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Title: Learning Language


1
Learning Language
"That's one small step for a man one giant leap
for mankind".
learning language a universal process
2
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

3
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

4
Children develop and mature simultaneously in
four inter-related areas
  1. Physically
  2. Cognitively
  3. Linguistically
  4. Socially

5
Tabula Rasa
How does a child develop physically, cognitively,
linguistically and socially during the first two
years of life
6
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

7
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?
8
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

9
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

10
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'

11
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?
12
  • 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
13
  • 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
14
  • 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
15
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
16
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


17
  • 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

18
  • 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.

19
  • 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.

20
  • 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

21
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
22
  • 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
23
  • 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.

24
  • 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.

25
  • 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

26
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

27
  • 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.

28
  • 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

29
  • 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

30
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!

31
First words
  • Important people
  • Objects that move
  • Objects that can be acted upon
  • Familiar actions
  • Nouns before verbs

32
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

33
  • 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.

34
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.

35
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

36
  • 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

37
  • 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)

38
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

39
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

40
  • 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
41
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.

42
  • 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

43
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

44
  • Comprehended words
  • 12 months first words
  • age 2 years 200 words
  • age 6 years 15,000 words

45
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

46
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

47
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

48
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

49
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)

50
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

51
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

52
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