Transcript Language acquisition II:

Language acquisition II:
Putting words together
The two-word stage
• At about 18 to 20 months, children's first
multi-word utterances appear: 2 words first
• All dry.
• I sit.
• No pee.
• More cereal.
• Other pocket.
• Mail come.
• Our car.
• All messy.
• Bye-bye car.
• I shut.
• See baby.
• More hot.
• Boot off.
• Airplane allgone.
• Papa away.
• All wet.
• No bed.
• Hi Sam.
Early Semantics
• As with single words, there is much semantic
consistency in the two-word stage
• Early sentences in cultures around the world tend
to focus on a few themes: the appearance,
disappearance, and movement of objects;
comments about object properties; requests for
and rejections of objects or activities; and
who/what/where questions
Early Syntax Production
• Syntax is already almost perfect! (within the limits of two
words)
• 95% of sentences produced in this two-word stage have the
proper syntactical order
• Two-words phrases also have all the components of complex
sentences, but not at the same time:
– If a child is looking at his mummy fixing a toy on the table
which has just been given to her by daddy you might get:
subject-verb (Mommy fix), subject-object (Mommy toy),
subject-location (Mummy table), verb-location (put table),
and so on.
• There seems to be no syntactic component that infants can't usethe problem seems to be just that they can't string more than one
relation together.
Early Syntax Comprehension
• As with single word production, there is a dissociation between
comprehension and production
• At the two-word stage the infant already can understand very
complicated syntax.
• How do we know?
– Anecdotal evidence: Just hang out with a kid this age!
– Experimental evidence: Show two TV screens with different
images, and play a sentence describing just one ('Big Bird is
tickling Ernie' vs. 'Ernie is tickling Big Bird').
• The child attends to the screen being described.
From 2 to 3 words
• After a two word stage, you might expect a three-word stagebut you'd be wrong.
• When a child passes the two-word stag (usually between the age
of 2 and 3.5 years) things get so complicated so fast that no one
has yet found a clear sequential pattern for what is happening
• It is as if language is suddenly on-line and it just bursts forth
• Moreover, some children zoom through the two word stage in
just a few months
On the lack of a 3-word stage
• There are well-studied cases, by no means extraordinary, of
children apparently having mastered syntax totally by the age of 2
• For example, Roger Brown reported on a child who produced
these sentences before her second birthday:
–
–
–
–
–
I got peanut butter on the paddle.
I sit in my high chair yesterday.
Fraser, the doll's not in your briefcase.
Fix it with the scissor.
Sue making more coffee for Fraser.
• Clearly, she is not perfect: there are a few errors in the
sentences…but no one has ever found a single grammatical rule
that children at this stage usually get wrong
– At the highest estimate, children make errors not more than 8% of the time
when an error is makeable, and some estimates range as low as 0.1%.
A case study: Auxiliary verbs
• To get a feel for how amazing this is, let’s
consider just one example: the use of
auxiliary words- verbs that go with other
verbs,
– For example ‘can’, ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘be’, and
‘have’ in sentences like “He should have
eaten”, “He can be brushing his own teeth now”
or “He must have left his mittens in the car”.
A case study: Auxiliary verbs
• It has been estimated that there are 24 billion billion
logically-possible orderings of auxiliary words that can
legally appear in the same sentence
• Of those, only about 100 are actually grammatical in
English: we can't say “He have should eaten” or “He be
can brushing his teeth now” or “He have must left it”
• So ‘chance’ performance is ~ 0%
A case study: Auxiliary verbs
• Moreover, the problem is made even more difficult because some
misorderings seem like they might be quite plausible by analogy:
“He seems happy”  “Does he seem happy?”
“He is happy”  *“Does he be happy?”
“He did eat”  “He didn't eat”
“He did a few things”  *“He didn’t a few things.”
“I like going”  “He likes going”
“I can go”  *“He cans go”
“I am going”  *“He bes [ams] going.”
A case study: Auxiliary verbs
• So, the base rate odds of doing it right are minuscule,
and the base rate odds of making errors are huge, plus
there are many temptations by analogy to do it wrong
• One woman studied 66,000 productions of auxiliary
sentences by young infants, in order to examine the
pattern of their errors
– It turned out to be very easy to do- there were
virtually no errors in those sentences!
What do infants do wrong?
• The errors that infants do make are limited largely to overgeneralizations of very common rules
– They sometimes regularize irregular plurals: “I have two
mouses” or “My sister is missing two tooths”
– They sometimes regularize irregular verb forms: “I runned
back to Mummy” or “ I finded Daddy”.
• The only way to get these right is to memorize them, since they
are irregular
• These errors suggest that children have access to the abstract
rules- the child who says ''runned" or "mouses" cannot possibly
be repeating it, since s/he will never have heard it: it must be
deduced from an implicit understanding of the rule.
Adults do it too
• Adults also regularize if the irregular word is infrequent
enough: words like ‘trod’ (not ‘treaded’), ‘strove’ (not
‘strived’), ‘dwelt’ (not ‘dwelled’), and ‘smote’ (not
‘smited’) are often regularized
• Historical linguists have shown that this certainly does
happen, because Old and Middle English have about twice
as many irregular verbs (~360) as we do now
– The rest have become regularized as the error has
become standard.
