Chap 12. Process of Language Acquisition 2008. 11. 27 김 민 경

Chap 12. Process of Language Acquisition

2008. 11. 27

김 민 경

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Main Points

How Language is acquired?

Linguistic Environment Gross environmental neglect (feral & isolated children)

Retard language acquisition

Cognitive Processes Cognitive process are correlated with language

development

Innate Mechanisms Children given poor linguistic input Create communication

systems similar to early child language

The Linguistic Environment

Feral and Isolated Children The Critical Period Hypothesis Motherese

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Feral and Isolated Children (1/3)

Feral children Grown up in the wild Ex) Victor case

Isolated children Grown up with extremely limited human contact Ex) Genie case

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Feral Children - Victor (2/3)

Found in the woods of France in 1797, was captured as a naked 12 (or 13)-year-old boy

No speech (normal hearing, utterance of some sounds)

Itard (physician) tried to train him to be socialized and to use language for 5 years

In general, Victor’s language progress was poor Able to comprehend language, but practically unable to produce it The only 2 pronounced words: “milk”, “oh my god” The majority of his communication consisted of grunts and howls

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Isolated Children - Genie (3/3) Rescued in 1970, at the age of 13 in California, she could not stand erect and

was unable to speak except 2 words: “Stopit”, “Nomore”

Very little exposure to language during her imprisonment From the age of 20 months, lived in nearly total isolation and was attached to a potty

by a special harness for most of the day Her father did not speak to her but communicated through barking

By a program of language remediation 1970: one-word utterances, ex) “No. No. Cat” [13 y.] 1971: her language resembled that of a normal 18-20 months old child

Distinction between plural and singular nouns Tow-word utterances, ex) “Want milk”, “Big teeth” [14 y.]

No vocabulary explosion after 18-20 months Incapable to produce questions (Ex. “I where is graham cracker on the top shelf?”)

Semantic development: rapid & extensive, Syntactic development: slow Ex) I like hear music ice cream truck (Curtiss, 1981) : Little grammatical structure Ex) Think about Mama love Genie (Curtiss, 1981)

Cognitive development in advance of language development



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The Critical Period Hypothesis (1/5)

There is a period early in life in which we are especially prepared to acquire a language

There are neurological changes in the brain that leave a learner less able to acquire a language

Most commonly, these changes are assumed to occur near puberty

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Johnson and Newport (1989) Examined Korean and Chinese who had immigrated to

the US at various ages between 3 and 39 years of age Grammatical Test (Figure 12.1) Correlated age of arrival and scores on the test above

Strong negative correlation ( r=-.87): arrived (0 ~ 16) No correlation: arrived (16 ~ 40)

Concluded that fundamentally different processes are involved in younger versus older learners

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[Figure 12.1]

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Criticism Bialystok and Hakuta (1994)

Simply moved the boundary between the younger and older groups from 16 to 20 years and found significant negative correlations for each group

Hakuta, Bialystok and Wiley (2003) 1990 US Census from 2.3 million immigrants with Spanish and Chinese

language backgrounds Self-reported language proficiency

“not at all”, “not well”, “well”, “very well”, “speak only English”

No sharp breaks before and after 15 years of age (gradual decline)

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Criticism Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978)

Tested all English-speaking family embers who moved to Holland for one year and were learning Dutch

Adolescents did best > adults > children Old learner seemed to do better initially but they reach a plateau; younger

learners eventually catch up and pass them

The evidence from second-language acquisition research has not provided unequivocal evidence for the critical period hypothesis

Young children generally learn L2 better than older children and adults, at least in the long run

Younger and older learners differ in cognitive development and may bring somewhat different cognitive strategies on the task of L2 acquisition



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Motherese (1/4)

The ways adults speak to young children

(Adult-to-Child Language) : see Table 12.1

In general, speech to children learning language is shorter, more concrete, more directive, and more intonationally exaggerated than adult-directed speech

Such properties would assist children in their language development but data on this question are relatively scarce, and widely different opinions exist on the matter

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Motherese (2/4)

