Acquisition de la syntaxe.

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Acquisition de la syntaxe.

• Anne Christophe
• Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et
  Psycholinguistique,
• CNRS-EHESS-ENS, Paris
• http//www.lscp.net
• http//www.lscp.net/persons/anne
• enseignement cours Acquisition de la syntaxe

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Paradoxe dinitialisation

• Les expériences chez les adultes suggèrent que la
  structure syntaxique est extrêmement utile pour
  contraindre lacquisition des verbes
• or, pour apprendre la structure syntaxique, on
  supposait quil fallait être capable danalyser
  les phrases en mots, de connaître le sens de ces
  mots, et de connaître le sens de la phrase
  entière.

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Paradoxe dinitialisation

• Le lexique est un pré-requis pour lacquisition
  de la syntaxe
• la syntaxe est un pré-requis pour lacquisition
  du lexique.
• Solutions
• découper les composantes du langage en morceaux
• exploiter de linformation extérieure au
  paradoxe ex prosodie informe lanalyse
  syntaxique

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Initialisation syntaxique de lacquisition du
lexique

• Est-ce que les jeunes enfants exploitent la
  structure syntaxique des phrases pour apprendre
  un nouveau mot?

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Learning a new word noun vs adjective
Familiarization Phase
Test Phase
No Word "See here?" Novel Noun "See the
blicket? See what I have?" Novel
Adjective "See the blickish one?"  
Waxman Markow, 1995
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12-13 months-olds
p lt .05 Chance 50
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Learning a new word noun vs adjective objects
that share both category membership and a salient
property

• Can infants flexibly construe the very same
  objects either
• as members of an object category (animal
  flamingo) or
• as embodying an object property (purple soft)?
• . Does their construal vary systematically as a
  function of naming?
• Can we assess the evolution of infants
  expectations?

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stringent test Pitting Category vs Property

FAMILIARIZATION
TEST CAT vs PROP
CONTRAST
(Booth Waxman, 2003)
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(No Transcript)
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At 14 months Infants tease apart the nouns
Booth Waxman (2003)
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Whether they are phrase final or medial Booth
Waxman (2003)
The ability to generalize adjectives depends on
several things
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Nouns vs adjectives Waxman et al.

• Infants become able to identify a new word as a
  noun between 12 and 14 months of age (and infer
  that it refers to objects)
• adjectives are identified as not being nouns
  whether infants are able to generalize to objects
  sharing the same property depends on the task at
  hand, even in very old children (3-4 years) it
  seems that children need to have a
  well-established category before they will learn
  a word for one of its properties (color, texture).

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Pour tester la syntaxe des jeunes enfants
expériences de compréhension de phrases, avec
présentation d'une vidéo

• Suggèrent que les enfants connaissent déjà
  l'ordre des mots dans leur langue (Hirsh-Pasek
  Golinkoff, 1996)
• peut-être qu'ils exploitent la structure
  syntaxique des phrases pour inférer le sens du
  verbe (Naigles)
• difficultés d'interprétation...

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Testing early comprehension with the cross-modal
preferential looking task

• scenes a) big bird tickles cookie monster
• b) cookie monster tickles big bird
• task where is cookie monster tickling big
  bird?

result subjects look more at appropriate video
than inappropriate video
Interpretation perform a syntactic analysis of
the sentence? Subject Agent? Or, know that
agent is named first in the sentence?
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M. (1996). The
origins of grammar evidence from early language
comprehension. Cambridge Mass. MIT Press.
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Learning about verb meanings Naigles et al.

• Video synchronous action duck and bunny making
  arm circlescausative action the duck forces
  the rabbit to bend over
• speech three groups of children1. the duck
  is blicking the bunny!2. the duck and the
  bunny are blicking!3. blicking!

Naigles, L. G., Kako, E. T. (1993). First
contact in verb acquisition defining a role for
syntax. Child Development, 64, 1665-1687.
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Learning about verb meanings Naigles et al.

