Transcript Lecture: Psycholinguistics Professor Dr. Neal R. Norrick

Lecture: Psycholinguistics
Professor Dr. Neal R. Norrick
_____________________________________
Psycholinguistics
Universität des Saarlandes
Dept. 4.3: English Linguistics
SS 2009
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
•
•
•
•
lateralization of brain functions
dominance of left hemisphere
corresponding development of motor skills
general cognitive stages of development
(Piaget)
5.1 Developmental sketch
Age
Language
(months)
9
10
General
babbling
crawling
first words
precurrent, maintained
(ba)nana(na) for
'banana, food, mama'
standing,
claps hand,
holds spoon
Age
Language
(months)
General
11
5-10 recurrent words
fulfills requests like:
bring me the blue ball
show me the big red dog
first steps,
recognizes
pictures in
books
12
5 distinct vowels
5 distinct consonants
starts walking
Age
Language
(months)
General
13
recognizable words
daddy nein ball
allgone
running,
climbing furniture
14
imitations: horse, train simple puzzles,
reduplications:
turns book pages
choochoo,
byebye, taktak ‘clock’
Age
Language
(months)
General
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
Age
Language
(months)
20
General
3-word units:
hangs on monkey
Nicky cookie haben bars, points to
also:
eyes, nose, mouth
haben Nicky cookie
Age
Language
(months)
22
verb + particle:
lock up/ deck zu
4-word units:
Mami Auto fahren kauft
General
dramatic
play,
stuffed
animals,
Inni gute Nacht sagen dolls
Age (months): 24
Language
verb endings: Inni spuckt bisschen
statement:
Nicky auch essen
question:
Nicky auch essen, ja?
command:
Nicky auch essen
word-formation: cutter ‘knife’
auskleben ’tear apart’
umwärts
General
kicks soccer ball
plays hide-n-seek
draws details:
ears, tails, wheels
Age (months): 26
Language
participles:
Mami ist weggegingt
das ist runtergefallt
comparison:
Pferdchen ein kleineres
Mond grösser als Daddy
General
draws objectively
recognizable figures,
recognizes colors
Monologues/ Mami kommt darein, tic-tac
stories:
Danke, Post schickt Daddy
Age
Language
(months)
27
future orientation:
Let's build a castle
I'll put it in
28
General
sings melodies
recursive structures:
counts to 5
Ich weiss nicht, wen
recognizes letters:
der Deckel verloren hat N, C, O
questions with
when, how
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
Age
Language
(months)
32
first real narrative:
It was a wooden lamby
and it was on the floor
in a barn
and they took it home
and they washed it
and it wasn't ugly
General
builds Legos
draws people
and house
with chimney
and windows
Age
Language
(months)
34
General
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
(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
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
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
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
as standard measure of first language
development as opposed to age
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
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)
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
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)
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
extending the pattern of Vs, always seeking to
maximize distinctness, the child should move to a
triplet:
a
u
i
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
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
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
Brown's (1973) order of acquisition for syntax:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
present progressive
prepositions
plural
irregular past tense
possessive
articles
regular past tense
girl playing
ball in water
toys, dishes
went, told
Ann's toys
a dog, the dog
jumped, hugged, wanted
8.
9.
10.
11.
regular 3rd person
irregular 3rd person
auxiliary
contracted auxiliary
she goes, talks, watches
she does, has
be: I am, you are, she is
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)
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)
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
e.g. infant recognizes caregiver as separate from
continuum
caregiver as recurrent/stable entity
self as separate
self as entity like caregiver
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
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
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
3. Stage of concrete operations (age 7-11)
• child can vary two or more relationships
independently solves conservation problem by
compensation
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?