Psycholinguistics

First language acquisition 1

A true story

 Like the story of Phineas Gage last week – We learn something when things go wrong  In groups: – Most people start to learn language when very young – Imagine of a situation where this does not happen – Describe the situation in a short English paragraph 2

Language acquisition: the critical period

    Language cannot be effectively learned after brain lateralization is complete – This may be around puberty Fromkin (Natalie’s book) says that Genie’s story proves the critical period hypothesis. Yule makes the opposite claim – – Genie had zero exposure to language until she was 13, but she

did

acquire some language She learnt words, but very limited syntax Dichotic experiments (??) showed that she had no left hemisphere language facility – It is possible to use the right hemisphere for restricted language purposes.

3

1L acquisition



learning

 Language is like walking  Reading and writing are like riding a bike, or swimming – Many languages have no writing system – Some people never learn to read  Second language

is

usually taught 4

Nature vs nurture

    B F Skinner wrote

Verbal Behavior

in 1957 He said that babies are born with a brain which is more or less empty – – They learn language (and everything else) from the environment Many of Skinner’s ideas came from experiments with rats Chomsky wrote a strong criticism to the book in a 1959 article His argument is often called the Poverty of the Stimulus: – – – Language is extremely complex Children could not learn language without an innate ability They do not hear enough evidence from adult speakers 5

Poverty of the Stimulus (Chomsky’s argument)

1.

2.

There is an infinity of expressions in language It has been proved (by formal logic) that if 1. is true, children would need negative evidence to acquire language. Positive evidence is not enough.

3.

Children do not generally get negative evidence 4.

Children do acquire language Therefore : Language is not learned from “evidence” 6

The language acquisition device

  New-born kids have a complex, innate LAD (a system which prepares them for language acquisition) – This contains the Principles of language Children of any race or nationality can learn any language, through cultural transmission – They learn the details specific to their own language from their environment – That is, the Parameters relevant to their language 7

Correction and teaching

  Do parents talk to children in a special way?

Does it make any difference?

8

Correction and teaching

  Do parents talk to children in a special way?

Does it make any difference?

   Neither seems to apply to language acquisition Various examples in Yule Caretaker speech (motherese) – – – – – Reduplication (and other baby talk) Lots of questions Pretending to be in a conversation (but only really one participant) Reduced speed Exaggerated intonation 9

Stages of LA: Cooing

  Cooing – Usually velar consonants and high vowels – [ku], [gi] Roman Jakobson (1968) claimed sounds were acquired in order of frequency in all the world’s languages – And that the least frequent sounds are the first to be lost in aphasia – But his views are not widely accepted now 10

The next stage: babbling

   This includes various vowels, as well as fricatives, nasals and even non-pulmonic sounds Experiments show that babies – Can distinguish sounds (allophones) which adults cannot (like [r] and [l] for Japanese speakers – Do not respond to non-linguistic distinctions (eg sex of speaker) Later babbling is language-specific – Sign language babbling in deaf babies (or with deaf parents) 11

Holophrastic stage

  One word utterances appear to represent more complex structures – Child sees empty bed, says 姊姊 Overextension – – 球球 round used to represent an apple, the moon, anything 狗狗 means dogs, cats, horses, lions – Daddy to mean any man. Potentially embarrassing for mothers!

– – Kids always use the middle member in a hyponymy relation (

dog

, not

animal

or

Cocker

) Never use colors in an overextension relation!

12

Melissa Bowerman’s findings

  – – – – Others had assumed that overextension meant:

one

feature An apple is a “ball” because it’s round A speck of dirt is a “fly” because it’s tiny A cat is a “dog” – because it has four legs, or is soft But Bowerman discovered that “kick” could mean shared a) b) c) d) Kicking a floor fan (first time; really kicking) Moving a ball by bumping it with a toy A moth fluttering over a table Pushing her tummy against a mirror Can you explain what Bowerman concluded?

13

Two-word stage

  The famous phrase

Mummy sock

, uttered by the daughter of researcher Lois Bloom – – Picking up her mummy’s sock, and When Mummy was putting baby’s sock on baby Quite a lot of research has been done on the syntax of baby language!

 Why is it difficult to do this kind of research?

14

Comprehension exceeds production

   Babies may not distinguish “mouth” and “mouse” in their own pronunciation – But, they can point the two things out in pictures when they listen Famous example – “Silly Daddy, not a guk, a guk!” But, in experiments, one child pronounced – – Puddle as [pʌgəl] Puzzle as [pʌdəl]!

15

Telegraphic speech

      

Andrew want ball Cat drink milk This shoe all wet

No inflectional morphology No determiners The Chinese equivalents of many of these utterances are OK In Bulgarian, the articles (determiners

the

are added to the noun as a suffix; they are acquired earlier than English articles) and

a

) 16

Acquisition of morphology

一.

二.

三.

  I broke it I breaked it I broke it Why is 二 important?

Kids acquiring richly inflected languages (like Spanish, Italian) typically do so before 2.5 years 17