• Test phase the two actions are separated (one on
  the left, one on the right), children hear find
  blicking
• Results 2-year-olds look longer at causative
  action when they had heard the verb in the
  transitive frame (the duck is blicking the
  bunny)
• Ccl 2-year-old use the syntax of sentences to
  make hypothesis about verb meaning
• interprétation alternative???

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Exploiter la diversité des structures syntaxiques
pour inférer le sens d'un verbe initialisation
syntaxique

• Encore une fois, double actionune causative
  (faire faire quelque chose à quelqu'un), une non
  (action de contact)
• présenter le verbe dans une seule construction
  syntaxique, ou dans deux constructions
• une transitive,
• une intransitive.

Naigles, L. (1996). The use of multiple frames in
verb learning via syntactic bootstrapping.
Cognition, 58, 221-251.
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• As Landau and Gleitman (1985) hypothesized in
  their original proposal of Syntactic
  Bootstrapping, children may exploit the multiple
  frames in which a verb can be presented in their
  acquisition of that verb's meaning. The idea is
  that while a single frame may be insufficient to
  accurately constrain a verb's meaning given a
  particular extra-linguistic context, multiple
  frames may provide enough information to do so.
  For example, in Landau and Gleitman's
  investigation of the acquisition of look by a
  blind child named Kelli, they suggested that it
  was the set of syntactic frames in which look
  appeared that enabled Kelli to establish this as
  a verb of perception. To Kelli, look was a verb
  of haptic perception rather than visual
  perception (i.e., it meant explore with the hands
  rather than explore with the eyes).

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• Part of this meaning could be attributed to the
  fact that Kelli's mother only used look in
  reference to nearby things and not far-away
  things. However, she also used such verbs as
  have, give, play, and put in reference to nearby
  things that is, the spatial context did not
  distinguish look from the nonperceptual verbs.
  Interestingly, the syntactic frames in which look
  was used did provide this distinction look
  differed from have in allowing PPs (compare Kelli
  looked AT THE BALL with Kelli has AT THE BALL),
  it differed from put in not allowing frames
  containing three NPs (compare KELLI put THE BALL
  in THE BASKET with KELLI looked THE BALL in THE
  BASKET), and it differed from go in allowing
  sentence complements (compare Look HOW TO DO IT
  with Go HOW TO DO IT). Thus, Landau and Gleitman
  conjectured that it was the conjunction of these
  frames in Kelli's input, plus the accompanying
  spatial contexts, which enabled Kelli to
  establish explore haptically as the meaning of
  look.

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Exemple des alternances

• Causative alternation(1) The girl dropped the
  ball.(2) The ball dropped.
• Object omission alternation(3) The cat was
  scratching the door.(4) The cat was scratching.

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Dessin expérimental

• Causative alternationthe duck is sebbing the
  frogthe frog is sebbing -gt action causative
• Omitted objectthe duck is sebbing the frogthe
  duck is sebbing -gt action de contact? (?)
• Frameless sebbing! -gt indifférent
• Intransitive onlythe duck is sebbing. -gt
  action de contact? (?)

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Matériel expérimental
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Set-up expérimental
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Exemple de scénario
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Résultats
F(1,112)3.19, plt0.05 (one-tailed)
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16
16
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Préférence globale pour l'action
causative seules les filles, dans la condition
'omitted object', ne la montrent pas.
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Résultats item par item
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Conclusion

• The current study supplies the first
  experimental evidence that young language
  learners can take advantage of cross-sentential
  information. In this study, the pair of
  sentence frames (the transitive/intransitive
  alternation) makes a specific prediction
  concerning the meaning of the verb that appears
  in it. That is, hearing a verb in a transitive
  frame can inform a child that the verb's action
  affects an object, possibly in a causative
  relation, and so directs the child to focus on
  these types of actions in the accompanying scene.
  Hearing a verb in an intransitive frame suggests,
  among other things, that the verb's action is
  spontaneous or internally controlled, so that the
  child's attention is directed to these types of
  actions. Hearing the same verb in both frames may
  inform the child that both types of actions are
  feasible for this verb, but may not (yet) provide
  enough direction for the child's attention in a
  given scene of set of scenes.

