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Language Acquisition and Language Disruption
Tutorial 4: Definition Revision (Bank Holiday week)
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Lexical and syntactic development:
Children use organised patterns in both learning the meaning of words and the grammar of the surrounding language, they don’t make random mistakes.
Important definitions and properties in learning the lexicon include: fast mapping, (complexive concepts), overextension, underextension and syntactic bootstrapping.
The development of syntax happens in stages: one word stage, two word stage and telegraphic stage. Function words and morphemes appear later. Negation and question forming also happen at a later stage and follow fairly strict patterns.
Linguistic Terms:
1. Overextension: meaning of a child’s word is more general or inclusive than that of the corresponding adult form. Dog includes horses and other four legged animals.
2. Underextension: using lexical; terms in an overtly restrictive fashion. Kitty to family pet but not to other cats, word meaning spaniel but not Labrador.
3. Lexicon: A speaker’s mental dictionary contains info about syntactic properties, meaning and phonological representations.
4. Imitation Theory: children learn through imitation
5. Universal Grammar: The system of categories, mechanisms, and constraints shared by all human languages and considered to be innate.
6. Phonetics/Phonology: component of grammar that determines how sounds pattern in language.
7. Syntactic Bootstrapping: using knowledge of syntax to learn the syntactic category of a word, bliking -> jumping up and down, blik -> furry animal.
8. Reinforcement Theory: Correction, positive and negative evidence, can help but only at the appropriate stage in development. Quite often misjudged in terms of frequency and effectiveness.
9. Telegraphic Stage: Follow one and two word stage, chair broken, man ride bus today, these lack bound morphemes and non lexical categories, appearance of telegrams. The morphemes and lexical cats emerge gradually, no word order errors, in languages with variable word order different orders are use with regular frequency.
10. Pragmatics: appropriate use and understanding of language, speakers intentions and how they are surmised by the addressee. The speaker’s and the addressee’s background attitudes and beliefs, their understanding of the context in which the utterance is made and the knowledge of how language can be used for a variety of purposes.
11. Fast Mapping: a pre-existing conceptual repertoire (a rich understanding of objects, actions etc.) enable children to learn words from one or few exposures over a month later. “the meaningful generalisations that people make from just one or a few examples of a novel word – that is arguably the most remarkable feat of human word learning.”
12. Syntax: The system of rules and categories than underlies sentence formation in human language.
13. Linguistic Universals: A linguistic universal is a statement that is true for all natural languages. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs. or All spoken languages have consonants and vowels (but not sign languages, to which phonological universals have no relevance). Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to linguistic typology, and intends to reveal information about how the human brain processes language.
14. Morphology: the system of categories and rules involved in word formation.
15. Critical Period Hypothesis: After puberty ( the optimum period for language acquisition) the capacity to learn language wanes.
16. Motherese: Child directed speech, often deemed simplified speech but is often complex, question including yes/no and wh. Cultures that don’t use it. It can be helpful, speaking more clearly and slowly.
17. Holophrastic Stage: 12-18 months, one word phrases such as up -> I want up, more -> I want more, dad -> I see daddy.
18. Two word stage: ‘mini-sentences’, hit doggie -> I hit the doggie, Ken water -> Ken is drinking water. have word order, no inflection so less clear if they have acquired syntactic categories.
19. Nurture/Nature: is it innate or as a result of experience.
20. Milestones: stages in acquisition, though age my vary the stages do not.
21. Babbling: emergence of articulatory skill, six months, gain control of vocal apparatus, similar across languages, frequent: p, b, m, t, d, n, k, g, s, h, w, j. Infrequent: f, v, th, dh, sh, zh, ch, dj, l, r, nj,
22. Semantics: The study of meaning in human language.
23. MLU: mean length of utterance, by counting words or by counting morphemes, useful up to 4.0 MLU, then use T-units (terminable units), Jane went to the store and Bill went to the theatre 2 T-units, Jane went to the store and bought some coke 1 T-unit.
24. Universality: all children acquire language despite wide range of experiences.
25. Uniformity: convergence of grammar despite different experience and environment.
26. Rapidity: speed by which acquires language with limited knowledge, compare to linguists
27. Prosody: features of speech that can bee added to sound, intonation, stress, rhythm, voice quality, loudness, tempo.
28. Innate: Existing within a person from birth
29. Analogy: generalisation of a regularity, kicked, goed.
30. Lexical words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions
31. Functional words/Grammatical words/ Non-lexical words : harder to define and paraphrase than lexical words. E.g. aux verbs, conjunctions, determiners, degree words.