Motherese Hypothesis There is a relationship between the speech adjustments

adult make and children’s language development Strong form of the motherese hypothesis

Motherese features are necessary for language to develop properly; absence of features child’s language difficulty

Weak form of the motherese hypothesis Motherese features assist a child’s development

(1) Correlational Approach & (2) Experimental Approach

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Motherese (3/4)

(1) Correlational studies Newport & Gleitman, 1977 Limited relationships between parental speech and

child language. Mothers who used more yes/no questions had children who used more auxiliaries but most aspects of child language were unrelated

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Motherese (4/4) (2) Experimental studies

Nelson, Carskaddon, Bonvillian,1973 Language development can be facilitated if children are presented

with new syntactic information related to the child’s previous sentence.

(1) Recast-sentence group Received new sentences related to the child’s sentence

Child: Allgone truck Experimenter: Yes, the truck is all gone

(2) New-sentence group Received relatively short, grammatical sentences that excluded the

content words of the child’s previous utterance (3) Control group (received no special treatment) Recast-sentence group (>> Control, > New-sentence)

Cognitive Processes

Operating Principles Sensorimotor Schemata Cognitive Constraints Impairments of Language & Cognition

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Operating Principles

Children’s preferred ways of taking in information (See Table 12.2, p335)

Useful in explaining certain patterns in early child grammar Children use fixed word order to create meanings. (C) Children often overregularize grammatical morpheme. (F)

Useful in understanding children’s acquisition of complex sentences First attempting to form negatives and questions, children often

simply place the negative or question marker at the front of a simple declarative sentence (D)

Cognitive Processes


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Sensorimotor Schemata (1/2)

Cognitive development – Piaget Believed that intelligence was not random, but was a

set of organized cognitive structures that the infant actively constructed through the adaptation to the environment

Stages of Cognitive Development Sensorimotor period of development (0~2 y.)

Child use body and senses: banging, sucking, throwing Acquisition of object permanence (near end of S.P.)

Notion that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be perceived

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Sensorimotor Schemata (2/2)

Cognitive development & Child’s language development (two predictions) Very young infant (not acquired object permanence)

Should use words referring to concrete objects Large number of “here and now” words

Infants (mastered object permanence) Should begin to use words referring to objects or events that are

not immediately present Ex) allgone truck, more milk

Specific language and cognitive achievements occur with very short time lags or nearly simultaneously

Little support for the notion that cognition predates language by a significant period of time

Cognitive Processes


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Cognitive Constraints (1/2)

Adult-to-Child language (a simplified and orderly pattern of data) is sufficient for normal language acquisition? It seems unlikely that children explore every possible

meaning of a given word from adults Child may have certain expectations about word

learning (Cognitive Constraint) Three Possible Constraints

Whole object bias A taxonomic bias Mutual exclusivity bias

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Cognitive Constraints (2/2) Whole object bias

When children encounter a new label, they prefer to attach the label to the entire object rather than to part of the object Ex) dog (a label for the entire object rather than dog’s tail)

A taxonomic bias Children will assume that the object label is a taxonomic category

rather than a name for a individual dog Ex) dog is a label for a group of animals not just Fido

Mutual exclusivity bias It refers to the fact that a child who knows the name of a particular

object will then generally reject applying a second name to that object Ex) Show me the X (X was a nonsense syllable) much more likely to

select the novel object

Children have some clear biases or preferences in learning new words

Cognitive Processes


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Impairments of Language and Cognition (1/3)

The notion that a close relationship exists between language and cognition has generally been supported by studies of individuals with Down syndrome

These individuals tend to have language delays that are proportionate to the severity of their cognitive disability

However, in certain individuals, there can be significant discrepancies between the level of cognitive functioning and the level of linguistic functioning Genie Williams Syndrome Chatterbox syndrome

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Genie Advanced cognitive skills relative to linguistic skills

Grammatically rudimentary but semantically more advanced Adult: Why aren’t you singing? Genie: Very sad Adult: Why are you feeling sad? Gene: Lisa sick

This would provide evidence against the thesis that cognition is sufficient for language

