Lecture: Psycholinguistics Professor Dr. Neal R. Norrick _____________________________________

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Lecture Psycholinguistics Professor Dr. Neal R.
Norrick_____________________________________

• Psycholinguistics

• Universität des Saarlandes
• Dept. 4.3 English Linguistics
• SS 2009

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• 5. First Language Acquisition
• Natural acquisition with no special learning
  necessary
• critical period resulting from a combination of
  factors
• development of connections between nerve cells
• myelination of nerve cells

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• lateralization of brain functions
• dominance of left hemisphere
• corresponding development of motor skills
• general cognitive stages of development
• (Piaget)

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• 5.1 Developmental sketch
• Age Language General
• (months)
• 9 babbling crawling
• 10 first words standing,
• precurrent, maintained claps hand,
• (ba)nana(na) for holds spoon
• 'banana, food, mama'

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 11 5-10 recurrent words first steps,
• fulfills requests like recognizes
• bring me the blue ball pictures in
• show me the big red dog books
• 12 5 distinct vowels starts walking
• 5 distinct consonants

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 13 recognizable words running,
• daddy nein ball climbing furniture
• allgone
• 14 imitations horse, train simple puzzles,
• reduplications turns book pages
• choochoo,
• byebye, taktak clock

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 16 recognizes own name points to himself
• 20 words Where's Nicky?
• 18 vocabulary explosion climbs stairs
• 2-word units without rail
• ducky allgone
• Nicky haben

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 20 3-word units hangs on monkey
• Nicky cookie haben bars, points to
• also eyes, nose, mouth
• haben Nicky cookie

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 22 verb particle dramatic
• lock up/ deck zu play,
• 4-word units stuffed Mami Auto fahren
  kauft animals,
• Inni gute Nacht sagen dolls

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• Age (months) 24
• Language General
• verb endings Inni spuckt bisschen kicks
  soccer ball
• statement Nicky auch essen plays
  hide-n-seek
• question Nicky auch essen, ja?
  draws details
• command Nicky auch essen ears,
  tails, wheels
• word-formation cutter knife
• auskleben tear apart
• umwärts

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• Age (months) 26
• Language General
• participles Mami ist weggegingt draws
  objectively
• das ist runtergefallt recognizable
  figures,
• recognizes colors
• comparison Pferdchen ein kleineres
• Mond grösser als Daddy
• Monologues/ Mami kommt darein, tic-tac
• stories Danke, Post schickt Daddy

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 27 future orientation sings melodies
• Let's build a castle
• I'll put it in
• 28 recursive structures counts to 5
• Ich weiss nicht, wen recognizes letters
• der Deckel verloren hat N, C, O
• questions with
• when, how

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• Age Language
• (months)
• 30 conditionals
• ich suche, ob ich den Hasen finde
• Timmy ist traurig, wenn das
• Osterhäschen hier schläft
• plans I want to read a book about a story

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 32 first real narrative builds Legos
• It was a wooden lamby draws people
• and it was on the floor and house
• in a barn with chimney
• and they took it home and windows
• and they washed it
• and it wasn't ugly

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• Age Language General
• (months)
• 34 reports on TV program learns to
• Plötzlich kamen zwei peddle trike
• Krokodile und haben das
• Kälbchen ge'essen
• reports on activities
• I'm pretending this is
• a castle

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• (continued 34 months)
• explains actions
• I break it that I can make it new
• predicts
• It's gonna be real beautiful,
• you're gonna love it

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• Age (months) 36
• Phonetics
• voiced th initial okay in the this etc
• medial v in other
• voiceless th initial s in sing
• final f in both
• vocalizes final l and r
• mispronunciations amimals, cimamon, pasketti

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• Morphology
• double plurals mens, feets, mices
• double preterites sawed, standed
• regularized preterites goed, sitted
• reverse word-formations popcorner, mowgrasser
• Syntax
• negation I see it not, That doll sits not
  right
• questions What it did? What the lady said?
• counting 1 2 3 4 5 6 20 14 fiveteen 16

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Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) as standard
measure of first language development as opposed
to age
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• 5.2 Natural order of acquisition
• 5.2.1 "Why mama and papa?
• Jakobson's order for phoneme acquisition
• in babbling, children produce all kinds of
• sounds and sound combinations many
• children produce imitations after babbling
• but around age 2, children narrow their sound
• repertory and begin to produce sounds of
• their language in fixed order

