences between
  speech and non-speech sounds)
• 5) Costly physiological adaptation (larynx and
  choking)

14
However...

• Modern neural network models show some promise
  for being able to demonstrate how language is
  learned in a way that does not require special
  equipment.

15
Nature AND Nurture

• Both nature and nurture play valuable rolls in
  language learning. For proper language
  development you need a human brain and a human
  environment.