Language Acquisition

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Language Acquisition

• 1.

Elena Lieven, MPI-EVA, Leipzig School of
Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester
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Sharing food
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M. Who would like a biscuit? C. Jessie D. I would
like a biscuit M. Jessie and Dimitra M. Who gave
us these? C. Grandma Granddad M.Yes, Grandma and
Granddad C. Open it M. Isnt it a great box? C.
Mum have one M. Mummy have one? C. Yeh, Mummy
have one M. Can we offer Dimitra one? C. Ya M.
You hold the box M. Hold the packet C. Yeh M. And
offer Dimitra one M. Say Would you like a
biscuit, Dimitra? C. And Mummy D. Mmm, very
nice C. One for Jessie M. Theyre callred
fingers, arent they, Jess M. Chocolate
fingers C. Chocolate fingers
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Outline of Course
MAIN TOPIC
POST BREAK

• Theoretical preliminaries
• Errors and different approaches to explaining
  them
• Input and complex syntax
• Crosscultural issues
• Unanswered questions

• What infants bring to language learning
• Early structure
• Developing complexity
• Crosslinguistic issues
• Comparing theories

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Outline for Session 1

• MAIN TOPIC
• Precursors
• Infant perception
• Word meaning
• Understanding communicative intentions

POST BREAK Some theoretical preliminaries
- Constructions - Abstraction -
What does usage-based mean?
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What newborn and very young infants can already do

• discriminate human speech from other sounds and
  prefer to listen to it
• discriminate their mothers voice from that of
  other adult women
• discriminate their language from another
  language
• they listen longer to a story that they have
  heard read in the womb

Infants are using the broad pitch and rhythmic
characteristics of the speech to do this
Eimas et al Mehler et al De Casper et al.
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Perceiving phonemic distinctions - differences
between the sounds of different languages
Both Hindi and English /ba/ vs. /da/ 6-8
month-old babies and adults could discriminate.
Hindi, not English, easy /Ta/ vs. /ta/ 6-8
month-old babies could discriminate. Adults could
not initially but could after 25 trials of
training.
Hindi, not English, hard /th/ vs. /dh/ 6-8
month-old babies could discriminate. Adults could
not, and never learned.
Babies can discriminate the sounds of all the
worlds languages and adults cannot.
Werker et al.
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Recognising and remembering words
Between 6 and 7.5 months, babies learn to
identify familiar words in context

• At 7.5 months, English-learners can identify
  words with strong-weak
• stress patterns but not words with weak-strong
  patterns.
• They can identify words with weak-strong patterns
  by 10.5 months.

• 8-month old babies listen 10 times over 2 weeks
  to 3 stories, read by different speakers, in
  different orders.
• Two weeks later, they listened longer to lists of
  words that had occurred frequently in the stories
  than to lists of words that had not occurred in
  the stories

Jusczyk et al.
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Learning that elements are ordered
1. Present babies with strings of elements from
an artificial grammar VOT PEL JIC RUD TAM
2. The artificial grammar has rules as to the
order of elements PEL can occur 1st
position 2nd position both 2nd and 3rd
not at all JIC can occur after VOT,
PEL or TAM but its position depended on whether
VOT or TAM was first
3. The babies listen to the strings following
these rules for 2 minutes
4. Test with strings of the same sounds but
different rules of combination
5. 12-month-old babies listened longer to new
strings from the grammar they had heard before
than to strings from the other grammars
Gomez Gerken
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Does this mean that babies know grammar
innately?
Younger babies could not do this, though Marcus
et al. found that they could do a related but
much simpler task at 7 months
Older babies (17-months) could do a distance
dependency task in an artificial grammar e.g.
The boy, who I like, is here today The
boys, who I like, are here today
NO !
Babies are sensitive to the statistical
properties of what they hear and these
sensitivities are developing before and during
infancy.
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Connecting sound and meaning processing speech
1. Present babies with two pictures doll dog
2. Present sentences Wheres the
dolly/doggie? See the dolly/doggie
3. From about 9 months, they look at the right
picture
BUT it takes them much longer to do this at 12
months than at 24 months
Fernald et al.
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Summary

• Infants have a number of perceptual skills
  which we share
• with other species
• They are surrounded from before birth with an
  environment
• of human speech
• They are powerful statistical learners
• Learning to process speech proceeds by stages in
  which the
• child gradually identifies different levels of
  organisation
• prosody ? syllables ? words
• Connecting sound to meaning starts in the first
  year, but takes
• a quantum leap at about 9 months
• Achieving the perception and production of
  accurate speech
• sounds using our specially evolved human speech
  apparatus
• is a long task

Jusczyk, Kuhl, Werker, Gomez, Gerken, Marcus,
Fernald
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Learning word meaning

• Very few words can be learned by simple
  association
• Some researchers posit innate constraints that
  help the child to learn words
• Others maintain that the childs developing
  cognitive skills and understanding of intention
  is enough

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Developing intersubjectivity

• Pointing to direct the others attention
• Tracking anothers attentional state
• Respond to the perceived intentions of others

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Misunderstanding Litowski, MPI-EVA
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Uninterested
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Intention readingWarneken MPI-EVA
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Communicating intention

• Language is first about communication, then about
  meaning
• Children have intentions that they want to
  communicate
• They understand that others have intentions that
  they are trying to communicate
• Children use this to work out mappings between
  form and meaning

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Some theoretical preliminaries

• Constructions
• Abstraction
• What does usage-based mean?

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Learning to talk
Intention reading and preverbal communication
Distributional analysis prosody ? phonemes ?
words
Infant cognition
Form-meaning mappings
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Learning to talk
Intention reading and preverbal communication
Distributional analysis prosody ? phonemes ?
words
Infant cognition
Form-meaning mappings
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Mapping sounds to meaning
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Constructivist views of language acquisition

• Language acquisition involves the learning of
  form meaning pairs

Simple or Complex (word-sized)
(phrase-sized) Concrete or Abstract
(phonologically specific) (partially
underspecified phonologically)

• Abstract constructions have the same structure
  as
• more specific units and are acquired by
  generalising
• over them

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Where does X go?
Where does THING play? Where does THING
sleep? Where does THING live?
Q-word Grounding Entity
Process Location predication
TAP LOCATIVE QUESTION CONSTRUCTION
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Implications for language development

• Children start by learning concrete expressions
• Then abstract low-level schemas from them
  (mappings of form and function)
• These become
• more complex (more parts)
• more abstract (less phonologically-based)

Children are making abstractions from before they
start talking. What changes with development is
the scope of the abstraction.
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Abstraction

• Children abstract from the beginning
• A concept is an abstraction, so is a word
• The issue is not whether children abstract but
• What do they abstract over?
• How specifically linguistic is the nature of the
  abstraction process?

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Usage-based theories

• Language structure emerges from language use
• Human communication is biologically underpinned
• But grammar is the product of historical language
  change
• Children learn a structured inventory of
  constructions from the utterances they hear