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• order reflects an attempt to create the clearest
  possible set of distinctions at any given point,
  within the given physiological limits
• this order of acquisition also reveals parallel
  
• between different languages
• most salient distinction is between Vowels (V)
  and
• Consonants (C)

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• Vowels are characteristically open and resonant
• the prototypical V is a
• Consonants are characteristically closed and
  obstruent
• stops are prototypical Cs
• the prototypical stop is p
• the prototypical syllable is CV maximizing the
  C-V distinction, a child's first syllable should
  be pa
• ? given children's tendency to reduplication,
• a child's first real word should be papa

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the first division within the class of Cs is that
between oral and nasal the nasal counterpart of
bilabial p is m ? maximizing the p-m
distinction and reduplicating, the child's
second word should be mama (actually initial
nasals often appear first, because of the
association with sucking and mama is often
first word recorded, because of the centrality
of mother for the child)
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major divisions within the class of Vs are those
between front and back, high and low, spread and
open the vowel most distinct from a along all
these parameters is i ? again maximizing the
a-i distinction (and reduplicating), the
child's next words should be pipi and mimi
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extending the pattern of Vs, always seeking to
maximize distinctness, the child should move to a
triplet a u i
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• after the Cs p and m , the child usually acquires
  t , then the third voiceless stop k and so on
• p m t k
• child moves on to ever larger patterns with
• increasing numbers of distinctive
  features

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• only when child controls the individual
  consonants can they occur together in 2-consonant
  clusters
• then word-initial clusters like pl- and st-
  precede
• final clusters like -lp and st
• later come initial 3-consonant clusters like
• spr- and str-
• and then word-final 3-consonant clusters like
• -rst and -sks
• of course, kids don't learn sounds in isolation,
  
• but only in words and syntactic structures

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• 5.2.2 Order of acquisition for syntax
• at first, kids produce
• one-word utterances with holistic meaning
• two-word utterances with no fixed word order
• three-word utterances without inflections,
• prepositions or other markers
• then they begin to acquire syntax

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Brown's (1973) order of acquisition for syntax
1. present progressive girl playing
2. prepositions ball in water
3. plural toys, dishes 4. irregular past
tense went, told 5. possessive Ann's toys
6. articles a dog, the dog 7. regular past
tense jumped, hugged, wanted
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8. regular 3rd person she goes, talks, watches
9. irregular 3rd person she does, has 10.
auxiliary be I am, you are, she is 11.
contracted auxiliary I'm, you're, she's ?
order of acquisition as reflecting general
learning strategies and stages of
development (Piaget) or as evidence of
innate language acquisition device
(Chomsky)
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• 5.3 Piaget
• language as product of intelligence,
• not behaviorist learning
• rational origin of language presupposes
• fixed nucleus,
• i.e. structures common to all human languages
• like subject-predicate, hierarchical organization
• but no specific language-learning device
• (despite Chomsky)

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• Piaget assumes child language development
  reflects species development no innateness
  assumption is necessary, given sensorimotor
  intelligence in human development
• language as a special case of general symbolic
  behavior
• developmentally, each stage prepares for the
• next, but each new stage requires a
  reorganization

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• e.g. infant recognizes caregiver as separate
  from continuum
• caregiver as recurrent/stable entity
• self as separate
• self as entity like caregiver

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• e.g. kid recognizes human sound separate from
  continuum
• language sound as separate from babbling
• discrete word as separate from continuum
• discrete word as recurrent/stable entity
• word word as unit
• hierarchy within word word unit etc

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• Piagetian stages in general cognitive development
• 1. Sensory-motor stage (birth to 2 years)
• child notices objects as separate from self and
  permanent
• manipulates objects as chief contact with
  environment

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• 2. Preoperational thought
• 2a. Stage of symbolic thought (age 2-4)
• symbolic play, pretending and language
  acquisition
• child recognizes social nature of language.
• 2b. Stage of intuitive thought (age 4-7)
• child begins to think in language, but thinking
  is still egocentric and centered on one
  relationship at a time

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• 3. Stage of concrete operations (age 7-11)
• child can vary two or more relationships
  independently solves conservation problem by
  compensation

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• 4. Stage of formal operations (age 11-15)
• hypothesis formation and testing. rational
  consideration of the form of an argument, e.g.
• All three-legged snakes are purple.
• I am hiding a three-legged snake.
• What color is it?