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Conclusion

• However, hearing the verb in both frames in the
  Omitted Object alternation provides information
  that the verb's action is not causative, and that
  it refers to an ongoing activity in the scene (in
  this study, this was one involving contact). In
  sum, the information provided by the two frames
  in the OO alternation in this study would seem to
  be more specific than that provided by sentence
  forms being considered in combination but not in
  relation to each other. Both kinds of
  cross-sentential information are likely to be
  useful to the language learner, though, and both
  should be investigated in more detail.
• ???

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Perspectives

• How can the child learn about syntax?
• If possible, before he/she knows many words?
• Pay attention to grammatical words, articles,
  pronouns, etc, to identify syntactic categories
  (noun/verb/)
• E.g. look, the gorp is blicking!!

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Bootstrapping syntaxique test expérimental

• Les bébés peuvent-ils exploiter les mots
  grammaticaux pour inférer la catégorie syntaxique
  des mots de contenu?
• - je jaurime -gt jaurime est un verbe,
  réfère probablement à une action.
• - une jaurime -gt jaurime est un nom, réfère
  probablement à un objet.
• (note bien moins complexe que verbe de pensée
  vs verbe de communication)

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Test

• Les bébés apprennent un mot nouveau ex
  observent une pomme qui tourne sur
  elle- même entendent regarde, elle
  dase! (répété quatre fois).
• test deux pommes, une qui tourne sur elle-même,
  une qui fait autre chose,
• question montre-moi celle qui dase!
• réponse en pointant du doigt (bébés
  préalablement entraînés à pointer du doigt vers
  lécran 4 mots nouveaux, 2 essais par mot).

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Résultats bébés de 23 mois.
Montre-moi celle qui dase!
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Groupe contrôle

• pomme qui tourne sur elle-mêmeGroupe
  verbe Groupe Nom regarde, elle dase!
  regarde la dase!
• test deux pommes, une qui tourne sur elle-même,
  une qui fait autre chose,
• Groupe verbe Groupe Nom montre-moi mont
  re-moi celle qui dase! la
  dase! (question idiote).

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Résultats bébés de 23 mois.
Montre-moi celle qui dase!
Montre-moi la dase!
Savita Bernal (thèse de doctorat).
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Conclusion initialisation syntaxique

• L'information sur la structure syntaxique peut
  être utile pour contraindre l'acquisition du sens
  des mots (étude adulte, Gillette et al. 1999)
• les enfants (américains) de 14 mois distinguent
  déjà entre un mot nouveau présenté comme un nom
  ( objet) et un mot nouveau présenté comme un
  adjectif ( pas objet mais pas encore
  propriété)
• les enfants (français) de 23 mois distinguent
  entre un mot nouveau présenté comme un nom (
  objet) et un mot nouveau présenté comme un verbe
  ( action)
• qu'en est-il des enfants plus jeunes?? (18 mois)
• Comment ont-ils fait pour apprendre ça??

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Objectif des expériencesTomasello, M.,
Akhtar, N. (1995). Two-year-olds use pragmatic
cues to differentiate reference to objects and
actions. Cognitive Development, 10, 201-224.
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Discussion générale.

• Lenfant utilise des indices socio-pragmatiques
  pour déterminer si un adulte qui prononce un mot
  nouveau cherche à indiquer un objet ou une action
  (Tomasello Akhtar).
• L'enfant utilise des indices linguistiques pour
  déterminer si un nouveau mot réfère à un objet ou
  à une action (Gleitman Bernal)
• Y a-t-il un paradoxe?