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William Syndrome Elfinlike facial appearance, mental retardation, cardiac defects Despite their cognitive impairment, syntactic skills were found to

be largely intact

Chatterbox Syndrome Significant cognitive impairments & unexpected language

abilities

If normal cognitive development is necessary for normal language development, it should not happen at all

Innate Mechanisms

The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis Parameter Setting The Issue of Negative Evidence

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The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (1/3)

Language Bioprogram - Bickerton (1983, 1984) Children have an innate grammar that, in the

absence of proper environmental input, serves as the child’s language system a linguistic backup system

Related studies Case 1: Pidgins and Creoles (Bickerton) Case 2: Studies of language development in

congenitally deaf children (Golden-Meadow) Case 3: Sign language in Nicaragua

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Case 1: Pidgins & Creoles (refer to Table 12.3) Pidgin: an auxiliary language that arises when speakers of several mutually

unintelligible languages are in close contact (Bickrton, 1984) Ex) Immigrant workers come to speak a simpler form of the dominant language of the

area-just enough to get by No recognizable syntax, often one word order, no complex sentence

Creole: when the children of these immigrants acquire a pidgin as their native language Relatively sophisticated, complex sentences Unlike pidgins, the creoles resembled the structural rules of other languages

Case 2: Congenitally deaf children Children (13 months ~ 4 years), every 2-4 months, for 1.5 years None of these children were exposed to conventional sign language Nevertheless, the children invented a form of gestural language (Homesign)

similar to the language of children with normal hearing One-sign utterances appeared (18 months), followed by 2-3 sign utterances When linguistic input is minimal, deaf children may create a gestural language

similar to normal children’s language

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Bioprogram might operate in the absence of ordinary linguistic stimulation

What happen given appropriate linguistic input? Bioprogram is suppressed and children learn the native

language Children use “Preemption Principle”; If you hear people using a

form different from the one you are using, and do not hear anyone using your form, abandon yours and use theirs”

Cognitive processes associated with language use are not general purpose problem-solving processes but are instead restricted to language

Innate Mechanisms


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Parameter Setting (1/4)

Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1981) Grammar a set of parameters corresponding to each of the

subsystems of the language

(Each parameter has a finite number of possible settings) Various combinations of parameter settings all of the

languages of the world Children are born with the knowledge of the parameters and

their possible settings Language Acquisition identifying which parameter settings

apply to one’s native language

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Head Parameter (Cook, 1988) Each phrase in the language has one essential element called

head Noun in noun phrases, verb in verb phrases The head parameter specifies the position of the head within the

phrase English – a head first language

The man with the bow tie Liked him Nice to see To the bank

Japanese – a head last language Watashi wa nihongin desu (I Japanese am)

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Null-Subject Parameter (Hyams, 1986) Italian, Spanish – grammatically acceptable English – not permitted Children are born with this parameter set to the null-subject

value (default value) Ex) Play it Ex) Eating cereal Ex) Shake hands Ex) See window

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Subset Principle (Berwick and Weinberg, 1984) Children begin to search through possible languages by

beginning with the smallest subset available (that is, the

most restrictive language). If there is no evidence from their

linguistic input that this is their native language, they proceed

to the next largest subset until they find a match

Innate Mechanisms


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The Issue of Negative Evidence

Positive Evidence Evidence that a particular utterance is grammatical in the language that

the child is learning Negative Evidence

Evidence that a particular utterance is ungrammatical Pinker (1990)

It would be very difficult to acquire a language from positive evidence alone

Negative evidence, which could constrain the problem space, is not generally available

Therefore, some constraints must be innate

Although negative evidence is present and may assist language development, research has not shown that it is necessary

Justification for innate mechanisms

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Summary

Three classes of variables are needed for a complete account of language acquisition

Linguistic Environment Gross environmental neglect (feral & isolated children)

Retard language acquisition

Cognitive Processes Cognitive process are correlated with language

development

Innate Mechanisms Children given poor linguistic input Create communication

systems similar to early child language

Documents

Chap 12. Process of Language Acquisition 2008. 11. 27 김 민 경