• As a general rule, errors are more likely on less frequent
aspects of language, and they are likely to be regularization
errors
The problem with passivity
• Another example of where low frequency leads English
children astray is in comprehending passive sentences, in
which the S is not at the beginning of the sentence as it is
in most sentences
– E.g. ‘The cat was chased by the dog’ is a legal OVS
order, rather than the usual SVO
• Children have trouble with passive sentences, and often
mistake them for SVO sentences, so they will match a cat
chasing a the dog to the sentence ‘The cat was chased by
the dog.’
Some other interesting errors
• We can get some idea about how children parse language
at this stage from their other errors:
• "I am heyv" (reponse to 'Behave!")
• “Daddy, when you go tinkle you're an eight, and
when I go tinkle I'm an eight, right?” [from
‘urinate’]
• In both cases, the child makes a plausible miscalculation
about where word boundaries are.
Creoles and pidgins
• We can get further insight into what is happening inside
children's heads from a very interesting linguistic
phenomenon: creolization
– A pidgin arises when two peoples who don't speak the
same language are suddenly and without advance
warning forced to live and work together: their ad hoc
communication system is a pidgin
– Creolization is the process by which a pidgin language
is regularized
• Creolization offers us unique insight into linguistic
construction in real time.
What pidgin?
• Pidgins arise depressingly often in this
sorrowful world
– The best-known cases sprung from the slave trade in
America, and from indentured servitude in the South
Pacific
– They have also arisen in other less horrific
situations: there are pidgins between people who
occasionally get a chance to barter but have no
formal trade, such as Russian and Scandinavian
sailors before the fall of the Soviet Union
What pidgin?
• Pidgins tend to draw heavily from a third language, usually the
language of the boss
• Pidgin utterances are short: almost never more than 4 words at a
time; never more than 1 idea at a time (very much like chidren's
two-word stage)
• Pidgin has no grammar at all: word order is completely free
– There are no tense markers (or any other morphological
affixes), no articles, no prepositions
– Many pidgin utterances don't even contain a verb: i.e. “Big
expensive flour Russia this year”
Pidgin Examples (Papua)
(Incidentally, most examples of pidgins on the WWW are really
creoles.)
“Sapos yu kaikai planti pinat, bai yu kamap strong olsem phantom.”
If you eat plenty of peanuts, you will come up strong like the
phantom.
“Yu pren tru bilong mi. Inap yu ken helpim mi nau?”
You are a true friend of mine. Are you able to help me now?’
“Em i go we?"
Where did he go?'
Pidgin Examples (Rus-sonorsk)
R: What say? Me no understand.
N: Expensive, Russian—goodbye.
R: Nothing. Four half.
N: Give four, nothing good.
R: No brother. How me sell cheap? Big expensive flour on
Russia this year.
N: You no say true.
R: Yes. Big true, me no lie, expensive flour.
N: If you buy—please four pud. If you no buy—then goodbye.
R: No, nothing brother, please throw on deck.
So care yu pidgin?
• Our interest in pidgins in this context is due to the
fact that there have been a few cases in which prelinguistic children have been raised in situations in
which pidgin was the only language
– This happens when they are raised primarily by
a caretaker who speaks pidgin
• Something remarkable happens in that situation:
the language-learning infants regularize the
pidgin, add some features, and turn it into creole
What creole?
• Unlike pidgins, Creoles include rule-based tense
markers, prepositions and a hard-coded word
order = they are bona fide languages
• Creole rules may bear no strong resemblance to
the other ancestral languages in the mix, nor to the
dominant language, nor to the native language
• BUT they do bear a striking resemblance to other
creoles which have arisen in other situations on
other places on the planet!
Creole example (Bislama )
• Bislama is a mixture of English, French, and
Melanesian words used on the pacific island of
Vanuatu
“Tufala i stap yet long Betlehem, nao i kam kasem stret taem blong Meri i
bonem pikinini. Nao hem i bonem fasbon pikinin blong hem we hem i
boe. Hem i kavremapgud long kaliko, nao i putum hem i slip long wan
bokis we oltaim ol man oli stap putum gras long hem, blong ol anamol
oli kakae. Tufala i mekem olsem, from we long hotel, i no gat ples
blong tufala i stap.” - Luk 2:6-7.
"The two of them were in Bethlehem, now it came the exact time for
Mary she births child. Now him he born firstborn of her that him he
boy. She she coverup (him) good in cloth, now she put him he lay in
one box where always all men they are putting grass in him, for all
animals they eat (it). The two of them they made same, because at
hotel, it no got place for the two of them to stay." - Luke 2:6-7
Case study: Hawaii
•
Creolization happened quite recently (just at the end of the
last century) in Hawaii, when plantations boomed and
uneducated plantations workers were brought in from
around the world
– Some of their children- who were raised with pidgin as
their first language- are still alive, and have been
studied by linguist Derek Bickerton
– Hawaiian Creole includes rule-based tense markers,
prepositions and a hard-coded word order
The claim
• Bickerton's claim- not without critics, but with good
evidence- is that the children exposed to the pidgin were
the source of its regularization
• The suggestion is that there are ‘default settings’ on
language which children are innately drawn to use (UG?),
even if they have to invent the language in doing so, in the
absence of a compelling reason to use other settings
– The pre-linguistic infant is thus seen as a bottleneck
which places strong constraints on what is possible in
language, and which may be the source of the
regularities we see across languages